Alex Pearce's SharePoint Blog

I don't normally talk about my own school in my blog posts but there are a few things I do want to bring up.

Thursday last week was a very big day for me as I had 5 visitors from Microsoft visiting the school.  To me, having any Microsoft employee visiting the school is really big but these guys weren't any Microsoft employees as we have 2 Microsoft Corporate Executives.

They were visiting the school to see what we had done with our IT and also gave me a opportunity to show our Learning Gateway (SharePoint, Exchange, Moodle, OCS/CWA, TSGateway).

We have deployed a whole new domain, SharePoint, OCS, Exchange, Office 2007, Vista etc aiming to turn the school around with the Technology and E-Learning within a few months.  Well we're achieved this, even though we have done a lot we have so much more to do and we are now looking at Moodle for course delivery.

It was great to have these guys visiting and you can read Ray Fleming (from Microsoft) report of the day at his blog – Click Here

Anoop Gupta and Michael Golden were the two Executives visiting and we were delighted to have them at the school.  We even had them competing with a class group on Nintendo DSs on Brain Training.  How quickly can you do 100 simply maths questions.  Anoop did his in 2 minutes 15 seconds, that's 1 question every 2 seconds!  So quick!!

Thanks for coming to visit us at Great Barr School

I've logged in this morning and been reading through my RSS feeds and found a post about Blatchington Mill School's SharePoint and SIMs Learning Gateway Install.

Take a loot at what they have been doing with their SharePoint 2007 environment and SIM.net webparts

http://blogs.technet.com/tothesharepoint/archive/2009/01/19/3178564.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335971.aspx).

So I'm here at BETT (British Education Teachers and Technology Show – Largest Education Technology show in the World)  at Olympia, London and it's another great event.  This year its a lot busier than last year with lots being shown around the event and on the Microsoft Stand.

This year I'm in a blue Microsoft Rugby shirt sitting on the TechDesk answer technical questions that people have mostly on Windows 7 and SharePoint.

With Windows7 Beta out at the beginning of the week there are lots on ICT and Network Managers asking how it can help them, what does it look like, where to get a copy from etc  Some are asking for it to be released now as they can already see the benefits to their school and don't want to upgrade to Vista.

Sometimes schools can be the most innovative areas to work but other schools can have the oldest machines around and are now looking whether to go to Vista or WIndows7.  So they are asking the question whether to wait – hard one to answer really as they want to know the release date for it as they will buy new computers in the August summer holidays.

On the SharePoint side of things many people already have SharePoint 2007 installed in their school but its more about getting people to use it. They have created all their departmental sites but nobody is using it.  I guess this could be a good post to do in the near future – How to let your Educational SharePoint Mature.

So come along to the stand – not long until the doors closes

At the very end of last year the MVP program created a new blog to feature their MVPs and the work they are doing around the globe.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mvpawardprogram/

Today they have featured the work my school has been doing in Sierra Leone.

Make sure you take a look

http://blogs.msdn.com/mvpawardprogram/archive/2009/01/06/sharepoint-mvp-brings-the-gift-of-computing.aspx

Microsoft Popfly is a great way to create a mashup – taking a source of information and publishing it in a great graphical view.

http://www.popfly.ms

As an example here I have taken my favourite football team(soccer for you Americans , Aston Villa, searched Live Images and  published all the images it finds into a page turner.  There are some many different blocks you can use now in Popfly – you should really give it a go if you haven't already.

So here are the blocks for the Aston Villa Page Turner

When we've saved that, we can run and see how it looks as a mashup

So how do we get this onto our SharePoint page.  Well its easy as the others really.  As per YouTube and SlideShare, Popfly gives you the embed code to add to any kind of website.

Click on Share at the top and you can see other sites you can publish it to like your Space and Bebo.  Click on Embed and you can copy the code

Here is the code for the Aston Villa Page Turner

<iframe style='width:500px; height:375px;' 

src='http://www.popfly.com/users/Alex-Pearce/Aston%20Villa%20Page%20Turner.small' 

frameborder='no' allowtransparency='true'></iframe>

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

So we copy the code and place it in the Content Editor Web Part in the Source section

And we then have our Popfly mashup in our SharePoint site

One of my many highlights of 2008 was to present on the Microsoft stand at BETT.  I enjoyed the 4 days their presenting 8 times in total and making a lot of friends at the same time.  It was a great way to start the year.

I'm hoping 2009 will be just as good as 2008 if not better and this year I am on Ask The Export also know as the Tech Desk on the Microsoft stand.  It will be great to meet up with Eileen Brown and her team at Microsoft on the desk.  I know we will have a good time.

So I hope your coming to the event.  If you not then you need to get yourself down to London, if only for a few hours it will be worth it.

Many companies are releasing products and I have had a few emails already regarding products for the Education SharePoint world.

This year during the week I hope to bring to you about the SharePoint releases and they do and how they can be used in your organisation.

Get in touch if you want to meet if not please come say hello on the Microsoft stand

Happy New Year and I hope 2009 bring you much joy and happiness

I've been playing with Moodle the last few weeks.  A open source, web based E-Learning tool coded in PHP written for Apache, mySQL on Linux.

We are looking at several E-Learning tools includes SLK but Moodle at the moment Moodle has become the leader in the delivery of E-Learning for our school.  Many schools look at Moodle as a competitive to SharePoint but SharePoint is not a E-Learning tool, it can be used for E-Learning but doesn't delivery the course by course we are looking for out of the box.  SharePoint delivery management and collaboration for all stake holder in the school which makes it the most value tool in a school in my eyes.

There are many documents out their that can help you to install Moodle on Win2K3R2, IIS6 and MsSQL2005 but I never found one that was right. So I thought I would pass this one as well as look at how the Moodle SharePoint Web Parts look.

The closest white paper I found was written by Matthias Wachs and the document is spot on but except for the exception.

1. Install Win2k3 and patch
2. Enable IIS6.0
3. Install SQL2005
4. Install PHP 5 – try and use the same version as the document – saves confusion
1. When installing the modules you also need to install LDAP – you will require this later
5. Create username and database for moodle
6. Configure IIS and PHP
7. Configure php.ini

And this is where you need to have different exceptions than the white paper.  The white paper wants you to have two php dlls for the connection of php to SQL while you only need the one – FreeTDS.  The execption should be the following

Installing_Moodle_on_Windows_Server_2003_-_Updated.pdf

 On codeplex you can also download the Moodle WebParts for SharePoint 2003 and 2007.

Well actually I've been back a few weeks but its been so busy since I got back.  All positive though.  We have had a lot of press coverage in Birmingham about Sierra Leone which is helping to raise more money.

The trip was amazing – Sierra Leone is such a beautiful country with such bad poverty.  We went the local market one day and locals were buying bread for 20 or 50 Leones (the local currency), where a can of Coke would cost us 1000 Leones and œ1 ($1.5) is 5000Leones.  Scary thoughts.

They are so excited about us bring computers over.  Can't believe we will help set up the first computer lab in a school in the country.

We did visit the only place they teach computers in the country.  The computers were so old and I found the teaching book.  "Microsoft Office for Windows 95"  How times have changed…

We took 1000s of photos and if you want to see them add me as a friend on facebook and have a look, they are amazing.  We've been donated a Gallery at the Mailbox (posh area of Birmingham, UK) where we can display the images and people can buy them and the money goes to the charity – which is why they aren't on flickr.

As I mentioned we have had a lot of press coverage and have a look at articles here.

http://www.thisissuttoncoldfield.co.uk/greatbarr/Dream-help-Sierra-Leone-school/article-472420-detail/article.html
http://www.thisissuttoncoldfield.co.uk/news/campaign-help-change-lives/article-489353-detail/article.html

Here are two of my favourite images

The lad in the black and white photo work for the hotel where we stayed.  Their job is to fill the water tub so water can be used in the baths of the 5 room hotel.  The kid on the right nearest the camera can't go to school, well all of them can't but he use to go to school and can't any more because his dad can only afford for one of his sons to go.  Now his younger brother is old enough he goes to school instead.  School costs around $7 a term.

The 2nd is my favourite of all.  Just sums up my whole trip.

Next week I'm off to Sierra Leone in Africa to visit a school.  The school is called Waterloo School which is about 2 hour drive from the capital, Freetown. http://www.waterloo-schools.org/

The school I work for are going to create a partnership between the schools and we are looking at how we can send our old computers to the school.  So this trip is a wrecky to find out what we need to do get computers there.

We have been donated an internet satellite dish for the school allowing the computers to be networked and be on the internet highway.  Sierra Leone has the population of around 5 million and 11000 of those are internet users.  When we have installed the internet we will be enabling another 1800 pupils in the country.

One of our goals is to get kids communicating between the school in Sierra Leone and Birmingham and we are hoping that SharePoint and the Microsoft Learning Gateway will help us to do that.  At the moment we are running SharePoint 2007, Exchange 2007 and OCS2007 within the school which can also be accessed from home by the pupils.  These are services are want we to provide to the pupils of Waterloo school.

We are hoping to get pupils talking over instant messenger, emailing each other, blogging, video conferencing and collaborating with each other on work.

We are also hoping to help the school in Sierra Leone giving it the same benefits as all British schools with a learning environment and give the kids a better opportunity.

While we are there we are going to help build the first school based science lab in the country as well as meet Ministers from the country about our goals.

Sierra Leone is the worlds poorest country and is still broken from its civil war that ended in 2003.  Life expectancy is 40years old,  and 27% of children die before their 5th birthday.  This alone makes it a very challenging to visit the school and it worries me to think what will I see there.

Another thing about this visit that comes to mind is about my hotel room.  I don't know what its going to be like but I've been told it has satellite TV, but I'm guessing I'm getting water through a tap, toilet, bed and its costing $10 US a night.  I think this is just amazing to think what $10 dollars does in such a poor country.

We are taking football/soccer shirts over for the kids, I have loads of shirts to take, more than my bag can take.  A Saturday football team have donated a whole strip for us to take.  I saw this video of David Beckham visiting Sierra Leone and I hope the shirts bring just as much joy.  David Beckham visits Sierra Leone

I hope our trip is successful and we can start the ball rolling and get the computers to this country.  I don't think its that simple with licensing and rules with broken monitors and disposing of equipment in a environmentally friendly way.

I want to finish this post with a video all our pupils saw at school in assemblies during the week.  My boss who is also going created it and its very challenging.  During the week I saw 2600 pupils not blink an eye as they watched this video in the school hall.  I hope it get your thinking as well.

I got introduced to slideshare.net this week which is a great way of sharing your presentation with the world.

You can upload your presentation and make the available only to yourself through your login or through the public domain.  When you've uploaded your presentation you can view your slides in the same size as a YouTube video but you have the option of making it full screen.  You don't get any kind of animation, all you get are still frames of the slide.  This could be a great way to keep a back up of your slides online and also sharing them with the general public.

Getting your slideshare presentation in SharePoint is the same process getting a YouTube video.

The same as YouTube on the right of the page on Slideshare you will see embed with code next to it.  Copy this code

   1: <div style="width:425px;text-align:left" id="__ss_213894"><a style="font:14px Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;display:block;margin:12px 0 3px 0;text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/srinatha/technical-overview-of-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007?type=powerpoint" title="Technical Overview of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007">Technical Overview of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007</a><object style="margin:0px" width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=technical-overview-of-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-119883874577421-2&stripped_title=technical-overview-of-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><embed src="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=technical-overview-of-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-119883874577421-2&stripped_title=technical-overview-of-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div style="font-size:11px;font-family:tahoma,arial;height:26px;padding-top:2px;">View SlideShare <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/srinatha/technical-overview-of-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007?type=powerpoint" title="View Technical Overview of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 on SlideShare">presentation</a> or <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://www.slideshare.net/upload?type=powerpoint">Upload</a> your own. (tags: <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://slideshare.net/tag/sharepoint">sharepoint</a> <a style="text-decoration:underline;" href="http://slideshare.net/tag/ovrview">ovrview</a>)</div></div>

We are going to paste this code into the Source Editor with in the Content Editor Web Part.

Open your SharePoint site and add a Content Editor Web Part to your page

When you've loaded the web part properties click on Source Editor.

Paste the code into this box.

Now click on OK and Ok again and you will see your slides on your SharePoint site.