Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT

28th of March, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve blogged a bit in the past about the unique challenges encountered when moving to the cloud and the unavoidable consequence of introducing new network hops when moving workloads out of the data centre. I’m currently working for a unique organisation in the mining industry who are quite aggressively pursuing cost saving initiatives and have seen cloud as one of the potential savings. The uniqueness of the IT operating environment comes from the dispersed and challenging “branch offices” which may lie at the end of a long dedicated wired, microwave or satellite link

Centralising IT services to a data centre in Singapore is all very well if you’re office is on a well serviced broadband Internet link but what of these other data centres with more challenged connectivity.… [Keep reading] “Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT”

The FIM User Experience

27th of March, 2014 / / No Comments

A recent post by my colleague Jamie Skella “What UX Isn’t” started me thinking about how UX applies to FIM. Throughout my career as an Identity Management Consultant, I’ve seen projects reach a point in maturity where stakeholders are walked through the tasks an admin or user will perform in the portal, and the average eyebrow height in the room rises exponentially.

Those of us working with Microsoft’s identity products for a while, are used to seeing the glitz and glamour of the Sync Engine console, previously the only interface available with the product, so when the FIM Portal was introduced with FIM 2010, it gave a “user friendly” interface to work with.… [Keep reading] “The FIM User Experience”

Office 365 / SharePoint Sign-in with Xamarin.iOS

20th of March, 2014 / / 1 Comment

While coding up an iOS app with Xamarin I came across some odd behaviour when trying to programmatically sign in to O365 using HttpClient.

Xamarin

If you are not aware, Xamarin is built with Mono (the open source .NET Framework) and for all intents and purposes has the same namespace and language features as .NET 4.5. Excluding of course, all the Microsoft specific .NET parts.

HttpClient

OK I’ll set the scene. One of the requirements of my shiny new Xamarin app was to host a SharePoint site in a browser control.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 / SharePoint Sign-in with Xamarin.iOS”

What UX isn’t

18th of March, 2014 / / 2 Comments

There’s still many common misconceptions about what user experience design (UX, UXD) is amidst many of the companies that need and want to invest in it.

Highlighting the impact of good design, what we’ve seen over the past ten years is that design driven businesses have outperformed America’s Standard & Poor’s 500 large publicly traded companies — by a massive 228%.

Characteristics of design driven businesses are the embedding of design leadership at the highest organisational levels, and a top-down commitment to using design as a catalyst for innovation.… [Keep reading] “What UX isn’t”

Remote Event Receiver (RER) for Host Web using SharePoint Provider Hosted App in Office 365/SharePoint Online Environment

13th of March, 2014 / / 16 Comments

There are a number of articles talking about how to deploy Remote Event Receiver for SharePoint 2013, but few of them are in depth, especially on how to set it up for host web using Provider Hosted App in Office 365/SharePoint Online environment. I hope this post can provide detailed information for developers who need to deploy the same.

The inspiration for this article is another similar article written by Chris O’Brien, here. However the mentioned article talks about how to make the BasicDataOperations SP2013 provider-hosted app on MSDN work on App Web, not Host Web.… [Keep reading] “Remote Event Receiver (RER) for Host Web using SharePoint Provider Hosted App in Office 365/SharePoint Online Environment”