LauraJ's Weblog

Windows Live WiFi

2006-08-25T19:37:00Z

While I've been away from this blog, I've been working with the MSN Access team. We provide dial-up access to a ton of users across the United States but we've also been working on a stealth project that we're now ready to Beta -- Windows Live WiFi. This version is pretty basic, but you'll want to be in on the Beta, I'm sure, because there are some very cool and incredibly useful features coming. "Getting online in a WiFi world Windows Live is all about unifying our customer’s online experience...(read more)

Getting support/help on SharePoint and InfoPath

2006-01-04T19:38:00Z

As 2006 rolls in, it seems like a good time to remind folks about support resources for SharePoint and InfoPath. Each month I get one to several emails requesting help with a specific problem -- as intriguing as some of those questions are, I just don't have time to research and answer them. So, if you've found this post on my blog, then when you scroll way down the page, on the right hand side you will see sections of links for both SharePoint and InfoPath -- there are lots of great resources here.

When I'm trying to figure out how to do something with SharePoint and/or InfoPath, the first thing I generally start with the WSS and SPS FAQs where many of the common questions from the newsgroups are summarized. If I can't find what I'm looking for there, the next thing I do is search the SharePoint newsgroup and the Office newsgroup (for InfoPath or FrontPage questions). Other resources include the SharePointBlogs site, Lamont Harrington's SharePoint Resource Center, MSD2D, SharePoint University and a host of others.

Happy searching!

MSN Billpay Troubles

2005-12-06T22:38:00Z

This past weekend we tried to get into MSN Billpay to pay a couple of bills. The signin UI has changed several times in the past year or so, but usually we're able to figure it out eventually. This time, however, we were stumped. Even though we were signed in to our .net Passport, it was prompting us for Username and Password. Huh. As far as we knew, it was just the .net Passport -- there was no other Username or Password. We went through all the help resources provided and couldn't figure it out, so we called the support number provided for signin troubles. Unfortunately, after numerous attempts, we were unable to get to anyone who knew anything about MSN Billpay. <grumble> The bills weren't late yet, but I'm pretty frustrated at this point.

So, I do a web search (MSN Search, of course!) and find a newsgroup post that alludes to an email that was sent out explaining the changes and new process. Okay, so we search through every email account even possibly associated with the MSN Billpay account, every folder, every spam repository -- and no email. Maybe it got caught in a spam filter along the way, but we're still left without the information. This is where I'm thankful I work at Microsoft and can leverage my contacts for information.

A day and several emails later, I had my answer (and an opportunity to provide my .02 on how bad the process was for our customers!) And of course I'm going to share it with you :)

If you find yourself in the same situation, first of all, look for the email from MSN Billpay in whatever account is (or may be) associated with the MSN Billpay account -- the email may be in your spam folder. (In our case, the email address associated with the account was not our .net passport account.) If you find the email, the email address for that account is your new username and the email will tell you what to use for your password. If you can't find the email, the support IVR has been changed to walk you through figuring it out or getting the information from a support rep.

You can reach MSN Billpay support at 1-877-800-4873. Don't be tricked into choosing option 1 -- you really want option 4. The wait recording that plays after you select option 4 gives you information about the problem. If you still can't figure it out, stay on the line and customer service will help you.

Resurfacing

2005-07-22T21:39:00Z

Wow, it's been a long time since the last time I blogged. Much has happened in my world in the intervening months... I left MSDN & TechNet several months ago and have been immersing myself in a new job and a new role. I'm now leading the Service Delivery team for the MSN Access group. "MSN Access? What's that?" you might ask. It's the dial-up internet access business. I can almost hear you thinking "But isn't that dead?" Nope, far from it -- dial-up is still an important part of our MSN offering, and is absolutely relevant in a world where DSL/Cable hasn't reached a significant number of homes in the US, where people travel and need reliable access from anywhere, or where folks have limited use for the internet (!) and want the value that dial-up service can provide.

My team does a variety of things including working with our telco partners, reporting, and managing traffic distribution. We also own the 800 service that is used not only by the internet access products (to get local #'s) but also by many groups within Microsoft for product registration and activation. So, as you can probably imagine, I've been learning all kinds of interesting things about the telco industry and technology, service monitoring & reporting, and the internet access landscape.

At about the same time I came on board, there was a significant change in the engineering management team -- a new PUM (think SaraW's role in the past at MSDN), and new Group Program Manager, Test Manager and Dev Manager. And I'm thrilled to be working with each of them -- it's surprising how similar we are in terms of approach. It's an exciting time for all of us as we are working with our teams to recreate a culture that is even more focused on the customer, and where we can take the product(s) to better meet our customers' needs, both today and in the future. The environment is highly collaborative and there are so many opportunities to make a difference. Nothing makes me happier than being part of an energized, high-caliber, collaborative team, intent on making a difference for our customers! And these days, I'm beyond happy!

One of the things that I relished about working at MSDN was the ability to really know our customers/users. I had meaningful, insightful conversations with more developers in the time I was at MSDN than I had with any users in the rest of my MS career. It was something that I had missed from my previous life at Borland (and before) -- connecting with customers, hearing their likes, dislikes, suggestions and big ideas -- and I was thrilled to have it again at MSDN. Now, though, it's something that I'm missing again*. If you're a dial-up user (or if your parents, grand parents, etc. are, and you end up doing support for them), I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

One of the many fun things about my new job is running what's called a QoS v-team. QoS stands for Quality of Service, and the v-team is all about improving the quality of the service that we provide to our customers. We have a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) specifically targeted at QoS -- this is a big part of how we manage our business. The QoS team works on initiatives to improve those KPIs and other measures. One of the things that we'll be driving to in the coming year is metrics that are more representative of the end-to-end customer experience. We see in our user satisfaction surveys that customers view the access service they are subscribing to in a more soup-to-nuts fashion that we tend to. For example, they consider using Hotmail, Messenger and surfing the web in general as part of the "access" experience. This means that we (MSN, not just Access) need to think beyond metrics like connection success rate (CSR). Don't get me wrong, CSR is important and we'll continue to measure, track and drive improvement there, but it's not enough. Some of the things that we want to improve are difficult to measure and/or aren't being measured today -- this means driving change into the product(s) or tools so that we can understand and improve the end-to-end customer experience. Luckily there are many QoS teams across MSN, so it's relatively easy to find like-minded folks on the different product teams to collaborate and engage with on the topic. And of course, our own engineering team is fully engaged and on board here. This is a big part of what I do, so I'm sure this will be an ongoing topic in my blog :)

I think I'll end my back-in-the-blogging-saddle post here. I'm looking forward to getting back in the blogging habit and sharing my new world with you!

*I still have my customer connections through the ISV Buddy program, and all the folks I met through my work at MSDN, but it's not the same as getting feedback from your users about your product.

InfoPath: Adding a button to switch between views

2005-03-10T06:45:00Z

The ability to have multiple views of information and multiple uses for forms is one of the great features of InfoPath. And yet, any person responsible for supporting the users working with the forms can tell you that it can be a real challenge to users to have to switch views via the menu system. However, it's remarkably easy, once you know how, to add a button to your form that allows your users to quickly switch between views. The button will use a rule with the Action of Switch Views -- it's a simple as that.

This will be a learn by doing exercise, so launch InfoPath. Really, it will only take a few minutes, and I'll wait :) Open the sample form called "Meeting Agenda". This form has two views, one for the Agenda and one for the Meeting Minutes. (It's also a very handy sample with very little modification, in my opinion.) We'll add a button to each view at the top of the form that allows the user to easily switch between the views.

Place your cursor in the space to the right of the words "Meeting Agenda". In the Design Tasks Pane, choose Layout. Under Merge and split cells, click on Split Table Cells Vertically. This will add another table cell in the title row. In the Task Pane click on Controls and drag the Button control into the new cell you just created.

Now we'll assign a label to the button and set up a Rule that switches views when the button is clicked. Double click on the Button control you just inserted. Change the label on the button to "Minutes View". Click the Rules button in the properties, and add a new rule. (The name of the rule doesn't matter at this point.) Click on Add action and choose Switch Views. Chose the Minutes View (post meeting) as the view to switch to. There's no need to set a condition, since we want this action to occur when the button is clicked. OK through the dialogs to complete the process.

One view down, one to go. Use the View menu in the Task Pane to switch to the Minutes View (post meeting), and repeat the process, this time labeling the button "Agenda View" and switching to the Agenda View (pre meeting). Test and save the form and voilà, your users now have an easy way to switch between views!

Bonus: Publish the form to your SharePoint site and you have a really handy tool for your teams to use to plan and track the results of meetings!

Cross-Site Groups in SharePoint

2005-03-09T16:50:00Z

There's a great article by Adam Macaulay on MSD2D about using Cross-Site groups to manage your SharePoint users. It's written from a CorasWorks perspective, but don't let thinking it's a promotional piece keep you from reading it -- it has lots of excellent information for the SharePoint administrator including a discussion of the types of permission management:

"The first question is, what type of permission management can you use within a SharePoint Site? It comes down to four items:

First, there are individual users who can be added/edited/deleted from a site collection or a sub-site.
Second, there is an Active Directory group, which can be added/edited/deleted from a site collection or a sub-site.
Third, you can control access via a Cross-Site group which you can add/edit/delete from a site collection and then control access of this same group across your sub-sites.
Finally, there is anonymous access control, which allows you to give everyone access to a site collection and/or sub-sites."

New SharePoint Magazine

2005-02-09T17:13:00Z

Wow, has it really been since September since I posted last? The weeks and months go by so fast! Well, rather than put off this post because it will take too long to write a "where I've been and what I've been doing" post, I'm just going to dive right back in...

Today I received notice of a new magazine, SharePoint Advisor Magazine, that is going to be published by Advisor Media. You can sign up to receive a "special charter subscription offer" here. (Although the email I received said "free copy" ;-) They are also putting together a conference and looking for contributors.

Redux: Excel tip: Split first name and last name into separate cells

2004-09-01T19:40:00Z

In response to my post on splitting names into multiple columns in Excel, someone (who listed themselves as "me") posted the following comment:

very interesting, but there is a problem - when you split the names into two or three columns using this method and there are variations of first+last and first+middle+last names within the column, it tends to insert the middle names of those who have them in the same column with the last names of those who don't have middle names, reserving the third column for the last names of those who have middle names. you end up with a mixed column -not good.

I did see this problem when I used the feature, but it was a simple matter to sort the list by last name and then, for the ones that were empty, move the entry from middle name to the last name column. It took me all of a minute and a half.

David Campeau commented:

And would you happen to know how to turn the feature off?

This is the most usefull feature that bugs me in the long run. After using it, I will have to close Excel than reopen it because it keeps trying to "help" me by doing more and more Text to column on each paste in the range!

I dont know if it saved me more time than it wasted me in the long run!

My friend (and former manager) Ross just supplied me with an answer to this one:

The solution to the “problem” described in the comments is to do another Text To Columns, choose Delimited, and restore the defaults (Tab checked and Space unchecked).

Thanks, Ross!

Hope this helps!

Mixed Language pages - What do you think?

2004-08-25T12:50:00Z

I'm working in London this week, and yesterday we were talking about mixed language pages. My question to the group I was working with was this:

If we could provide components on signed in pages like the Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, which is currently an English language page, that were targeted at users in different locales in their language, would this be considered a bad user experience or a step in the right direction?

So, for example, if you were a signed in user from France (and had specified France as the country in your profile), and when you went to the Developer Center, you would see all of the current content there, in English, plus additional content which was programmed by the MSDN team in France, in French. This content might be news on local upcoming events, or links to French language only content, or links to French language community content. There were a range of opinions in the group, but the general consensus that emerged was that developers whose primary language is not English still go to the main MSDN site for some or all of their content, so in all it would be a slightly positive experience.

Do you agree about the likely developer reaction to this scenario? Is the assertion that developers whose primary language is not English use the main MSDN site correct? I'd love to hear what you think!

Addendum: Yikes! Although I generally try not to edit existing posts except for grammatical errors, etc., I can see from the comments I've gotten already that I didn't give enough context. Absolutely we want all the subsidiary sites to be as great as the main site, including a wealth of content in the local language, and are working toward that goal. And yes, as someone pointed out in the comments, this would be a temporary measure. I'm talking here about surfacing a single additional piece of content, programmed by the in country folks specifically for this purpose, surfaced on a limited set of pages (starting with one). So this wouldn't be replacing anything, it would be in addition to. Search and Browse wouldn't be impacted. The component would contain local information in the user's local language -- perhaps information on an upcoming event in France, or information programmed by Germany, specific to German users. You could think of it as "local voice".

All that said, keep your comments coming, I'm loving both the content of the comments AND the passion!

MSDN Information Architecture

2004-08-16T17:17:00Z

Please welcome Paula Land to the land-o-blogs! Paula is MSDN's Information Architect, and is going to be posing you some interesting questions, including what you think of the sneak preview of the new MSDN Library Table of Contents. You'll have to go to her blog find the sneak preview ;-)