idubbs.com

So, I bought my current main monitor – a Samsung 204B three years ago – just over 3 years ago.  I’m sure you’ve already guessed that the manufacturer’s warranty period for the particular item is yes – 3 yrs.  For a little while, starting before the 3 yr mark, it started acting a little flaky – nothing too outrageous, but little “I wonder what’s up with that” kinds of things that I was able to get past with a power off/on, etc…  Literally a week after the 3 yr warrantee expires, it has a much more significant issue, that takes a number of unplug/plug-in cycles before it finally starts working again.  At this point I’m thinking – great timing – I’m probably out of luck because of the warranty and purchase date.  I at least want to check with Samsung and see what my repair, replace, whatever options are, so I send them an e-mail looking for assistance rather than sitting in support call hell. 

So, in addition to a little background information in my message to Samsung, I ask:  What options do I have for repair, replacement, credit… anything”.  The response I get back, in addition to the normal canned response is:  “We are sorry to inform you that Samsung does not provide free service for the warranty expired products”

No s… kidding Sherlock.  Now answer my question and tell me WHAT MY OPTIONS ARE.  I resubmit my question – still haven’t received an answer.  *sigh* 

What’s next… I’ve got two reasons to swing by Best Buy.  One, to see what’s new with monitors since I’m likely going to need another one anyhow between this one and getting rid of the rest of the CRTs in the house.  Two – since I’m heading over I might as well see what, if anything they can do about my busted one – which I originally purchased there. 

So we swing into Best Buy and are looking at monitors.  One of the folks working there stops by before too long and I explain my current situation.  She informs me that they have a 30 day grace period on warranties and that I should bring it in before that expires – which is the next day.  Sweet.  I’m thinking I’m not totally out of luck. 

The next morning I pack the monitor up, grab the receipt and head to Best Buy.  I head to Customer Service and explain my situation again.  The low-level CS guy enters my receipt and information and tells me the warranty period has expired.  I explain that I am aware of this, but that another person at the store informed me of a grace period under which I have some options – which I’m trying to figure out.  Let me check with the manager.  Super.  Nope sorry – but I can call and check with Samsung for you.  Ok – let’s do that… I’ll talk to your manager after we’re done with Samsung.  He calls the retailer super-special number and they’re closed.  So he calls the consumer number and hands me the phone.  Gee, thanks.  I could do this at home while sitting down without having to pack up my monitor…  After talking to the wrong person, they transfer me to the correct department with plenty of hold time in between.  He takes my information and explains that my warranty has expired.  *sigh*  So, Mr. Helpful, WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS.  Well, you could check the web site for authorized repair services.  Fine, I’ll do that once I get home and have my monitor back up and running – I can’t check that from the desk at Best Buy.  Thanks for nothing.  OK Best Buy level 1 CS guy, since I’m here already let me talk to the manager just to make sure your story is correct and the person last night is wrong.  I talk to the manager and she informs me that yes indeed, they can’t do anything.  Lovely. 

So – with the help of the folks at Samsung and Best Buy I’ve gone from generally bummed that my monitor is busted and bummed at the timing of my monitor failing to:

1. Wasting my time with trips to Best Buy, packing up my monitor (that at the time was in its ‘functioning mood’), sitting on the phone with Samsung AT Best Buy, re-setting up the monitor and smacking it around until it started working again – and now this silly blog post. 
2. Irritated at Samsung – who, honestly I have plenty of their products that I like – but the shoddy way this was handled was just crappy from a customer service quality perspective.
3. Irritated at Best Buy for telling me (apparently erroneously) that I would be able to bring my monitor in and have something done with it.

Now, you don’t get the last few minutes you spent reading this back, but I feel better having written it. 

Have a wonderful day everyone.  In other news on this day in history, a good friend of mine had a baby (late yesterday actually) and the East coast is getting slammed with 30” or so of snow.  So much more important things going on than my dealings with aging computer hardware and poor customer service. 

Oh hey – I just checked where the nearest service location is for my monitor… it’s in NEW JERSEY.  I’ll wait until they dig out of the blizzard to give them a call. 

2010 was welcomed in with a SharePoint Server Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award renewal message from Microsoft for the new year.  What a wonderful honor and great way to start the new year – this is my second year being awarded.  Thanks to everyone who helped make this happen. 

To be included with the SharePoint MVP community is really cool – everyone I’ve met has been incredibly gracious – eager to help and to share.  As with the greater SharePoint community, they are a community themselves – a lot more cohesive than some of the other MVP product groupings out there.  They are amazing technical resources and provide so much energy to the community at large, making the products we support and the people we work with so much better and more fun to work with.

2009 was an interesting year for the MVP community.  Maybe this happens every year and I wasn’t aware of it, but being a part of the MVP community this past year has made me more aware of it.  There were changes driven by the economy as well as conversation and criticism regarding who is awarded and how awardees are chosen – amongst other topics.  There are still plenty of things I’m not privy to, but I do know that regardless of who receives the MVP awards, there are a lot of people in the SharePoint community and other technical communities that are amazing contributors out there – people that love to learn and to share – people that will continue to advance our communities through their efforts – people that should be recognized and thanked.  Kudos go out to them as well.

A huge thanks goes out to the SharePoint community that I’ve been blessed to be a part of.  I hope we can continue to learn, share and grow in the coming year.  See you at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG), other SharePoint user groups, SharePoint Saturdays, SharePoint Camps, conferences and other events online and in person. 

God Bless.

Well we had a little hiccup with this months meeting – between some double-booking of the room and enough snow to seriously impact travel efforts on Wednesday – but we still worked through it.  We didn’t have our usual on-site meeting, but all of our experience with Live Meetings this year and the ongoing support of Microsoft (Thank you Nick Stillings!) we did pull of a pretty successful online-ONLY meeting.  We peaked out a little over 100 folks visiting. 

Thank you everyone for your participation!

This month’s meeting was about SharePoint 2010 and Enterprise Content Management.  This broke down to the major areas of document management, records management and web content management.   

The slide deck is available now – the meeting recording will be available soon.  (I’ll update this post once it’s available)

One of the things I’m doing to dig into the SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 bits is build a Windows Server 2008 R2 build and installing everything on it.  Over the course of this build, I’ve come across a few things that others might find useful.

First of all, I’m doing this on my laptop (another server soon too, but for now, the laptop).  I’ve currently got a Dell Latitude D820 with 4 GB of RAM – though not all the RAM is fully used due to hardware constraints.  In order to keep my normal work environment available, I’m using a second hard drive in the CD (modular) drive bay using a hard drive caddy. 

So #1 that I ran into today was trying to use PowerPoint 2010 to work on a slide deck.  For the life of me I couldn’t get the file to open.  I don’t know if this is only a Server 2008 R2 feature, but the file was blocked – I couldn’t open it in PowerPoint.  PowerPoint just sat there and spun until I cancelled it.  If you right-click on the file name (once it’s saved locally) and select Properties, you’ll see a Security blurb at the bottom of the General tab.  By clicking the Unblock button, you’ll be able to open the file as you normally would. 

Oh, I suppose this is #1.5.  Not sure what the deal here is, but when I save something from a SharePoint site down to my local machine, it’s changing the file name by filling in the blanks with underscores.  I’ll take a peek at this one later – it’s not stopping me from getting my work done. 

#2 Was trying to Run OneNote to take notes, etc while running through things.  Ran into “OneNote cannot start because the Desktop Experience feature is not installed.  Install it in the Windows Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off.”  That pretty much says what you need to figure it out. 

So open the Control Panel.  Under Programs there is a ‘Turn Windows features on or off’.  This opens the Server Manager.  Scroll down to the Features area and select Add Features.  Select Desktop Experience.  This will require you to also install Ink and Handwriting – go for it.  Run through the install wizard for these and you should be good to go.  This does require a reboot. 

Note: Using the extra drive caddy, or at least different drive partitions for the separate OSs allows me to have a OneNote file that I can open up and use on either machine/OS.  I can take my notes and capture screen shots in OneNote while working in Server 2008 and then access those notes just as easily on my Windows 7 machine.

We had our first 2010 SharePoint Overview presentation today as part of the series of presentations we do at New Horizons Minnesota.  This is still early information, so keep in mind that the content in this deck will continue to evolve as we get closer to RTM and we keep refining the content and presentation.  I’ve posted the slide deck on the Minnesota SharePoint User Group site (MNSPUG) – HERE. 

Oh, and it sounds like ‘New Horizons’ is reverting back to ‘Benchmark Learning’ soon…  so links, etc will likely be changing. 

Lori Neff (@lorineff) will be doing a free webinar this Wednesday (12/2) on Design Considerations for a Public-facing SharePoint Site.  Subject matter is mainly SharePoint 2007, but will also touch on 2010 here and there.  This is going to be one of those ‘drinking from a firehose’ sessions with tons of information in a short amount of time, so prepare yourself now. 

Get more information at BrandingSharePoint.com

Then, nag Lori on Twitter and the Branding SharePoint site. 

Lots of big stuff going on right now – most of which you’ve probably heard of, but just in case ->

The SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is now available – Keep checking back to the SharePoint Team Blog and forums (see below) for ongoing announcements and updates:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/11/18/sharepoint-2010-public-beta-is-now-available-for-download.aspx

Update Center was launched:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ee748587.aspx
SharePoint Team Blog post about the Update Center:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/11/19/update-center-is-now-live.aspx

Links for the last MNSPUG are now online:
http://www.sharepointmn.com/Pages/Presentations.aspx

You can now purchase access to the SharePoint Conference 2009 (SPC09) sessions and materials (PPT, recordings, labs):
https://spc2009.dynamiceventsreg.com/

The SharePoint 2010 Blogs have expanded:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/sharepoint2010,sharepoint/

Slides from the Social Networking session today at New Horizons are available on the MNSPUG site in the Resources section. 

Or, you can just click HERE. 

November’s Minnesota SharePoint User Group meeting on Wednesday, November 11 will be a special, ALL DAY session!  This super-sized user group will be chock full of information on SharePoint 2010 as well as highlights from the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. 

The first part of the day will be an overview of SharePoint 2010: A Walk Around the Wheel.  Stick around for lunch, and listen in on "Preparing for 2010: The Top Things to Do Now."

In the afternoon, we will be offering four different breakout sessions, each taking a deeper look into various aspects of SharePoint 2010. We’ll have 2 different "tracks," a Business Track and a Technical Track.  We will split the room in half and these breakout sessions will be going on simultaneously.

On top of this day full of new content, we’re going to have our first MNSPUG-associated "SharePint"!  Yes, after Raymond and I heard about all the other SPUGs out there and how critical the socializing/drinking component of their user groups are – we thought you’d want that opportunity too.  We’ve been missing out with our morning meetings.  So, this month we’ll be over at Major’s in Bloomington and will reserve some space, please come to socialize over a pint and hear more stories from Las Vegas!

We hope you can join us for at least part of if not the whole day! There will be lots of new information and demos, as well as time for Q&As. 

For more details on sessions, schedule and registration, see the MNSPUG site. 

Just a quick re-post from the SharePoint Team: Check out the SharePoint Team Blog post for the latest cumulative update information: 

• Downloads for both WSS and MOSS
• Patch details (links may not be live yet)
• Installation instructions
• New version number after patch = 12.0.6520.5000

Have fun!