Video: Citizen Service Platform in Porto

You can read the Case Study here.

Hi everyone!

Last week both me and Daniel Pereira went to Porto for the LRG Forum where the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform was launched.

On this event we did two presentations, one showing the Executive Portal for Porto Council and another demoing our contribution for the CSP, using a lite version of our solution.

The Porto Council Executive Portal is based on our solution for Council Meetings: CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition, which has already beaten the initial estimated Return Of Investment - we initially estimated that 11 trees would be saved yearly.

Based on live data, we can now estimate, so far, that Porto Council will spare 30 trees per year by lowering drastically their paper consumption. These yearly 4 tons of wood, still had to be converted to paper. Since this isn't happening anymore, that's around 51 million Kw/year that don't get spent on doing so, 1.3 tons/year of solid waste that don't happen anymore, 3 tons/year of CO₂ like gases that don't get generated and released to the atmosphere anymore and 91000 litres/year of water that don't get consumed anymore.

Another interesting fact is that prior to our solution, a staff of 4 people where needed, fulltime, to provision Council Meetings at Porto's (lots of photocopying had to happen). This staff of 4 would work for 2 weeks on average to prepare 1 Council Meeting (2 meetings happen regularly per month). Now, roughly, 1 person can do this work in 1 afternoon. That's around 7296 work hours freed yearly for more productive and value-adding tasks.

The cool thing is, summing on the national prize this project had already received, during the LRG Forum, the project got awarded another recognition, this time international: Sustainability Award - City of Porto and CaveDigital, Portugal.

To name a few, our solution is built on top of the following technologies:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft Office 2007 Professional
• Windows Workflow Foundation

For more information on our solution, please visit: http://www.cavedigital.com/bm/

For more information on Microsoft Citizen Service Platform, please visit: http://www.citizenserviceplatform.com/

Paper calculations thanks to http://www.papercalculator.org/

Keeping up with the usual flow of information sharing in the hopeless effort of saving others the troubles and perils I go through, I'm documenting here my first trip to Redmond, Seattle ;-)

Last week I had 2 full days of meetings at Microsoft campus in Redmond, regarding this project our company is participating on called Microsoft Citizen Service Platform (let's call it CSP ;-)). It was really nice to meet all the folks and talk about über-geek stuff, with special kudos for the OCS guys, which won the «best meeting award»! :-)

For CSP we'll be delivering a Lite version of our solution for Board Meetings on its edition for the Local and Regional Government market, the CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition and which is in use at Porto Town Hall Council (the second largest iconic Portuguese city (also known as Oporto)).

Video: City of Porto

But let's get back to the reason why I'm writing here about, which is, how I got there, and that's where the fun begins.

It all started on the previous week - my flights were booked and the person in charge for making that happen emailed me my e-ticket.

Saturday I hopped on the first flight from Lisbon to Frankfurt...

At Frankfurt they flagged me for security check... so there I was waiting for 10 mins looking at a guy on the phone holding my passport and thinking «hey, this isn't my first trip to the US». Good thing from this was that on my next flight to San Francisco they moved my seat to Business Class.

At San Francisco I realized my luggage didn't fly there with me... Tried to fill in a bagage claim but they instructed me to do so on my final destination... so I hopped on my next flight to Redmond/Bend... «Bend?» I inquired myself... «just go with the flow».

When I landed at Redmond Municipal Airport, the first thought on my mind was «hummm... this seems a tad smaller than I expected».

I procceded to fill in a bagage claim and while giving the hotel address the lady behind the counter inquired «this address is Washington state... we're in Oregon». A sinapse storm occured instantly as my brain reached for the stored geographical represenation of North America. «Humm, Seattle isn't in Oregon ... what's going on here?»... So I procceded to explain that I was heading for the Microsoft campus at Redmond, Seattle, and that's when it hit me: «I'M ON THE WRONG REDMOND!»

Lucky me, NOT!, being a Municipal Airport, they closed at night, so I could only catch a flight to Seattle on next early morning. The people there were really nice though, and the lady behind the counter was kind enough to give me a ride to a nice dinner called Sharis (or something similar to that)  where I sat for a few hours and got back to the airport. People at the «wrong» Redmond are actually really nice ;-)

After arriving at the airport and checking-in, guess what? They flagged me for security check again, yes, at  municipal airport ... So there I waited for 10 minutes again, while they went through my backpack and laptop zzzz ...

Finally hopped on the flight to Seattle and there, got a cab to my final destination: Redmond, Seattle, Washington State ;-)

Bottom line, it took me more than 30 hours to get there, so... make sure they send you to the right Redmond. ;-)

Cheers!

The day when midnight had 80 minutes ;-)

Cheers!

May good things and excellent moments happen to all of us :-)

Have fun and accomplish successes!

Cheers.

I hope you all have a good one! :-)

Today we were getting this error while trying to start one of those out-of-box Approval workflows: Failed on Start .

After much pain and trial-erroring, we finally got it working thanks to this post we found online:

«...
Changing the identity of the application pool to a user with administrative rights can cause the workflow to “fail to start“. If this sounds like something you've done, try changing it back to network service and try running the workflow again. (worked for me)
...»

Thanks to Raghu Iyer for posting a solution ;-)

If you ever want to check if a document library item's author is the current user, here's the code snippet on how to do it:

Hope this takes away pain from anyone trying to use GetByID ;-)

P.S.: sorry all of you I haven't yet replied to your emails - I've been on the road and jumping airports a lot, so life is kinda hectic which is making it hard to keep up with my mailbox.

Hi everybody!

Please vote for our solution - CaveDigital Board Meeting 2007, Town Hall Edition - for Council Meetings on the Clean Technology vertical for the Ingenuity Point contest.

Our solution renders Council Meetings paperless, thus saving a LOT of trees per year :-)

Plenty of SharePoint, Windows Workflow Foundation and Office 2007 ;-)

Thanks for your support!!

You're getting «HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)» when you try to create subwebs using a custom site definition programmatically?

For a quick work-around, just add this to your Assembly.info.cs file, re-compile and re-deploy:

using System.Security;

...

[assembly:AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers]

Signing and making your code trusted should also work, but if you're on a tight spot, this code will probably get you some air to breath :-D

Hope this helps someone out there ;-)

Both me and Daniel Pereira just did 70-630. Instead of bragging about it, let's just say it's done, with style ;-)

Three or four weeks ago I did this during a weekend (yes, had no sleep...)

Basically, I integrated the Timeline from SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments) into a SharePoint web part which consumes event itens from a SharePoint Calendar list.

I really fancy on how I might be using this in the future :-D

SPException ...

Pedro Santana just shared this with me ...

Now, who had the idea of translating the role ID for full control on MOSS 2007 pt-PT ?

... naughty you! ;-)

Patrick's been kind enough to share again more goodies and gems with the rest of us ;-)

« MSDN Labs for Workflow

Looking for a way to allow downloading all files contained on a document library?

Thanks to Bart Gunneman, now you can ;-)

Yes, I am still alive :-D

And to prove it:

Just been busy, good busy :-D

Cheers, ;-)

SharePoint team posted on their blog about the newly released whitepaper: Microsoft Office Programs and SharePoint Products and Technologies Integration – Fair, Good, Better, Best.

Want to understand which levels of integration are available for each of the client and server versions of Office?

You can download it here.