Walter Almeida's Blog

About Me

 I am Walter Almeida and I intent here to drop a brief description of myself, for sole purpose of making my Blog more lively and personalized and for drawing the background of the posts I will be writing.

         

I am the creator and owner of UNIC International, and the co-creator and co-owner of Pulp Informatique, Microsoft Certified Partner companies. This Blog will be an open window on my thoughts, returns on experience on processes and technologies we use daily at UNIC and Pulp, but more on this in a next post where I will explain what I mean by "Business Oriented Software Solutions"!       

Back to the beginning, here is briefly where I started: I have been in the IT business for more than 10 years now, am passionate with technologies, always have been. I have indeed always loved "creating things" in general, and the flow of life and the chain of decisions and events brought me to accomplish my goals and build my career in the software industry. And I am grateful for being in this business that IMHO happens to be a very challenging, exciting creativity sandbox, and this keeps me alert and happy to go working every day. After all we spend the most part of our lives working, so why not making it a great journey and enjoy the ride?       

I started my career as a software consultant for 5 years, in France, Spain and the United Kingdom, working for several clients in the telecommunication, health, space and financial industries. I started as a developer, first in C language and rapidly moving to C++, language for which a dedicated several years of my working time and it was the language through which I was getting confident to modern object oriented programming techniques and patterns. I remember that I especially loved the C++ template aspect that was much more than the generics we find today in .NET and could be used as a powerful mechanism to perform advanced static (at compilation time as opposed to runtime) programming tasks. This is something I discovered through the amazing book of Andrei Alexandrescu: Modern C++ Design: Generic programming and Design Patterns applied.

         

I then moved from the Consultancy business to be a technical team leader in a leading medical imaging software company based in London. I was responsible for the delivery of Windows based rich applications for the company imaging software solutions. And this was a total new and enriching experience for me and I had to manage a team, handle inter-team collaboration by integrating the work done by the research team, and setup a highly iterative software development process to answer the very demanding company targets and fast changing business directions due to the unexpected nature of research results. It was the first full opportunity for me to build a proper, layered software architecture from scratch while making sure we would deliver time to market solutions in a highly dynamic and demanding environment.

               

I have mainly been working on Microsoft technologies until today and I will keep the same direction in the future. And I am not saying here that one technology is better than another and that Microsoft or any other technology is the best. However I believe than one individual/company should always decide on a set of technologies and tools to use and then train on them, use them and become expert and mastering them. The IT industry is a very fast evolving industry and a technical centric team always has to learn new concepts and new tools in order to keep competitive, so crossing this challenge with having to master the same tools but from different vendors is very tedious and inappropriate in a business oriented vision. It is important to remind that the objective is not to learn new technologies for the sake of it, but because new technologies can bring new productivity gains that can make you more efficient in delivering time to market and high quality solutions. To make a long story short, technology is only a mean to deliver solutions but not a goal, so make your final choice and then go for it! For what I am concerned I made my choice on Microsoft technologies and a set of third party and open source tools and frameworks on which I will discuss in a later post.   

So having worked for years in C++ on Microsoft centric technologies, it was then clear to me that the logical next move would be towards the emerging Microsoft .NET technologies. I always felt in the past that Microsoft was being behind in terms of proper support in their technologies for clean modern object oriented developments. I must say I was quite into their component oriented COM technology but for the rest they lacked of all what for instance Java was providing to the developer community. This was about to change with Microsoft.NET and I therefore left my London based company, came back to Paris for a full year of intensive training on Microsoft.NET technologies, C#, Windows, Web and distributed solution development. It took me a year to get my MCSD.NET certification. I based my training on the development of a concrete multi-tiered application which was an online web application for collaboration and picture Sharing along with a rich client for the administration of communities. I utterly enjoyed developing this solution and learning .NET.

I then decided upon leading my own business and created UNIC International in 2003, followed by Pulp Informatique in 2006.   I keep getting more and more expertise, knowledge and experience using Microsoft Technologies and I am investing now on the SharePoint 2007 collaboration platform, business intelligence, workflows, SOA and am actually developing a large solution following the Software As a Service strategy, but will not reveal more on this at this stage!                

In order to not give of myself a complete geek vision, let's talk quickly about what I do when I am not

thinking or writing or working on technology and business matters! Everyone has its philosophy of life and his own path to happiness, some people place work fulfillment at the top of their life, others make their private and family life the top priority and their job is only a mean to pay for the bills. And each philosophy is equally respectable when happiness is the sole consequence of a deliberate choice, there is no judgment to be made. I am part of those who need both professional and personal realization and give them an equal importance, I would be very sad and frustrated if I would lack one or the other. So I have a great girlfriend, wonderful family and friends and exciting hobbies which provide me with a very good and enjoyable balance in my life. I love to travel and especially when I am able to communicate in the welcoming country language, it indeed makes the whole travelling experience even more interesting and deep! I can speak French (natively), English, Spanish and am currently learning Portuguese, so it makes the choice of travelling destinations very interesting! I love practicing sports which I believe is part of a healthy and balanced life: I run, ride my bike, do fun stuff like body boarding, windsurfing and plan on trying kite surfing. I dive and underwater world is the most amazing thing I have seen so far in my life. And recently starting powered paragliding which is an amazing toy for flying and enjoying nature from the skies! Give you some pictures through this post  And as a bottom line, I am interested in all practices that can lead to better knowledge of oneself and search for inner peace and joy in life, part of this is Yoga, relaxation and meditation, and deep thinking phases. I indeed think that it is essential to try to reunite body and spirit and especially in our modern, fast pace and consumption/material driven European life.

          

What's next?

I will next write about this blog and what I intent to share through these writings.

 

    

Hello World! Proudly writing my first Post!

Hello World! This is my first post!

Here I am at home, after a long day of work, drinking a glass of wine for celebrating my new decision to create my own Blog. It is quite an exciting time I must say, after years of reading very compelling and interesting posts on internet, to decide on becoming an active contributor and start throwing to the world my own views and thoughts!  

I have named my first post "Hello World", after the classical application sample you would write when first trying or demonstrating a programming language, as I actually am writing my first post and shouting "hello" to the connected world, ready to start an interactive sharing of knowledge and return of experience on matters around business oriented software solutions (more on this a bit later!).

     

I want to start my Blog, humm what Blog platform will I use?   

First step was to select a blog platform, there are plenty of them, so comparing them and choosing one appears to be a difficult and time-consuming task. However I had already strong constraints that dramatically reduced the choice: I already discarded hosted Blog platforms and wanted a Blog platform that integrates with WSS 3.0, SharePoint 2007. I indeed have a SharePoint 2007 server and want to integrate my Blog and Blog contents on my SharePoint server for easy integration of my Blog contents with my internet site, leverage the use of the SharePoint search engine etc. Well, first obvious choice is… the new WSS 3.0 Blog site template.

      

First look at the SharePoint 2007 Blog site template: not convincing!

I therefore started by  looking at the Blog site template that ships with WSS 3.0 but my first impression was that the WSS 3.0 Blog template is very limited with regards to many aspects and only offered basic functionality: no anonymous comments, no multiple categories for a single post… and more important: little support for look and feel customization, the Blog theme is still customizable but only through creation of a SharePoint 2007 master page which is all but an easy and straightforward task. And when you start a Blog, the concern is to have an easy setup procedure to start blogging asap and not go through a painful customization and probably coding phase first! I therefore was disappointed and decided on having a look at other available solutions …

 

Community Server: an attractive good looking solution, but…   

After my first disappointment with the SharePoint 2007 Blog, I digged into the internet, remember several nice looking and fully featured Blog, and got though the "Powered by Community Server" link to the Community Server web site and was quite amazed. Hey here we are! Looks like a great Blog platform, which you can host on your server and integrate with SharePoint! Plus you have plenty of extra collaboration functionalities including forums, documents sharing an more.   

However, after a time of high excitement, I came to realise that the little problem was the cost of the solution. Even though you indeed have an Express edition that comes for free, integration with SharePoint requires the purchase of a highly expensive Enterprise Edition… Bummer! back to the beginning, and no still no target Blog platform…   

And after some thinking, it seems not the best to go for Community Server as a full collaboration platform when you already have a SharePoint 2007 that is itself a collaboration platform! So let's try to have a deeper look on the SharePoint Blog site template and see if we can make it a real compelling solution for internet Blogging.  

     

Second look at SharePoint 2007 Blog template: Community Kit for SharePoint  

So let's try to leverage WSS 3.0 and its Blog template. After searching on internet, I found interesting links to solutions for customizing the default Blog template to make it a more relevant, fully feature Blog platform, but no fully ready to use solution… Until I finally found the open source CKS project (Community Kit for SharePoint) and its Enhanced Blog Edition!

From the CKS CodePlex source:  

"The Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest."  

And more about the Enhanced Blog Edition:   

"The Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition is designed to enhance and extend the functionality of the built-in blog feature in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0"  

And this day, I finally found the solution I would use for my Blog, fully featured Blog platform, fully integrated with SharePoint, free and easy to install (with little subtleties to properly configure anonymous access). And this solution comes with a powerful modular theme framework that allow easy customization of the Blog look and feels without having to deal with the complexities of creating WSS 3.0 master pages. I especially find elegant and convenient the way you can customize the look and feel of the various CKS controls by just changing the XSL file the controls are mapping to.

Just one word about the subtlety when configuring anonymous access to your Blog: not only will you have to configure anonymous access to the WSS site that will host your Blog, but you will also need to perform an extra step to make sure anonymous users cannot navigate your SharePoint lists using the standard SharePoint pages (example : /_layouts/viewlsts.aspx for the all content of the site). The anonymous user would have only read access to the whole content; however this is still a behaviour you want to disable for internet anonymous users. This can be done by activating the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature on the Web application that is hosting the Blog site. More details on TechNet about this. 

And here we are: I am now proudly publishing my first post! So go and try it for yourself, I am so far very impressed and convinced with the Enhanced Blog edition of the CKS 2.0 project. Another great thing is that the SharePoint Blog also integrates seamlessly with MS Word 2007 as SharePoint is known by MS Word 2007 as a BLOG provider. You can therefore use Word to author posts, open and modify existing posts, manage Blog categories etc.

   Publish

What's next?

I will next present myself and talk About me.

I will then talk about my Blog, to introduce the intent of my Blog, what future content I will be writing.