Social media in the enterprise

Following on from my thinking on RSS Enabling the Enterprise, I have been pondering on how much CIOs really want this technology. This article has a good discussion and throws some water on the fire.

Enterprise Web 2.0 » Why CEOs Are Afraid of Social Media

It’s merely one more example of why the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is not about technology, it’s about who gets to control the flow and pace of inside information.

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Group blogs on Community Server

I’ve just tried to set up a group blog. The intention to have multiple authors posting to one single blog around an event we are holding internally. It seems that the only way to allow people to author posts is to give them full management of the blog. This means they are able to delete posts by other contributors and change everything about the blog, including the title.

It would seem that WordPress does a better job for this sort of solution, although I haven’t tried to do Windows Authentication with the WP engine. So it looks like I’m stuck with CS this time, the event it too close to try anything else. I’ll know for next time, unless there are changes coming down the line or I’ve missed something.

Admin group in CS

Setting up a new Community Server 2.1 with Windows Authentication Module is easy. However, configuring the admin users to link to a local or AD group proved tricky. I discovered the answer on the CS form, basically the user is given the admin role when the account is created if they are in the group specified by adminWindowsGroup. If they are not in the group at the time of creation adding the user later won’t work. In CS 2.1 you can now delete a user (which is ok for a new site, where the user has no content). Otherwise your only option is to manually assign the user to the admin role.

Update: Another thing to note, setting adminWindowsGroupIsSystemAdministrator to “false” means the members of the built-in adminitrators group will not be admins on the site – only the group specified by adminWindowsGroup. Set it to “true” and you get both groups.

Search broken by CS upgrade

I realised after the last post the search was broken after I had done the upgrade to Community Server 2.1. I was getting no results, others will see only new posts in the result set (I presume). Fortuantely the fix is pretty easy. I posted to the CS forum here and got an impressively quick (25 mins) reply from one of the CS Team taking me to this post, which has the solution.

Upgrading community server to 2.1

Well, I upgraded my community server to 2.1 (.NET 2) today. All went smoothly except that the SQL upgrade script wouldn’t run. I found that I was missing the schema patch #52. Quick search on the forum revealed a link to patch #52, which I ran. After that no problems.

Two changes were needed in the web.config file:

1. The connectionString to the database: just pull the value parameter from the >appSettings> section and paste that into the connectionString in 2 places.
2. Changed authentication to Windows. I don’t seem to have to install the extra dlls that I was given when I purchased this module.

Changing WordPress URL

I’ve had to set up a blog and used the WordPress engine. I set up a trial site and then had to change the URL for going live. To do this you have to update two fields in the xxxpw_options table. Open MySQL Query Browser and run this command.

UPDATE xxxpw_options SET option_value = ‘http://<newurl>&#8217; WHERE option_value=’http://<oldurl>&#8217;;

Virtual Vega, Synthesised photos

Two things caught my attention today that seem to offer an interesting contrast. First was Susanne Vega singing in the virtual world, Second Life (link New World Notes blog) and Microsofts Live Lab demo of PhotoSynth, which is just stunning. I’ve had only a few jaw dropping moments in IT, and imagining the potential of PhotoSynth as I watched the demo is one of them.