Hot off the presses – MSFT colleague Bill Baer has just published a white paper outlining everything you wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about maintaining your MOSS database.

The target audience for this doc are MOSS admins, DBAs, integrators and developers.

Download it here or pull down a PDF here.

Enjoy!

Some colleagues who are working on a contract overseas shared some very interesting observations on how their client conducts developer interviews using pairing.  This is a really creative and innovative approach that I think can yield better candidates than the traditional whiteboarding interview:

They follow an "explicit pairing" development style where one of their interviewers actually designs a solution with the candidate (collaborates instead of interviews) and the second interviewer collaborates with the candidate to code up the design they came up with. The coding is actual coding which they do on laptops and they switch between writing test cases and the actual solution half way through the exercise -- i.e. one picks up the others code and tries to finish the exercise.

There are few things we can learn from their style (it flushes out design and development ability more explicitly than whiteboarding and also surfaces ability to collaborate when things get down and dirty and nothing clears the mind better than having to dig through someone elses code).

This approach blows my mind – it takes the staid, boring and dry interview process and makes it (for the right candidates) a fun and engaging activity that not only helps better surface skills and potential, but also offers insights into how an agile team works.

How do you conduct interviews?  What do you like or dislike about the process?  Would this type of real-time pairing and problem solving help your team find better candidates?

With MOSS’ increasing uptake in enterprise datacentres, there are commensurate questions from clients who have investments in Lotus Notes installs how to manage migrations or coexistence between the platforms. 

Here’s a collection of links that were recently circulated by a colleague to help answer these questions.

·        Configure MOSS 2007 to crawl Lotus Notes 

·        Configuring the Lotus Notes Protocol Handler  

·        Information about installing the Lotus Notes Protocol Handler for SharePoint Portal Server 2003   

·        Secure crawls of Lotus Notes with SharePoint 

·        Search and Index Lotus Notes    

·        Displaying Correct Titles of Lotus Notes Documents in SharePoint Search Results  

·        Use MOSS 2007 to index a Lotus Notes Database   

·        How to Configure Search to honor Lotus Notes Security Settings  

·        MOSS Search resources

My blogging has decreased dramatically - I know!  I've a lot to catch up on, but I thought this would be a good tidbit to share with respect to my earlier post about not being able to browse my local IIS on my Vista laptop.

Well, after much digging, I discovered that the issue is related to my IPSec policies - somewhere, there's a conflict in the rules that the corp net pushes down to my machine when I connect to the network.

I "fixed" my problem by stopping the IPSec service.  Horrors!  Yes, I know.  Violating a bazillion policies, but dammit!  I want control of my machine!  It even held me up from launching my Virtual Server console.

I began to believe it wasn't a firewall issues and more in the IPSec direction after reviewing a few articles online and discovering that I could not ping the loopback adapter (127.0.0.1), but could ping external sites.

Lesson learned - word to the wise.  Now, it's a whole other matter on how I'm going to get the IPSec policies rationalized...

Non-tech item of the day:  My wife Jennifer delivered our first child, a boy, today at 17:32h EST - I'm on the road in Edmonton - won't be getting in to Toronto until near bloody midnight.

Why don't they fly some old Concords out of Edmonton?  Or can I hitch a ride in a CF-18?