Some insight on Project Server 2010

What is this about? This is about Project Server 2k10 and the stuff I learned in the last half of the year about Enterprise Project Management Solutions and the deployment of it.

Everything started 6 months ago, when the head of PMO told me about his visions of Project Server and what we can archive with that lil piece of software.  Not to mention about all the lovely sounding catch phrases implicated with visions of project server – such as:

• one-stop-shop -  let’s just call it the Mecca of Project Managers
• more quality and pm-methods
• more and better possibilities of standardization
• efficency
• semit-automatism
• streamlined communication
• better and intiuitive collaboration
• and, and, and, and, ….

I guess I could add thousand of more words to project server and the idea involved. In fact I really started to believe the technical solultion – or let’s rather call it approach – is pretty neat, but the roll in a company is simply a pain in the ass.  Why? Because people and change is involved, and let me tell you this: ‘It is definitely not going to be easy!’ – O_0 – ‘ and please, keep it always in mind! –> change + people = a hell of difficulties n’ issues.

After being aware of the social component, you should also take your time to review all the current pm-processes and the sample project life cycle in order to merge those things with the possibilities of project server.

Having seriously done all those stuff it should be easier to focus on the technical components before roll out:

1. The Security Concept (Groups, Categories, Templates, RBS)
2. (custom) Enterprise Fields (and the according lookup tables)
3. Users and Ressources (import from AD -  or add them manually)
4. Enterprise GLOBAL.mpt
5. Enterprise Calenders
6. PWA Views (Projectcenter and Ressorucecenter)
7. Workflows  (sample proposal workflow in 2k10)
8. Enterprise Project Types  (different templates for different projects)
9. Project Work Spaces (create a template)
   
10. Misc Settings (Backup, Cube, Timesheets, Currency, etc. )
11. is something missing ?
    

To get this stuff right – the TECHnet Library is a good point to start!

PS: I’m going to add some links to this topic soon…

cheers, Thomas

Flash: Embeding Fonts with Flash CS4 and ActionScript 3.0

One year ago I tried to embed a specific font within an image slide show and it was a little harder to do that without a glue. Today I wanted to know if there’s a step by step tutorial and I found a relly detailed how to embed fonts with ActionScript 3.0 by adobe itself.

thank you to them!!!

cheers Thomas

Remove URLs from Google’s index

If you does have a website and you Google indexed some URL which should not be indexed or which are outdated then there are three ways – 1) an 404 (File not found),  2) Google’s Webmaster Tools or 3) an robots.txt file

1. The first way is to send an 404 or 401 Header code and Google will drop the URL out when they recognize it – this would be the natural way and usually takes some time.
2. If you’d like to speed things up a little bit, simply use Google’s Webmaster tool,  choose the domain you possess on your  dashboard and go to “tools” where you have got an option called “Remove URL’s…”, enter the URL you don’t want to be listed on Google and Google will remove that URL permanently after a period of 3-5 days.
3. Use an robots.txt File and disallow sites or folders (subsequently Google kicks out those URLs of their index)

SEO: Subdomains vs. Folders

I recently was asking myself whether to use a subdomain or a folder in order to promote specific services for my client. So both, my client and me tried to figure out which option was the best. tended to use a folder because I just thought that this would not be as separated as a subdomain. After reading this article about folders, subdomains and the weight both has got with search engines, we both agreed to the outcome. We ended up with the second option (using folders) to promote his services better.

Why ? Simply, because a subdomain would be seen as a completely independent site and therefore all the effort has to be applied to the subdomain as well, whereas a folder gets more or less rankings from its TLD and therefore it is the better solution for promoting services which are in direct connection with your TLD.

cheers n’ out Thomas

Mod_Rewrite: How to set up a 404 (not found) rewrite

A few days ago I had this problem with Google’s indexing of some of my pages. While I was deploying on the server and my only solution was to develop the HTACCESS file directy on the deploying machine, Google indexed some really messed up and useless URLS.

First off,  I thought i should rewrite every url like “en/en_pedikure” (which isn’t what I wanted at first hand) to “en/we-offer/pedicure”. When I started to consider that the “en/en_pedikure” page has no page rank, no popularity etc. I suddenly realized this page should not be redirected anyway… So I tried to rewrite the page to a non existent page  (with a 404 error/header code)… which isn’t quite possible this way:

RewriteRule en/en_pedikure nonexistent.html [R=404,L]    # R=404 is not a valid redirect code

Soooo…. this will fix it:

RewriteRule en/en_pedikure /none/none/none/none/ [R=301,L]  #simply redirect to a none existent directory..

then you will get a 404 Response Header and the site will be kicked out of the google index!

I hope I’m not mistaken because I just did this rewrite thing.. and I’m now waiting to approve my theory.

For more on SEO in general:

Search Engine Optimization Tools for Webadmins (checking headers, popularity, meta tags, etc.)

Some gerneral information about Seach Engine Optimization

Fonts – Using fonts is one thing, understanding them is another!

I know this topic has so often been discussed and therefore the article’s purpose is to put things (information) together! Subsequently, I actually wanted to put some articles (links to a variety of sites) in here, which I recently stumbled upon and liked !

1) How to choose fonts wisely ?

• which font are you – choose between fonts
• fewer fonts within your text
• body fonts
• font cheat sheat (whereas 1 is good and 3 is bad)

2) Basic Information about Fonts:

• general definitions of fonts
• basic stuff and history of fonts
• web safe fonts
• font samples
• open type fonts
• cross platform font difference
• font caps

3) Typography in general

4) Headlines

• which fonts for headlines
• fancy headlines with css

Easy Filtering with MySQL

I’ve recently thought about a filter for a simple news table and after realising how I did such a thing in school, by simply  using the whole result set of the MySQL news table and filtering data by using any String Functions or Regular Expressions  provided by a software language rather than by the MySQL API I now think it was really stupid. 

Reconsidering traffic and speed, whereas I don’t know whether MySQL or  e.g PHP is faster with filtering/string search, I now prefer using native String Function with MySQL for easy searches! MySQL also offers you  Regular Expressions for advanced data filtering/search within rows and columns (as far as I know only with MyISAM) !

As in a matter of traffic in my point of view it is wise to only get back what you’re really looking for! This is the time where I want to introduce you two easy MySQL String Functions:

• LOCATE/POSITION
• FIND_IN_SET

First of, I really like to show you the equivalent of PHP’s strpos which is LOCATE and POSITION either, whereas POSITION is just an alias for LOCATE!

LOCATE(substr, str)  - means it takes a substring and tries to match it against the string, the result will be the starting position within the string and if the return value is greater than 0 there is a match! 

SELECT * FROM news WHERE LOCATE(“my first”, headline) >=1;

if you are looking for something more specialised there will be another neat string function:

FIND_IN_SET(str, strlist) - imagine you’ve got tags with your blog entries and you save them like this “software,hardware,geekerish” (all tags separated by a comma and don’t try to use “spaces”) you can easily look if some of your rows do have the tag “software” by using this string function!

SELECT * FROM news WHERE FIND_IN_SET(“software”, tags) >=1;

All the information offered in here are just my own approach, so feel free to correct me if there is a better way, apart from that enjoy my thoughts… 

regards Thomas

Best Practise Java – Part 4(Interfaces)

First off, ask the right question:

What are interfaces? In order to answer the first question we rather should ask a better question such as, ‘When do we actually need interfaces?’. For instance we need interfaces for the following matters:

• multiple inheritance
• setting a protocol/contract for not directly connected classes which, though, have to implement common behavior.
• guarantee that all the required methods are implemented by subclasses in order to provide polymorphism

Now, what does all that mean? Continue reading »

Why don’t we become a freelancer?

Nowadays there are still a bunch of people who usually will request your proffessionalism, in case you know some people, who know some people, who know some people, do you get it ? It should be always  that simple, because if you provide your service to one guy and you do great… your reputation will spread and you certainly will get more requests! (I know there are downsides as well)

So my plan is to get a freelancer within the next 2 months, whether with or without you Kaan, but I would really be pleased to work in a team, because we always did!

My desire is to provide 2 ur up to 5 different services that will round up the web:

1. Webdesign implicating all the steps to reach goals(such as design, programming, modifications, configuration and so on)
2. maybe excluded “SEO” for customers who want to have an improved Google, Yahoo and whatever search engine required good ranking
3. minor design things, such as “CI, minor Photoshop, Illustrator workarrounds… ” maybe also some video editing and so back and forth
4. … whatever you want to add

About the web package I would specifically add some differences or options:

• simple Websites(done with a bunch of HTML files)
• more complex websites(done with joomla)
• big projects(which we really do not expect from the beginning with typo 3)
• specific website projects(done with mvc oop style php and our self invented packages)

all these option are dependend from what the customer needs and how much he want to spend on his website, because I would say a joomla site won’t take as much time as a specifically programmed website!

cheers Tom

Sun Certified Java Programmer

Is it really worth to get such an certification ?

I’m going to figure that out!!!

First I read the requirements, then I checked out the price “235 €” which is not all tooo much, I personally think, don’t get me wrong! So this one’s for you Kaan: “is it worth or necessary to get the SUN certification(s)?”.

Just give it a minute and think about it…If your answer is “yes” just let me know and I recommend us to do this test together because I’m partly interessted!

sincerely yours, Tom