John Burkholder

Dear Microsoft, Your recent purchase of Nokia has me wondering. What are you doing? Hardware is not your forte'. Phone is also a challenge for you...and yet, here you are buying a phone company already having challenges. I understand you may be approaching the phone market much like Apple does where they own the hardware and software on the phone. The problem is, you are already missing out on market share. Blackberry even has more market share than you do and they are for sale and bankrupt. source Nonetheless Microsoft, you really should make your people focus on what you all do best. Software. If you want the chunk of the mobile market, make software for the mobile platforms instead of trying to compete against them. Market your application interoperability with Apple, Android, etc. Don't get stuck in the cloud. Although the cloud has been marketed as more and more secure, it is still not as secure as on-premise. Many companies, governments, and educational institutio...

It is really frustrating when I am the third interview of a SharePoint person and I ask 3 basic technical questions and they have no idea on all 3. I just interviewed someone with 5 years of SharePoint experience and besides knowing the technical aspects of SharePoint understood the business analysis side. She was also very skilled with SP Designer.  Here is how the questions went... Me: assume I have a user named John Smith that has access to a SharePoint site. He has a user level permission of Read and he is part of a SharePoint group with Full Control access. Which permission level does John Smith have on the SharePoint site? Interviewee:  Me: are you still there? Interviewee: yes. Sorry. You would need to interview that person to ensure the application they are tied to and the workflow has the correct authentication.  Normally this is done in the business analysis area.  Me: uh... Ok. That was nice but it didn't answer the question. (I repeated the entire questio...

I have decided to take on the Unicef Live Below The Line challenge.  Live Below the Line is challenging individuals and communities to see how much change you can make out of $1.50. By living off just $1.50 per day for food for 5 days, you will be bringing to life the direct experiences of the 1.4 billion people currently living in extreme poverty and helping to make real change. The challenge is set at $1.50 a day, because this is the current equivalent of the accepted global figure used to define extreme poverty. This was set by the World bank as US$1.25 per day in 2005. Basically, if you live on less than that every day, you’re recognized internationally as living in extreme poverty. Want the full detail? Check it out below. "It's not that bad," you might say - "$1.50 goes a lot further in developing countries". Unfortunately not. The $1.50 figure represents the amount someone living in extreme poverty in the U.S. would have to live on. And for peo...

I rarely will write a blog entry about anything political, sexual, or religious... but all of that is about to change right now. For a government to tell the "free citizens" of America who or who they cannot marry because of their sexual orientation based on religious beliefs is wrong. There isn't a gray area in this discussion, no matter how it is argued, it is wrong. Right now we have the supreme court trying to determine if Proposition 8 in California is breaking our Federal government practices and in my opinion, not only does it enflame the prejudices of homosexuality, but it creates a segregation. That's right... I said segregation. When black people were segregated, they were not allowed to marry each other in the name of the government. Believe or not, in 1967 the supreme court had another decision to make on whether it was legal for interracial couples to marry in 16 other states including Virginia...which a white man and 1/2 African American / 1/2 Native A...

So in this blog entry I made comment that we were trying to figure out our next steps. The decision has been made... we are staying in Bloomington. Not only are we staying in Bloomington, I think we will be here a very long time. What brought us to this decision... I already figured out that we would stick it out one more year. I had some good propositions in the queue but none of them actually leaped out at me and said TAKE THIS JOB! We both like it here, and since we have to move Squeaky Clean Soaps to Bloomington anyway (which we found a new location downtown), it just makes sense to stay here. I will continue to spread the SharePoint cheer in Central Illinois and work with the TEKsystems. I like TEKsystems. They have treated me very well. Therefore, all future plans I had with DevElements I will now push over to TEKsystems. As far as the house... it looks like we are going to work with the landlord to have the house updated. It definitely needs it. The best part about this...

Microsoft has added some wonderful Yammer social features into SharePoint. This is much like taking the communications and social development of Facebook and Twitter and slamming it into the business tools of SharePoint. A lot of arguments are surfacing on both sides of the collaboration space and I wanted to stretch my narcissistic legs and provide my own point of view on this. I am in the middle. The social features are fantastic as a new line of communication and knowledge sharing. It is powerful for receiving different points of view on questions, issues or feedback. For those who use Facebook and/or Twitter, it is very familiar and it does not require an associates degree in computers to figure out. A prime example of how social media can help solve business problems is in a Ted talk by Don Tapscott where he talks about how a company owner sourced socially a solution to his business problem.   I understand how business social can resolve problems in business. I...

Every 18 to 24 months, Our family makes a change. It usually involves us packing up the house and moving again. Often, this is not really a rough decision. But this time it is different. Positive indications to stay in Bloomington: The "traffic problem" people complain about here is non-existent compared to where we have lived previously. Honestly, I am sure most of the people who are complaining about traffic here would be one of the people who would just stop on the Washington DC beltway and leave their car right there in the middle if it snowed. Traffic here is actually a low stress environment for us. We have friends here and I am slowly building that same type of SharePoint community that I had when I lived in DC. The schools are not terrible (although they are not Fairfax County, VA or Carmel, IN). They have a hockey team and a few entertainment options. The cost of living is very nice here. Negative indications to stay in Bloomington: Rental housing is v...