Change is generally described as being inevitable and in today’s IT world, this is seemingly true. Some of you may know that I am currently working for Government, with working for the Government there will always be some bureaucracy. Recently I was recommended and appointed as our ‘agency’ liaison and main contact for implementation of some governmental information technology security policies. Part of this work allocation involves my researching and understanding the policy implications among IT services along with knowing exactly how these implementations will affect the end-user within the organization. One of the recent changes that went live recently was a change to the agencies intranet home page, the change described in policy was simply implementing a change so that employees home pages were set via policy to the intranet page. (Within Governmental organizations there are varying levels of IT; my group is not responsible for the main intranet site.) When the policy went into place not only was the home pages changed but also an entire redesign to the intranet home page. The design change alone has sparked some interesting reactions from the employees.

The policy that everyone was informed about was that our home pages would be changed to the intranet. Prior to the implementation of the change to the intranet as well as the push of a new design, there was no discussion regarding a change in ‘look and feel’ of the intranet. Once these changes got put into place, as the IT Manager for the agency, I get to hear the complaints and dislikes of the implementation of the new intranet page. This brings to mind some thinking on change management implementation which I think are important.

Information Technology may help make the business world go round, but the business world does not revolve around Information Technology.

Change Management is a process of establishing and implementing change to stakeholders. Generally speaking change is implemented in a manner which involves the stakeholders, bringing communication to the table and looking at change from a different perspective than our own. One of the things that I believe that we, in Information Technology, should do is approach projects and solutions from the eyes of the stakeholders, put your foot in the users’ shoes and in turn, become a user yourself. The more you know about the users’ perspective, the more you can see problems and potential solutions from their point of view. One of the biggest problems I see in IT solutions and projects is that many times the developer(s) don’t see the problems from the users’ views and in result provide a solution that doesn’t solve the problems at hand.

Happy Change Management!

Today I want to post a quick piece on product development and inventions. In the Information Technology sector there are a lot of ideas about products and software that people just are dying to get out fully developed and into the market place. One of the things that I have noticed is that sometimes developers dive right into a project and overlook the stages of bringing a product invention to life.

A friend of mine is blogging about product invention, development and the process in it's entirety of how one would go about from idea to invention. I have found the blog an interesting read and would recommend anyone that is interested in learning more about product development (idea invention) to take a look at Tim Ruffner's blog postings on "Bring Your Invention or Idea to LIFE". Be sure to post and let Tim know what you think of his efforts.

~Happy Research and Development!

After some intermittend PC problems, BSOD and various annoyances that caused me to repair/optimize and replace certain pieces of my main development box over the past few weeks, I started getting this error message in Microsoft Visual Studio whenever I was trying to open/create or work with a project file... I could not start a new project nor load one up - making my development (local) environment almost completely useless. Here is the error message that I got and the steps that I took to resolve this error:

Could not load file or assembly 'sorttbls.nlp' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

This problem completely disabled Visual Studio, Microsoft Word, Excel and other Microsoft applications.

Step 1: Try add/remove programs to unload my .NET Framework packs. This was unsuccessful as the PC was throwing error message

Step 2: After some unsuccessful tries to reinstall .NET Framework packs, I ran across Aaron Stebner's Weblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2004/04/16/408856.aspx on this page I found The .NET Framework cleanup tool. You can download it here: http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/dotnetfx_cleanup_tool.zip

Step 3: Install the .NET Cleanup Tool and run it.

Step 4: Download a new Framework installation file: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4...

Step 5: Install and run the new 2.0 Framework

...

This solved my problems with my Microsoft applications - Word, Excel, Outlook and Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2008 appear to be working without issues now.

~Happy PC Fixing!

I got a crazy email today which was accidentally sent to me from a friend of mine about 15 years ago who thanks to "social networking sites" I can now stay "friends" with them forever... *sigh*

Sometimes I'm not sure which is easier, cryptography or trying to decode email messages.

Wot Wot Wot?!???1 U dnt N-dstnd R msg sstm? o.O

*sigh*

Working in IT I tend to keep a list of ‘TODOs’ so that I can keep track of my current and upcoming workload as well as things that I would like to do and ideas that I have… I know that in reality I tend to simply keep a list of things that I am working on and have to work on so that when asked what all I’m working on, I have a definitive list that I can refer to that keeps track of things that I have to do as well as things that I am in process of doing… This helps me keep track of things so that I make sure to follow up or go back and complete work that otherwise might get lost in the mix. Emails that come in with work requests…etc., get marked into my TODO list so that not only do I have an email but I also have my TODO repository… Ideally a bug-tracker application of sorts is best, but Excel works well also.

I used to mark everything that was deemed important as a high priority and then most everything else medium or no priority (for ideas and customer suggestions…etc.). I read an article a while back about prioritizing and how if you choose to make everything a high priority then in reality, nothing is a priority… Think about that for a moment. If everything that you have on your TODO list is a high priority, how can you tell by glancing what is your highest priority? Of course all of that work is important, right and it all needs to be done, but how can you better prioritize your work so that at a glance you can tell what is your highest priority versus the things that you should be working on second, third…etc.?

This may be easiest if you have the ability to prioritize your own priorities, but not everyone has the ability to do so and thus is thrust into “this is a high priority” coming from management. From my experience working in Government, a lot of tasks can come onto your desk with the notion that this is a high priority… On top of that, stack multiple-managers in charge of tasks and you end up with staff trying to figure out whose request is a higher priority than another’s… Sometimes when a request is coming from management the easiest thing to do is to give the manager an idea of your TODO list and ask them where in that list their request goes… Of course everyone at times has the mindset that their request is their highest priority… Thus some organizations partake in management meetings in order to prioritize the TODO workloads of the IT staff…

Most important, over ‘how’ you manage your priorities, whether it is self prioritizing, supervisor prioritization or even multi-manager meeting one of the most important things to keep in mind is that not only do you need to prioritize your TODOs into importance, but you need to know what items (that share a priority level e.g. high, medium, low) are more or less important than each other.

~Happy Prioritization!

December 11, 2008 the W3C announced that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 has been finalized. The WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards was made in order to try to better meet the needs of users and the developers of websites. W3C touts that the WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards have better testing standards and will be easier to use and understand.

You can read the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

The first place that you might think that the From email would be is the inboxItem, that's the first place I looked. You'll quickly find that the From Email is not in there. Here is how you access the From email address in EWS:

// C#
string strEmail;
SingleRecipientType getFromEmailAddress = ((ExchangeWebServices.MessageType)(getItemResponseMessage.Items.Items[0])).From;
strEmail = getFromEmailAddress.Item.EmailAddress;

Happy Coding!

Anyone that knows me is well aware that I have been a proponent in Alaska pushing for accessible web application design and programming. I am planning on continuing my work towards accessible design and development as well as finalizing up some publications that I was working on before for accessiblility training.

Check back here for updates on my accessibility publications!

I have been scraping by the skin of my teeth getting in as much schoolwork as humanly possible in order to finish college classes here in the next few days. I have officially gotten the last assignments turned in and will be spending the next three days preparing and completing final exams and presentations. Once I graduate I plan on having a two-day SPORE-A-THON with my mother where we play SPORE most all evening and talk on the phone about the planets that we are conquering. Saturday I plan on utilizing my spare time to clean and exercise… After graduation my next personal goal is to get outside and exercise more!

I have a few computer projects I want to complete as well… I think that I will focus on just one thing at a time for now.

~Happy surfing!