Tag Archives: Work

Update: Subsite Searches in SharePoint Not Working

We’re not the only ones having problems with subsite searches – apparently, the University of Washington’s SharePoint install suffers from the same issue. They’re working with Microsoft and have a ticket open, but I’m shocked that with the number of people who have this issue, no solution has yet been found.

We’ll see whether anything in particular happens as a result of our open ticket with Microsoft.

Subsite Searches in SharePoint Not Working

We’ve been having a search configuration problem within SharePoint 2007 at work in which the “This Site” and “This List” search scopes available within any site haven’t been returning results, despite the fact that the global site search will very clearly return results with the exact same query. This seems to be an issue that several people have on TechNet’s Sharepoint – Search forums. A bit of digging discovers a recent post by Robin Meuré, which suggests that using https:// (SSL) might be the issue. I’m a bit dubious, but I’m running it by our system administrator to see if it even makes any sense.

SharePoint 2007 Oddities

SharePoint’s a weird little bugger. It doesn’t really help much that the iSchool’s SharePoint 2007 install is hacked together in the first place (and who knows whether that explains some of the oddities that I’ve run into). One example is how the server handles what are technically known as 404, or “file not found”, errors. All three of the following messages mean that a file can’t be found:

  • HTTP/1.1 404
    Connection: close
    Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:59:05 GMT
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
    MicrosoftSharePointTeamServices: 12.0.0.4518
    X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
  • XML Parsing Error: no element found
    Location:
    https://portal...
    Line Number 1, Column 1:
    ^    (under Firefox only – IE gives me a blank page)
  • 404 FILE NOT FOUND

As far as I can tell (and the iSchool’s system administrator agrees), these are all SharePoint-generated errors and not the fault of the Internet Information Services server we’re running SharePoint off of.

Even with the quirks, though, SharePoint 2007 is actually fun to screw around with. I’ve been enjoying the work quite a bit.

Job Description

The position as listed below has changed slightly – there are two hires for this position, including myself, so it’s now a 20 hour/week position during the summer and a 10 hour/week position during the academic year.

Position Title
SharePoint Administrator
Meets Internship requirement for second year MSIM students
Start Date: as soon as possible
End Date: June 15, 2008

Location
The Information School of the University of Washington

Position Description
Under the general supervision of the Director of IT and in collaboration with the Information School IT team, the SharePoint Administrator will complete a needs analysis of iSchool stakeholders, help faculty and staff members establish collaborative sites around work teams, assist faculty and staff in the creation of personalized “MySites,” design document work-flow, provide support and training to end-users, document process and procedures, develop work-flow applications, and market the intranet site to internal users to ensure its overall success.

This position participates in the continued enhancement of the Information School’s web presence and intranet architecture. Development functions will be performed in partnership with internal IT Services staff, including other developers, project managers, and IT operational staff. The Information Specialist will build, enhance and maintain the Information School’s intranet web architecture and platform, which is based upon Microsoft’s SharePoint software. This framework will be utilized to deliver critical web-based solutions to the Information School.

This is an hourly position working up to 19.5 hours during the academic year and up to 40 hours per week during summer quarter and other school breaks.

Requirements

  • Experience with Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007
  • Sharp analytical and project management skills
  • Ability to work well independently and as a member of a team
  • Strong information organization/information architecture skills
  • Experience writing documentation
  • Ability to train end-users
  • Excellent communication skills

Desired Qualifications

  • Bachelors’ degree in computer science, business or related field or equivalent experience
  • Experience with Windows and SharePoint Portal Server administration
  • Process management improvement/business analysis
  • Two years of information technology experience such as analyzing, designing, installing, maintaining or programming computer software applications

This position is open to all Information School students. Undergraduate and graduate level students will be compensated at a competitive hourly rate of $17 – $19 per hour DOE. This position is not benefits eligible.

Note: This job classification is governed by a negotiated labor contract and is subject to union shop provisions. For more information about union shop provisions, visit: www.washington.edu/admin/hr/jobs/apl/union-info.html

Job updates

I wrote at the beginning of the last month about my interview for the Writing Center’s Special Assistant to the Director position. I learned a couple weeks later that I was not selected to fill that position; however, in my notification letter, I was offered the position of Information Technology Manager for the Writing Center, which will be a 20 hour/week position for Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters of the 2006-2007 academic year. I have since accepted this offer, since my other job leads failed to pan out. The details of this are reasonably solidified – I’ll be doing a technology audit and maintaining the new appointment system that I coded as part of my Student Originated Software project.

I am still looking for a job to fill the summer and the other half of my time – we’ll see what happens there.

Special Assistant to the Director Interview

I interviewed Monday morning for the Special Assistant to the Director position for the Writing Center, a yearlong position open only to graduating tutors. The job is to essentially take on administrative responsibilities for the Center – the job description is as follows:

Special Assistant to the Director
The position of Special Assistant is a five-quarter-long commitment available to graduating Writing Center tutors the year following their graduation. This position provides both managerial and administrative experience.

Duties include:

  • Creating, compiling, and maintaining a weekly schedule;
  • Planning and implementing the fall tutor retreat;
  • Coordinating open and in-program workshops;
  • Meeting regularly with the Director of the Writing Center;
  • Planning and facilitating staff meetings;
  • Fielding questions/addressing tutors’ concerns re: WC operation;
  • Hiring tutors and receptionists for the upcoming year;
  • Hiring replacement Special Assistants;
  • Participating in collective decision-making with the Director and other assistants;
  • Developing and implementing innovative projects to improve the WC;
  • Revising and enforcing the policies in the handbook;
  • and, most important, tutoring students.

After working very closely with some awesome Special Assistants (four sets of them now – including singer/songwriter Devin Brewer all the way back in 2002), and because of my personal connection to the job, I decided to apply. Admittedly, it’s low pay with no benefit, but it’s not about the money for me, it’s about the experience and the chance to work with an absolutely stellar group of people.

The interview itself consisted of the two current Special Assistants and the Director herself. They asked a series of very probing and good questions to ask in any job interview, asking me about such things as conflict resolution, collaboration, communication skills, and what assets I would bring to the job. They also asked me to speak about one of my obsessions (“which one”, I replied, “I have so many!”) – I chose to talk about sustainability and talked a little bit about how I was thinking about the connections between sustainability and my other work. I then had the chance to ask questions, and I asked two that I felt were very hard and contemplative questions: Where do you see the Center going in the next year? What is missing from our efforts to support the campus in writing endeavors?

I think I did quite well, though I’m still looking around for other employment opportunities. The Special Assistant job is roughly 20 hours a week, so I still need to find something to cover the other part of the time. If anyone knows of any opportunities, feel free to contact me.

I should know whether I have the job or not by Monday or Tuesday next week.

Summarizing the PNWCA Conference Trip

This is part 1 of 2 – in this part, I’ll note everything that didn’t have anything to do with the conference directly, but instead had to do with my impressions during our travels and as we were at Oregon State University in Corvallis. In the second part (to come later), I’ll discuss the actual conference, including my own presentation.

We left directly after the staff meeting on Friday to drive four hours south to Corvallis, which, if I do say so myself, was a beautiful drive. I was able to make full use of my new Garmin StreetPilot C340 GPS, and it got us there perfectly (and would later get us back perfectly). The only sort of harrowing part of the trip down was having a semi two lanes over experience a tire blowout and having a part of the tire hit the car. I wasn’t really aware of it until I heard a somewhat sickening thump, then looked over to see the remainder of his rear tire shredding. I immediately pulled into the next rest stop and checked the car – no damage, and the same semi came limping in a bit after I did. We breathed a sigh of relief, took a brief stretch break, then continued south.

Crossing the Washington border is a little bit like being a very tempted fish going after a worm on a line – it keeps teasing you until you capture it. Case in point: once you hit exit 1 just north of the state line, they decide to split it into 1A, 1B, 1C, and 1D, just in case you weren’t already breathless with anticipation.

We got to Corvallis at roughly 3:30 after leaving at 11. The way we got on the Oregon State University campus wasn’t particularly impressive, since we had to go to their parking structure to park and pay for parking, then hightail it to Memorial Union (which, interestingly, has its own web site) for the pre-conference session – more on that later. The parking structure is in a very industrial-looking area with train tracks and a Naval Science building that’s very obviously old. However, if you walk two blocks to the Memorial Union, it turns into an absolutely beautiful campus, which is a very striking change between the two. Admittedly, the parking garage area looks like it’s new construction, but it’s still very confusing to make that transition.

After the pre-conference session, three of us went to check into the dorms, leaving the other two playing Frisbee. Our director wasn’t joining us until much, much later in the evening, so we had autonomy until then. Checking in went fairly well, though apparently OSU Conference Services doesn’t know how to check their locks – the original keys they gave me to my room didn’t work and they had to switch me to another room. This happened to one of our other tutors as well (one of the ones who was playing Frisbee, to be specific). After some discussion, we decided to run through both my presentation and the other presentation being given by tutors from Evergreen before dinner. Doing that was fairly extensive, with both run-throughs and feedback discussions about what modifications could be made to make the presentations better.

We went to dinner after dark (roughly 10PM, I believe), after deciding not to wait for our Director. We went to American Dream Pizza on Monroe, about five blocks or so from the dorms. Not the greatest pizza I’ve had, but definitely a fairly unique menu – we had the Tejano (BBQ sauce, Herb Chicken, Smoked Gouda, Cilantro, and Red Onion), which was a really interesting taste experience – I liked it. Another tutor and I went back to the dorms, and I rehearsed my presentation before falling asleep.

I got up at around 7AM, showered (and was fairly impressed by the shower itself – not the fact that it was dark like most collegiate shower stalls, but the actual shower), dressed, threw a tie on, then rehearsed my presentation in my head before we checked out and left for the conference itself.  We did finally find our director when we checked into the conference – she didn’t even get to Corvallis until 11:30 Friday, so we were somewhat glad we ate instead of waiting.
I’ll leave the whole conference summary for another post.

Before we left, we decided we wanted to eat as a group, so we solicited some suggestions from some of the local faculty and staff of OSU and settled on the idea of Thai food.  My interest was piqued, primarily because I’ve never actually had thai food before, but I was looking forward to it  We went to a place called Tarntip, down the block from American Dream.  We had some squid and some chicken skewers for appetizers (both good), and I had the Plah Laht Prig (#62 on the menu) as my main course – deep fried salmon with special sauce.  Not bad, but I’ve heard of better food.  The only drawback was that they don’t take credit cards, which caused a bit of a headache when it came time to pay (probably not the first time either).

We left at about 7:30 – my passenger and I both got back to Olympia at about 11, and I got home at roughly 11:30 or so.

It was the first time I’ve done prolonged driving, which actually wasn’t that bad. I did enjoy the trip and the conference experience – I just wish the conference might have been a bit longer so that we could get more exposure to some of those ideas.  More on that later.

Presenting at the PNWCA Conference

I have just been notified that I am a presenter at the 3rd Annual Regional Conference of the Pacific Northwest Writing Center Association being held at Oregon State University in Corvallis April 29th. There’s a free session on the 28th that I am likely to try to get to, since it pertains to my presentation topic. I’ll post a bit more later after I’ve finished doing what I was about to do before I wrote this (yeah, and I’m presenting with that kind of sentence structure? Seesh…)