Ben Walters InfoPath MVP

Got the notification this morning that IE8 has officially gone RC1, if you’re running the Partner preview this will not automatically update so you’ll need to head on over to the Internet Explorer Beta Website to download the latest copy.

Yesterday I received an email from an old colleague of mine Adrian Downes, letting me know that there is a new User group starting up in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide dedicated to all things PerformancePoint, while a launch date for the Australian PerformancePoint Special Interest Group (APSIG) is still on the way you can check out more details on the group and who’s involved here

Recently I upgraded my work laptop to Windows 7, so far I’m enjoying the new OS from Microsoft and while there are obviously a lot of upgrades under the cover I though I would highlight my personal top 3 features in no particular order

1. New Start Menu

   Probably one of the main features that will cause some commotion amongst users who are upgrading, personally I love it I’ve already noticed an increase in my productivity simply from this small design change. Rather than having to filter through all my open windows I can now find the window I want by hovering over the items on the start menu

2. Slideshow desktop

   Ok so this is purely a cosmetic feature but as a new father this is something I can see winning a lot of hearts with new users, basically Windows now allows you to select multiple images for your desktop and on a predetermined time changes your background picture.

3. Native VHD Support

   This is a feature that will have developers and presenters cheering along, while attaching a VHD doesn’t offer a huge gain as far as features go, it’s the ability to boot from a VHD that has me really excited. The prospect of being able to boot into a number of different Demo/development machines as needed makes this a killer feature

   

Recently I’ve been working on improving some internal processes at Stargate, one of these processes related to submitting travel requests.

I ran into issues however, when I started building the workflow in SharePoint designer. My workflow was pretty simple but did require that an email be sent to a distribution group setup in Exchange.

My problem was that even though the workflow showed that it had completed successfully no email had been sent. Naturally I made the obvious test to see if the distribution group existed and a quick email from Outlook confirmed this. I also double checked both the SMTP settings in SharePoint and also tested my workflow with my own email address entered, all this turned up positive.

Finally after some troubleshooting with the Infrastructure Team I found that the distribution groups had been setup for use with only Authenticated users, so after clearing the “Require Authenticated user” check box everything worked like a charm.

Now I’m sure there is a way to have the workflow run as an authenticated but as yet I’ve not tracked it down, and for the purposes of this solution it didn’t cause any issues. If I do manage to track down another work around to this I’ll update this post.