TerriMorton.com

Hello Neudesic

Terri Morton — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:25:20 GMT

Last week I started as an Engagement Manager on the Microsoft Communities team with Neudesic. This is essentially the role I had up until October 2008 with Telligent, at which point Microsoft and Telligent parted ways on those sites, and Neudesic took over their management. It's a lot of hard, yet rewarding, work, and I am really happy to be able to be back working on the sites with the Neudesic team. I was able to work with the team during the transition period and got to know almost everyone, so joining the Microsoft Communities team is a bit like coming home again. And perhaps this blog post should have been titled "Everything old is new again."

This time around, my primary focus is going to be on the ASP.NET website. I will be monitoring and responding to feedback there, while driving forward initiatives to improve the user experience and continuing to add features and content. Neudesic is also managing the Silverlight.NET, IIS.NET, and WindowsClient.NET, and Jay Esguerra (a great guy and Engagement Manager) will continue to be responsible for those.

While I am a fulltime remote worker, and have been for the past 3.5+ years, I am fortunate that Neudesic has a Philadelphia office about a 40 minute drive from my house. I went in to the office today to meet some of the staff and take care of the HR paperwork that comes with every new job. The people in the office were great, and the location (the Eagleview Corporate Center in Exton) was beautiful. It's good to know that if I need some social interaction, suffer a power outage, or even if I need some space for a meeting, that I have the Exton office available.

There are lots of things in the works for the Microsoft Communities sites, and I am thrilled to be a part of it all. :-)

Goodbye Telligent

Terri Morton — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:20:00 GMT

Yesterday I found myself among dozens at Telligent who were terminated as a result of a Reduction in Force. With the uncertainty in the economy, and similar reductions having taken place at some of Telligent's key competitors, this move was not entirely unexpected. While I don't understand some of the decisions, I support the company's prerogative and responsibility to make the changes it deems necessary to ensure viability. And I wish Telligent and all who remain continued success!

The IMs, emails, phone calls, and tweets yesterday, in support of me and the other Telligenti who were terminated, were humbling and a testament to how wonderful the people of Telligent are. I was caught by pleasant surprise by the retweets from others in the Twitter community as well. Thanks to all of you for your friendship and support in a difficult time!

Like James, having come on board in August 2005 I almost felt like one of the original team. As such I am disappointed, and truly still a bit stunned, to have lost my job. But over the past 3.5 years I have had the distinct pleasure of working with and for an amazing group of talented and dedicated people. I have learned so much and am grateful for the opportunity I have had, and would do it all over again even knowing the final outcome for me.

Now I look forward to taking my own talents and experience to new opportunities! Please do drop me a note (terri at terri morton dot com) if you are looking for a technical PM or community manager.

Installing the Graffiti CMS Training Theme

Terri Morton — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:49:00 GMT

Overview

There has been some discussion and confusion on the Graffiti CMS support forum about how to install the Training theme, as well as how to use SQL Server with the theme instead of VistaDB. There is documentation on how to install the Training theme in the readme.txt file included with the download, and there is minimal documentation on how to use the DataMover utility to convert databases from one platform to another, and from an older version of Graffiti to a newer version here. But there isn't anything to tie them together cleanly.

Until we are able to get the documentation added to the website, below please find detailed steps on how to install the Training theme, as well as convert its data storage to SQL Server. Hopefully this will help to bridge the gap.

Note that the approach below is for the following circumstances:

Graffiti CMS version 1.2
Running Graffiti locally with Graffiti_Demo.exe, not IIS
SQL Server 2005

Prerequisites for running Graffiti CMS locally

The details for system requirements to run Graffiti can be found here, but essentially you need to have the following on your machine:

Windows operating system
.NET Framework 2.0 or higher

Install Graffiti

Step 1. Download a fresh version of Graffiti CMS from http://graffiticms.com. The download link is currently http://get.graffiticms.com/download/

Step 2. Place the .ZIP file onto your local machine and extract the contents.

Step 3. Navigate to the extracted Graffiti\New Install\Web folder and double-click Graffiti_Demo.exe. The sample Graffiti website using the Default theme should appear in your browser.

Step 4. Click on each of the menu items in the navbar to ensure they are working (Home, Sample Content, Blog, About This Site, and Contact Us)

Step 5. On the Home page, click on the post title "A Shorter Post"and verify that you are brought to the sample-content/a-shorter-post/ link, and that the content is present with no errors.

Step 6. Retrieve the admin user's password from the web.config file. The administrative user is the main user for the site. The username is admin, and the password can be found in the web.config file, on this line:

Note that the value is different for each download of Graffiti! Also note that this value is stored in the database. So, if you change your web.config to use a database that was not included with your download of the base install of Graffiti, the admin password will likely be different for that database.

Step 7. Verify that you can log in to the site by navigating to the /login URL, or by clicking on "please use this link" on the Home page. Use the admin username and password from Step 6.

Install the Training theme

Now that Graffiti is installed, and it's been demonstrated that it is working correctly, it is time to install the Training theme. The Training theme can be downloaded from inside the Graffiti Control panel (/graffiti-admin/presentation/themes), or from the Graffiti Marketplace. These steps will show you how to download it from the Graffiti Control Panel.

Step 8. Navigate to Control Panel --> Presentation -- Themes.

Step 9. Click on "Search online themes...", and then the Training theme.

Press the Download Theme button to download Training.zip locally.

Step 10. Extract the contents of Training.zip and overlay the files onto your Graffiti installation.

Files:

App_Data
-- Training.vdb3

Files
-- themes
---- training
------ images (29 files)
------ media ( 4 files)
------ utils (3 files)
------ (17 files)

When you are done, you will now have Training.vdb3 in your App_Data folder, and in your Graffiti\New Install\Web\files\themes folder you will have 2 folders listed: default and training

Step 11. Update the web.config file to use the Training.vdb3 database. Locate the <connectionStrings> section towards the top of the file, and replace your current connection string with the following line:

Step 12. Be sure that Graffiti is configured to use the VistaDB provider under the <appSettings> section in the web.config file. If it is not, replace it with the line below:

Step 13. In the browser, check Control Panel --> Presentation -- Themes and make sure that the Training theme is selected. (The selected theme will have a blue box around it.) If it is not selected, click on the thumbnail image to select it.

Step 14. Click on Site Options - Utilities - Rebuild pages

Then choose Start Building.

Step 15. When Step 14 is complete, the Training theme should now be fully installed. Click on "Go back to site", and navigate through the site to ensure that things seem to be working OK.

Configure the Training theme to use SQL Server

Now that Graffiti is installed, and the Training theme is working with the VistaDB version of the database, you may decide to use SQL Server as the database engine instead.

Step 16. Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio in SQL Server 2005, and create a new database called GraffitiTraining.

Step 17. From the Graffiti\New Install\Data folder, locate a SQL script file called Graffiti_SQL_Schema.sql. Run this script against your new GraffitiTraining database.

Step 18. Update the web.config file to use your new SQL Server GraffitiTraining database. Locate the <connectionStrings> section towards the top of the file, and replace your connection string with the following line:

Step 19. Configure Graffiti to use the SQL Server 2005 provider by looking under the <appSettings> section in the web.config file and change the DataBuddy::Provider line to this:

Step 20. Go back to your browser and press the Refresh button. Note that the page is essentially blank and the default theme is being used. This is because there is no data in your GraffitiTraining database…so there are no posts to show and no theme selected.

Step 21. In your file system, navigate to \Graffiti\Tools\Migrations, then click on DataMover.exe to start up this utility.

Change the Source Database to VistaVB , then click the Browse button to navigate to your App_Data folder and choose the Training.vdb3 file.

Change the Destination Database to SQL Server, and then copy in your connection string from the Web.config file:

server=(local);uid=;pwd=;Trusted_Connection=yes;database=GraffitiTraining

Press the Copy Data button, then the Yes button to confirm that you want to continue.

If this DataMover process fails at any point, and you get unexpected or continued errors when trying to rerun it, you should reboot your computer to free any locked files. The destination database *must be empty* in order for DataMover to succeed, so please be sure to delete the destination database and recreate it.

Step 22. When the DataMover process is completed, refresh your browser, and you should now see the Training site

Conclusion

While 22 steps may seem overwhelming, when you break it down I hope you can see that it's not terribly involved. The key is to take it slowly and to verify each step of the way that the step has been executed successfully.

Graffiti CMS Futures

Terri Morton — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Edit 3/28/2009: I was separated from employment with Telligent on 2/13/2009, and no longer have any idea of what Telligent's plans for Graffiti CMS might be.

On November 14, I became the PM for Telligent's Graffiti CMS product, and I am pumped! When I was first introduced to Graffiti at an internal Telligent meeting in August 2007, I was instantly in love with the product. It allowed me to develop a website quickly, giving me control over the content via the UI. One of the first things I asked when I joined the product team in October was ask if I could work on Graffiti, and my boss Josh (who is here to make others better) was happy to oblige.

As you can see from the product history below, we were pretty aggressive in our releases, and had been largely quiet in the months after Graffiti CMS 1.1 release:

Product History
- December 5, 2007 - Graffiti 1.0 Beta 1
- January 22, 2008 - Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2
- January 25, 2008 - Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2 Refresh
- February 18, 2008 - Graffiti 1.0 Released
- March 11, 2008 - Graffiti CMS 1.0 Service Pack 1
  - Added additional ways to get data that can be used in Graffiti themes
  - New and improved events
  - Chalk additions and improvements
  - New advanced functionality that plugins can use
  - Security Enhancements
  - Migration Tool Improvements
  - 30 bug fixes and other changes
- May 27, 2008 - Graffiti CMS 1.1 Beta
- June 20, 2008 - Graffiti CMS 1.1
  - Bulk comment management
  - Permissions functionality
  - Ability to delete and rename users
  - Packages
  - More than 30 bug fixes

As announced on the GraffitiCMS site, here are the high points of what we are targeting for the upcoming year:

Product Roadmap
- December 22, 2008 - Graffiti 1.2 beta release
- January 5, 2009 - Graffiti 1.2 release
  - This is a service pack release to address issues reported via the Graffit CMS forums and elsewhere
- Early Q2, 2009 - Graffiti 2.0
  - Vertical based theme support – users will be able to use from a set of verticals (blog, gaming, training, etc) when they first setup a site. Once the selection is made, Graffiti will then configure itself for the current vertical. This includes any necessary data changes (such as new categories and posts) as well as adding necessary widgets and navigation elements. At least two new verticals in addition to the three we have today will be included. Finally, many of the common theming tasks (alignment, color, and fonts) will be moved to the public part of the site.
  - N level categories – Graffiti will support unlimited nesting of categories
  - Localization – Graffiti will support localizing the control panel and will remove any hard coded strings from the public part of the site.
  - Marketplace – the marketplace integration will be expanded to provider a richer experience and make it much easier for users to find new themes, plug-ins, and widgets.
- Early Q3 2009 - Graffiti 2.5
  - Dynamic forms – users will easily be able to build forms, collect data, and view the results.
  - Dynamic theming – continue work on theming to make it easier to manage navigation, widgets, and other custom areas of themes directly from public UI.
- Early Q4 - Graffiti 3.0
  - Graffiti forums
  - Hosted Graffiti

Disclaimer: Roadmaps are subject to change, but this is what we have in mind at this point in time.

What is not called out here is our commitment to improving the documentation and support for Graffiti, both from an end-user and a developer standpoint. We want to make it even easier for everyone to use the product, and you will see improvements in that area either coinciding with or preceding the Graffiti 2.0 release. Our team will also have a stronger presence in the support forums. And also what is not called out are architecture updates to give Graffiti a cleaner and richer way to provide forums and better enable others to supply additional functionality to the product.

I am excited about what's ahead for Graffiti! I am always looking for feedback, so please do drop me a note if you have any questions or concerns or suggestions about Graffiti CMS!

Outlook/Google Calendar Synchronization

Terri Morton — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:41:00 GMT

Inspired a while back by James Shaw's blog post concerning coordinating his family's calendars via Google Calendar, my husband and I set up Google Calendars for each family member. I also added an external calendar with the US holidays.

This has worked reasonably well, but there was something of a disconnect between my work calendar and my personal calendar, which sometimes need to overlap.

I'd been scratching my head for a while, trying to figure out how to solve this problem with the least amount of fuss and not relying on third party tools. Today I finally came across this Microsoft Office Online article: Transfer calendars between Outlook and Google Calendar. Armed with this information, and the new knowledge that there is now a Google tool called Google Calendar Sync, I am now doing a 2-way sync between my work (Outlook) and personal (Google) calendars, and am doing a 1-way pull of my family Google calendars into Outlook.

For the 2-way sync between Outlook and Google, I am using Google Calendar Sync. And for the 1-way pull of my family calendars into Outlook I am using the "Subscribe to your Google Calendar" steps in the Microsoft Office Online article. In Outlook, you can view all of the calendars in the same view by using Overlay Mode (see View calendars side-by-side or overlaid for more information), which is how Google Calendar displays multiple calendars. For now I have my family calendars stacked in an overlay, and my calendar listed separately, but with a click I can move it back to the stack.

Works a treat!

Now on Graffiti CMS 1.1 plus a new site theme: Embouteillage

Terri Morton — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:48:00 GMT

Growing tired of the painful Yellow Hell theme, and being largely design challenged, I went on the hunt for a new site theme. Searching via Google, I came across Brandon Schwartz' Graffiti CMS theme page and quickly decided that I was very fond of the Embouteillage theme.

I downloaded it, and made the following tweaks:

added ImageUrl to the theme - index and post views
changed web hosting in site footer
changed it to a 2-column theme: removed ads column and adjusted widths on remaining 2 columns
moved tagline in heading from H2
removed "Continue reading" from index view
changed the comment datetime stamp
added style for when the commenter is the post author
added gravatars to the comments
changed the comment style to add a silver box around the comment
added a tagcloud style

Overall I am pleased with the theme. I was able to follow the same steps outlined here to update my site from Graffiti CMS 1.0 to Graffiti CMS 1.1.

Now a Program Manager on Telligent's Product Team

Terri Morton — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:46:00 GMT

For the past 1.5 years I had served as Telligent's project manager on Microsoft's ASP.NET and Silverlight.NET developer community sites. As announced here, Telligent and Microsoft mutually agreed to transition the site management to another company. This transition was complete on September 30 and I moved immediately to Telligent's product team as a Program Manager, reporting to Josh Ledgard. While there is an emotional component to any transition, in particular because I have a long (6+ years) history with the ASP.NET website, it is with great excitement that I am becoming a member of the Product Team.

When I had read Josh's blog post "Creating a New Breed of PMs at Telligent", I knew (or at least had hoped) that future was in my path. I've had a lot of experience managing and spec'ing projects in my 3+ years at Telligent, have a development background, and had the good fortune of reporting to Josh for about 9 months before he left my team to move on to be Telligent's Director of Program Management. With Intel's recent $20 million capital investment in Telligent, we as a company are focused on continuing to build superior social computing solutions and business intelligence tools, and I am proud to be a part of the effort!

My initial focus will be with our performance team, working with them to define performance scenarios, reporting, and improvements to help Community Server and our other products work as sharply and responsively as possible. I'll also have a presence in the forums at http://dev.communityserver.org/, as I gather feedback and help our customers. I will be picking up additional responsibilities as I become fully assimilated into the product team, and I will be blogging more here to share my progress and experiences.

Walk MS

Terri Morton — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:19:00 GMT

Inspired and impressed by my 16 year old daughter's efforts to raise over $100 in sponsorships for her 6-mile walk to benefit the Multiple Sclerosis society (sold $1 paper foot at a time), I decided to participate in the event instead of just dropping her off and picking her up when it was over. I wrote out a check for $25, the minimum donation required to participate, and joined her and her high school team in the walk.

It was a great day for walking. The temperature was in the low to mid 60's, mostly cloudy with the clouds clearing and the sun shining by the end of the walk. Given my impromptu decision, I was not really prepared for the walk, having gotten insufficient sleep (thanks to a very late night out with my husband) and improper hydration. Nevertheless, I was determined and actually wound up finishing 11 minutes earlier than my daughter and her friends. I walked 6 miles in 2 hours, which is a 20-minute mile pace. That's not especially great, but I was happy with it given my mostly sedentary lifestyle.

I also had really no idea just how much support these events have, with the large turnout and the number of teams in "team" t-shirts. We were provided water, snacks, and lunch, which was somewhat unexpected and great. Subway sponsored lunch, so I had a turkey sub and not just a hot dog. :-) Thank you, Subway! There was also music provided by a live band at the finish line, which was fun.

The walk reminded me of how much I enjoy being outdoors, and of how much I love walking in the woods. It also reminded me that I do not do enough charitable work, which I am going to remedy. I'll let you know how I make out there in a future blog post. :-)

I will certainly participate in the event next year, and will be soliciting sponsorships. What a great time for a worthy cause!!

How to Add a 4 GB Memory Card to a Samsung SCH-i760

Terri Morton — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 05:10:00 GMT

Last month I purchased a 4 GB microSD memory card for my Samsung SCH-i760. After struggling to get the card out of its packaging, and promptly losing the SD adapter, I inserted the card into my phone and thought I was good to go.

This past weekend, my phone told me it didn't have enough space to allow me to take a photo. Declaring the phone to be stupid, I went into Settings - System - Memory, clicked on the Storage Card tab, and was surprised to see "Total storage card memory: Not installed". Scratching my head, I did some research and discovered that the Samsung SCH-i760 will only recognize 2 GB cards. To use a 4 GB card would require a hack.

Armed with the hack I found here: Samsung SCH-i760 > 4GB microSD HC, these are the steps I took to enable the card (sorry for spelling this out in nitty-gritty detail, but maybe it will help someone like me who isn't completely up-to-speed on how these things work):

Placed the .cab file into the SCH-i760 My Documents folder on my laptop
Plugged the Data Link Cable into the phone and the USB port on my laptop
ActiveSync automatically started, bringing the .cab file down to my phone
Used File Explorer on the phone to locate the .cab file
Clicked on it which made it run
Gave me a security warning, and I opted to proceed

When done, it told me the device needed to restart to complete the installation, and I said OK. The device restarted itself, and when it came back, I again checked the memory settings and lo and behold, it told me "Total storage card memory: 3878.50 MB". Woohoo!

I'm Only as Smart as Google Allows Me to Be

Terri Morton — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:35:00 GMT

One of my fellow Telligenti (Michael Kelley) had this as his Windows Live Messenger tagline for the past few days: "I'm only as smart as Google." Each time I looked at my contact list in WLM I stopped and reflected on that tagline. For me, it holds many truths. People who know me tease me about my propensity for Googling anything and everything. I admit it: I am a Google addict.

A few months ago I signed up for Google Web History, just out of curiosity, since I am such an avid Google user. Taking a look at my trends, over the past 7 days I've performed 178 Google searches. Over the past 30 days I've performed 654 searches. Wow, that's a lot of searching. The Top Sites I've landed on in the past 30 days?

en.wikipedia.org
www.microsoft.com
www.amazon.com
weboggle.shackworks.com
blogs.msdn.com
www.ratebeer.com
msdn2.microsoft.com
msdn.microsoft.com
www.digitalcamerainfo.com
weblogs.asp.net

Google has helped me with decisions regarding the care of my children, purchase of a cell phone, interview preparation, cooking, programming questions, telephone numbers, slang translation, urban myth identification, vacation planning, my website theme, lyrics of songs stuck in my head, and a million other things. It's settled arguments, generated arguments, and provided information.

Just last week my son participated in his Cub Scout pack's Pinewood Derby. While there my husband and I were speaking with another parent about car designs, and we mentioned that the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile would be a fun design to do. The other parent said something along the lines of "yeah, but the trouble is finding out exactly what it's supposed to look like". Wha?? My friend Google can tell me within 10 seconds what the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile should look like. It can also show me what some previous Wienermobile entries in the Pinewood Derby looked like. (Oh, and as an aside, as I was Googling to find out the correct spelling of "wiener", I came across this advertisement blast from the past: "My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R.")

Obviously with an average of over 20 Google searches per day, Google is a big part of my life. I can't imagine not having knowledge at literally my fingertips. What did they do in the olden days? People trekked to the local public library for information. I remember in grade school learning about the file of periodical and newspaper clippings that the librarians kept, where you could try to look up information about recent events and topics. This was a literal file of scissor-clipped articles from newspapers and magazines. OK, perhaps I am showing my age here, but this was in the 70's. Can you even imagine that now? With Google News I have instant access to over 4500 news sources.

It's amazing to me that I get all of this for free. Don't tell them, but I'd be willing to pay for the service. I get way more out of it than my YMCA membership.

Yes, I'm only as smart as Google allows me to be. And that's pretty damned smart. :-)