3 Free Utilities a SharePoint geek should know about
February 1st, 2009
While I really need to do a full write up of all the cool stuff I’ve been doing recently integrating various jQuery tricks into SharePoint, my only real motivation for doing so would be to max out my Google page ranking as I still feel my write up last month covered everything any flexible web developer would need to know. Instead, I wanted to rave about three pieces of software that you should really check out.
1. Wink by Satish Kumar. S. is a superb piece of free software I’ve been aware of for a few years now, since it received some award or another. It allows you to record a desktop session, or a window or a rectangle of the screen or…whatever and output the playback as embedded flash on a web page, or a movie. Further more you can edit the play back to include word bubbles with messages in or arrows or button controls. You can even record sound. This week I’m producing SharePoint user training material, and Wink has allowed me to produce a number of short flash tutorials I can embed onto pages in SharePoint itself.
2. If fancy flash demo training examples don’t float your boat then Cam Studio (By various authors) is a lovely bit of free software worth a look. It allows you to record full video screen casts with sound and, if you like, embed your webcam output at the side of the screen.
3. Finally, how do you work with SharePoint at home? Myself, I don’t like to have development servers running all the time. Instead I like to virtualise. While hosting Windows 2003 on Vista ultimate was acceptable (On my quad core desktop) I’ve now discovered the joy of running Sun’s Virtual Box using Linux as a host (If you’re afraid of Linux scardy-pants you can try out the Windows version as an alternative to Virtual Machine or VMWare). While Vista struggled to run a SharePoint server, Ubuntu (My current Linux distro of choice) is running a Windows 2003 server and a Windows XP client machine just fine, with only the occasional slowness when both machines were updating service packs, but for the most part it’s as though they aren’t there (Vista would slow down and complain bitterly by grinding the hard drive when I tried to do anything with my virtual server). The most impressive thing is flicking between full screen mode, which when you have the ‘guest additions’ (Sun’s version of VM add ons) software installed on the target machine is a wondrous experience of effortlessness.
This has finally made Linux a very useable workspace for me as with most professional software people I’m normally stuck in a very Microsoft world day to day.
Look familiar?
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
May 10th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Way! Thanks for Utilities. I shall necessarily try