Jim @ imason : benefits, atimason

imason Stair Climb Challenge

James Schwartz — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:52:00 GMT

Photo courtesy of Neatorama

2 weeks ago I had a seemingly crazy idea. I challenged my colleagues at imason in a contest to see who could last the longest without taking the elevator. Considering we’re on the 8th floor of our building, I figured there wouldn’t be a myriad of people lined up to enter the contest.

Boy was I wrong.

15 people entered the contest, and in the last 2 weeks, imason employees have walked up and down approximately 47,250 stairs.

imason’s employees are so dedicated that some are even riding their bikes to work and carrying their bikes up 8 floors.

Not only is this challenge good for the environment, but it’s also great for everybody’s health. I’ve long been an advocate for active, healthy living and I believe strongly in treating the earth well. This is one simple thing that we can do to help make a small difference.

One thing I don’t know is how long this contest will last. But I can honestly say that I hope it continues for many months to come.

I’m in it for the long haul.

Toronto SharePoint Camp 2009

James Schwartz — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:18:00 GMT

On Saturday, January 24th, four of us from imason will be presenting at the 2009 Toronto SharePoint Camp at the Manulife Corporate Headquarters @ 200 Bloor St. East. If you’d like to come out to see our sessions, register here. There will be lots of free giveaways and prizes. Here are some details about our sessions:

Upgrading your SharePoint platform from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007

Bob Brown

Time: 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Room: Holmes B

With SharePoint 2007 taking on widespread adoption, many enterprises are starting to take advantage of the new and improved features of the new platform; but what about administrators and developers that are still supporting a growing business critical SharePoint 2003 environment and have been assigned the daunting task of upgrading? There seems to be an endless list of things to take into account before taking the plunge and upgrading.

In this session, I will walk through how to assess your system to make an educated migration path decision, draw up the high level upgrade steps, and then dig in on some specific snags you'll likely encounter (including custom web parts, FrontPage and unghosted pages, broken permissions, site themes, and legacy templates)

Advanced InfoPath development with SharePoint

Jim Schwartz & Boyan Tsolov

Time: 2:30 PM to 3:45 PM Room: International B&C

InfoPath 2007 has many limitations and doesn’t scale very well with complex forms. Using a custom solution built on SharePoint, we’ve extended InfoPath to support very complicated form functionality. In this session, we will describe to you how we overcame several InfoPath limitations, including multilingual support, pre-populating form data, field validation, and support a flow between several forms.

Effective Deployment of SharePoint Publishing Sites

Ivan Neganov

Time: 4:00 PM to 5:15 PM Room: Holmes B

SharePoint implementation presents many challenges to development teams with deployment often viewed as an area of the primary complexity and importance.

Over time we have accumulated a rich set of utilities which allow deploying SharePoint sites in a fully unattended fashion or close to it, by using custom logic interacting with SharePoint API.

Efficiency of deployment has a dramatic impact on practical aspects of agile and team development using SharePoint, which makes us invest in building comprehensive tools for SharePoint deployment.

Technology: The Good and the Bad

James Schwartz — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:13:00 GMT

Having 2 separate blogs sometimes makes it difficult to decide which blog to post to; especially when writing on a topic that applies to both.

I decided to post today’s article to The Urban Country, but I still wanted to capture it here because it’s about Technology. Here’s an excerpt:

“I'm confident that humans are intelligent enough not to succumb to the form of extreme laziness illustrated in Wall-E, but the movie should indeed be a wake-up call for what could happen if we embrace technology for all of the wrong reasons.”

Fun at imason

James Schwartz — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:49:00 GMT

Every day for the 2 weeks leading up to to Christmas, imason gave each employee a small gift. One of the gifts was something of a "confetti canon". A few colleagues and I had wars between us and on one occasion I videotaped Boyan shooting the confetti in a senior co-worker's office.

I wanted to try out Windows Movie Maker, so I put together a short clip of the confetti shooting coupled with some Benny Hill music (The idea for the music came from the Benny Hillifier - a site where you can take any YouTube video and apply Benny Hill's Yakety Sax to it).

Using Windows Movie Maker, it took only 10 minutes to make this short video (The haste in which I created the video will quickly become apparent when you watch the video). Although Windows Movie Maker has a couple neat features, I still prefer Corel/Ulead's VideoStudio Professional which I used to create my Summer 2008 video. The price tag of $79.99 is well worth it, but Windows Video Maker is free so if you don't need the extra features provided by VideoStudio, Windows Movie Maker might do the trick.

Here's the short movie clip that I've entitled "Fun at imason":

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Movember @ imason

James Schwartz — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:41:00 GMT

A bunch of us at imason are taking part in Movember to raise awareness and raise money for Prostate Cancer. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Movember, the idea is that you grow a moustache during the month of November to raise awareness for men's health. I don’t want to say that we’re “embarrassing” ourselves to raise money, because that could be perceived as a shot against people who normally wear a moustache.

There is nothing wrong with having a moustache, but for those of us who don’t normally wear a moustache, it is a bit embarrassing (but fun at the same time).

It’s interesting to me how everyone looks completely different when they grow a moustache. My co-worker Boyan looks like Freddie Mercury, Rez looks like a scary hitman, Shahzad looks like a Venice Taxi Paddler and Steve looks like a Medieval Viking.

I wasn’t sure what I would look like until I trimmed up today. Due to my inept ability to grow hair on my face combined with my “overtrimming”, I unfortunately ended up looking a bit like Adolf Hitler. I have one more week remaining to let it “thicken out” a bit. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll look more like Tom Selleck.