How to Use Microsoft Project: Fixed Cost

One of my colleagues ran into a major Project usability problem when he started filling in the cost column manually.  He actually did it by right clicking on a cell in the cost column and selecting “fill down” which he thought might like in excel just copy the formula.  In Project, this copies values and overrides the calculations normally done, e.g. cost = rate * number of hours.

Here is what Project assumes when you type in a cost into the Cost Column:

1. Normally, the cost column is calculated based on the rate (in this example $100 / hr) * the number of hours.

2. If I type in a number into the cost column, I can replace the calculated cost with a new cost – in this case, I have specified it to be $1200.

3. Project takes the cost I typed in and calculates the DIFFERENCE between takes the original calculated cost and what I typed in as a FIXED cost, e.g. in this case $400.  If you insert the Fixed Cost Column, you will see this value.

4. If you do not understand what Project has done, it becomes really confusing as to how to get rid of the fixed cost.  Simply changing the duration or hours doesn’t remove the cost.  For example, if I change the duration to 2 days it doesn’t recalculate the cost to be $1600 – it keeps the $400 in fixed cost and makes the total cost $2000.

5. If you have added a fixed cost my mistake, the simple way to fix the problem is to set the fix cost to $0.00 manually.  This resets to the default behaviour and now your cost is calculated normally.  See below – now that I have changed the fixed cost to $0 I can easily change the duration and the cost is calculated correctly.

  

I have been using Microsoft Project for ages and didn’t know this behaviour existed.   I found this problem because one of my colleagues was not an experience Project user and started filling in values like in Excel.  However, this is nothing in Project that warns you or points you to the solution – it took me digging through help and google to figure it out.

If you are new to Project, keep this simple lesson learned in mind – do not manually change the cost column.  Let Project always calculate it for you.  If you have a specific fixed cost for a task, then insert the Fixed Cost column and type it in there.  This will avoid a lot of confusion.

Yet Another Facebook Bug

I have posted previously on bugs in Facebook, and I ran into another one just this morning.

Facebook has a friend suggestion feature that lists people who you might know based on how close they are to your existing friends.  It’s a great way to find people but I found a bug in it.  It presents you a list of potential friends and for each one there is a little X that you can click to take the person off the list (e.g. it was a bad suggestion and you don’t know them).  Here is the bug: if Facebook runs out of further suggestion, only the text disappears and the picture stays behind. 

If you go back to the home and come back in, the whole lists resets and the problem goes away.

SharePoint vs. Confluence Comparison

I was at a client site this week and they currently have Confluence and are moving to SharePoint 2007 and wanted to understand the differences between the two products.  I have personally implemented both products in different environments and like both of them.  Each as its strengths and weaknesses.

Here is a side by side comparison:

	Confluence	SharePoint 2007
Company	Made by Atlassian in Australia.   In my experience, Atlassian has wicked customer service, a great support network, etc.	Made by Microsoft.  SharePoint is one of Microsoft’s most successful products and Microsoft has made a major commitment to the product.  Support in my experience is standard product support but doesn’t have the tender love and care you get from Atlassian staff.
Consulting Support	Limited, but in some markets quite good.  Look for open-source experts as Atlassian has strong ties to the open source community.  The software itself is Java based.	Huge consulting market from small shops to major consulting companies such as Accenture.  One of the major pluses of the platform is the talent pool to help implement and configure it.
Price	Free if you are a non-profit company and you ask them nicely.  Server license is available ranging from $800-12000 depending on number of users.	Pricing starts at about $5000 but for intranet cost is per named user at about $75-94 a user.  200 users would cost about $20,000 vs. about $4,000 for confluence.
Search	Good with confluence content and Microsoft documents.  No federated search model included.  Did you mean feature allows for synonym searches.	Enterprise level search engine with relevance ranking, synonyms, large scale searches (up to 500,000 documents easily and up to 50 million in theory), and federation model.  Out of the box search can index other web sites, file servers, etc. and plugins through third party products can index other systems such as OpenText, Oracle, SAP, etc.
Look and feel customization	If you’re changing the logo or basic colours you’re fine.  If you want to create a whole new interface, you will find it a challenge.  Confluence uses SiteMesh templates which are a set of XML/HTML files that need to be customized directly.   In my direct experience (and I have done lots of HTML editing), wading through the library of templates is not a trivial undertaking.	SharePoint supports customization at multiple levels through separation of layout, look and feel, and master pages.  SharePoint Designer is provided as a GUI based tool for creating new themes as well.  Template system is significantly simpler than Confluence in my experience to customize.
WIKI	Stronger than SharePoint in supporting WIKI mark-up.  Rich text editor is not bad but not as strong as SharePoint.	WIKI template provided as a site template.  WIKI mark-up is limited to embedding links in text, but rich text editor make WIKI mark-up less needed in most cases.
Security	LDAP based.  Authorization model is 100% stored in Confluence, so groups need to managed within the product.  Single Sign On is not provided.	SharePoint is Active Directory based by default.    Single Sign On is provided with Windows using Internet Explorer – users already logged into Windows are automatically logged into SharePoint.  Groups in SharePoint can map to Active Directory groups which makes management somewhat easier than Confluence.
Web Parts	Confluence supports a plugin model and there are some available.  Product availability is small in comparison to the third party web part market for SharePoint.	Long list of web parts are supplied out of the box for SharePoint.  Massive third party market for Web Parts including integration with major vendors such Oracle, SAP, OpenText, etc.  Web Parts can be easily built in .NET if custom parts are required.
Document Management	Version control, linking and embeddable.  However, there is no check-in/out, content types, workflow, etc.	Much stronger in SharePoint including features such as check-in/out, content types, meta-data, integration with Office 2007, workflow, authorization models, etc. that are typical of an enterprise document management system.
Integration with Office	No support.	Very strong integration as long as you’re on Office 2007.
Other Features	Blogs, discussion forums, etc. are provided.	Too many features to name, but SharePoint is an enterprise portal with dozens of additional features including: reporting integration, dashboards, dozens of web parts, workflow, forms server,  etc.  See this link for a complete list of features.

Comparing the two products is a bit of an apples to orange comparison because the markets for each are quite different.  Confluence is primarily a collaboration tool for small to medium size enterprises.  SharePoint is an enterprise portal that includes collaboration but also dozens of other portal features.  

In my direct experience, SharePoint is more user friendly for end-users – creating pages, changing content, managing documents seems to be more intuitive than in Confluence.  If you’re a power WIKI user then its less of an issue but I handed it to an HR department and found they struggled with it.  SharePoint requires a lot of pre-configuration to get it right but if its set up right I find the adoption tends to be easier.

If you really want a strong WIKI collaboration tool and don’t have much money then Confluence is a very good product.  The support you will get from Atlassian is awesome and they are constantly improving it.  However, if you’re looking at enterprise collaboration, document management, search, etc. then in my experience you may be looking at an upgrade to SharePoint in the long run as your user base becomes more sophisticated.

White House Data Feeds are Baby Steps

The White House announced to great fan fare that it would be releasing data feeds of its public information collected by hundreds of agencies within the US government.  They have launched the first iteration of this service.

My interest in this feed is to use this data to build mash-ups, visualization applications, and web applications that use this data.  There are many such applications that use existing data feeds such as Amazon data, Google Maps data, Microsoft Live data, etc. in interesting ways.   Amazon in particular has had an XML based REST API available for years (in fact Amazon sells a book on how to use it)  For example, Frucall provides a mobile comparison application that uses a variety of publically available APIs to compare products across retailers and present them to your mobile device. 

So with hundreds of data feeds, imagine the visualization, comparison, calculation and searching applications that could be built on US government data.  As well, imagine then directing these applications to mobile devices, XBOX 360, IPhones, Blackberries, etc.  in formats that work ideally for those platforms.

Unfortunately, based on what has been launched, this vision is not really feasible.  Here is what I can see from what is currently available:

• There are only about 50 data feeds.  Given the number of US agencies, this is a very small sample of the data available.
• The site provides data in a variety of formats such as XML, CSV, KML (google earth) and ESRI (GIS data).  The feed that would be useful for apps is the XML feed, as explained by their own site (“Better suited for consumption by automated applications capable of handling raw XML files”).  There are only 8 feeds in XML format available.
• The data is not a feed, they are files in most cases. If you click on the links, you get either a zip file containing some XML data or a site with some links to XML files.
• In some cases, the XML files are RSS feeds.  While this might be great if you want content, the “data” is really just unstructured content.
• There are no APIs, no REST and each feed has a completely different format.  There is zero consistency even for things like unique identifiers, delivery format, or XML structure.  There are also generally no available XML schemas – you just get raw XML.
• Its not clear how data is published in a timely fashion.  In most cases, you get a directory of files but there is no information on how often they are published.

So while its great to see the information being public, the US government has a long way to go before they have a useful API that could be used for application development purposes.  Given that Googgle. Expedia, Amazon, etc. have had these APIs for many years, its a lot of fanfare and not a lot delivered for this service debut – dumping a bunch of files onto a directory was a victory in 1999, not in 2009.

Billboard Gone Bad

I was downtown the other day and snapped this with my cell phone camera.  Apparently, this bill board needs Windows Activation!

SharePoint is not a Database!

As users of SharePoint start using lists they start taking advantage of a very intuitive and highly configurable information management tool.  Users who have been using Excel or Access in the past start seeing SharePoint as a kind of rapid application development platform for building structured data applications.  However, this is where SharePoint’s list architecture breaks down because simply:

SharePoint is not a database!

Part of the problem is that business users designing lists are not familiar with basic database concepts - they just want to store their information.  Part of the problem is false advertising by consultants and/or Microsoft that SharePoint is a miracle platform that can do anything - it does some things well but replacing your SQL server or even Access database isn't one of them.  The other problem is there is no really good way for surfacing bi-directionally data from a database into SharePoint – the business data catalogue works only in read only mode and does not allow for updates back to the underlying data store.

Here are a list of some features that a database has that SharePoint does not support - the moment you need these features you will need a real database.

• Primary And foreign keys: one of the most basic concepts in a database is the enforcement of a unique identifier (either system generated or user supplied) that can identify a record and link across table in parent child relationships.
• Transactions: if two changes are required to go together and the second change fails you want the first change to be undone (rolled back).
• SQL language: complex queries can me written in code using a standard language.  Queries can be saved and repurposed.
• Stored procedures: database programmers can write complex routines that can be called as reusable code blocks. 
• Indexing and query optimization: used to improve performance, indexing allows the database designer to pre-index specific fields that are frequently used in queries to improve performance.  In addition, most databases have optimization engines that based on what you are trying to fetch will optimize how the data is retrieved.
• Large data and binary fields: most modern databases allow you to store large binary files such as video files, large volumes of text, images, etc. in the database.  SharePoint can be made to store large files as documents but you only get one per record and a generic binary object. 
• Access outside of SharePoint: lists are accessible outside of SharePoint but only through XML or programming interfaces.  Lists are not great data stores to be used for line of business applications written independently of SharePoint because the integration is relatively poor in comparison to running a SQL query on a database.
• Cascading deletes: if a parent record is deleted, its children should also be deleted.  In most databases, this can be configured to happen automatically or else reject the delete of the parent until the children are deleted first.  This eliminates the risk of orphan child records.

These features are considered basic in databases – they have been around for decades and even the most primitive databases such as Access or FileMaker Pro have most of these features. 

Lists are great for flat, changing content especially when attached to unstructured documents.  At least in the current version, lists are not substitutes for databases and shouldn’t be considered so.  If you need a database, then you are better off building a proper database and using SharePoint as a front-end for surfacing that data through reports, dashboards, etc. or as a host for data entry components such as InfoPath forms or custom build web parts.      

Hotspot Shield and Hulu No Longer Work Together

Sites like Pandora and Hulu block IP addresses not originating from the United States.  The solution for the past 6 months or so has been to use Hotspot Shield which proxies your IP address behind an US address.

As of today, this no longer works.  When you load up a video, you get the following:

Pandora still works thankfully…

NOTE: There seems to be a solution to this problem – thanks to the comment below!  If you clean out your browser cache and then reconnect to hotspot shield it seems to work.  I suspect this is a temporary solution until Hulu starts blocking this new batch of servers.

When is the old world media going to get that the Internet is global and find a solution for all this rights territory nonsense?