/TECH RANT
Remember last time when I said Doppelganger has the caveat of "subject to change"? Yeah, apparently my work projects also have that. Two weeks ago I was "finishing" a form project only to have a discussion last Monday that made me go, "Oh crap." So my main project for the past month or so has been updating our Cell Phone Allocation form to include the option of getting a phone through the company. Previously you could only get a reimbursement for using your personal phone for business related work. Now, the university is offering full-time employees phones paid for by the university and the employee takes a deduction on each pay check for using the business phone for personal purposes. What I had spaced was the fact that the addition and the deduction were opposite from each other. So in five days I re-worked a significant portion of logic in the form to properly calculate the pay period allocation or deduction.
Five days isn't much, but I managed it. The worst part is because all these changes had to be to the current form, we now need to re-convert the form for our SharePoint 2010 migration. You might think that I should just make the changes to the new form rather than re-convert but I'll tell you now, it'll be faster to re-convert. The changes were extensive and although I just finished working on it, I can't remember everything I did and really need to hand the 2010 version over to a co-worker. So re-conversion it is.
The Cell Phone Allocation form isn't the only one that's been hijacked. So has one of the SharePoint Team's least favorite form: the IRB application. This form has given us numerous problems though most of them can be attributed to user error. However, to attempt to mitigate these issues the form has been updated numerous times since it was converted. Yes, with proper documentation we could probably update the 2010 form without trouble but how often do you have good documentation available? How often do you make good documentation?
I've even been improving our documentation, but it's improvement is secondary to the immediate problems of conversion and troubleshooting. Documentation wasn't always a problem for me. In fact in programming I'm pretty good about commenting code and what-not. But SharePoint and InfoPath documentation are different because they're visual design editors with no way to comment segments. So documentation has to be put in a separate document. Which means if you update something, you have to update the documentation separately. And most of the documentation is done through screenshots of the layout and design.
I apologize to people reading this expecting to see solutions to problems on various systems. Perhaps I should move these rants to my other blog and start posting more technical things here...
Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.
Remember last time when I said Doppelganger has the caveat of "subject to change"? Yeah, apparently my work projects also have that. Two weeks ago I was "finishing" a form project only to have a discussion last Monday that made me go, "Oh crap." So my main project for the past month or so has been updating our Cell Phone Allocation form to include the option of getting a phone through the company. Previously you could only get a reimbursement for using your personal phone for business related work. Now, the university is offering full-time employees phones paid for by the university and the employee takes a deduction on each pay check for using the business phone for personal purposes. What I had spaced was the fact that the addition and the deduction were opposite from each other. So in five days I re-worked a significant portion of logic in the form to properly calculate the pay period allocation or deduction.
Five days isn't much, but I managed it. The worst part is because all these changes had to be to the current form, we now need to re-convert the form for our SharePoint 2010 migration. You might think that I should just make the changes to the new form rather than re-convert but I'll tell you now, it'll be faster to re-convert. The changes were extensive and although I just finished working on it, I can't remember everything I did and really need to hand the 2010 version over to a co-worker. So re-conversion it is.
The Cell Phone Allocation form isn't the only one that's been hijacked. So has one of the SharePoint Team's least favorite form: the IRB application. This form has given us numerous problems though most of them can be attributed to user error. However, to attempt to mitigate these issues the form has been updated numerous times since it was converted. Yes, with proper documentation we could probably update the 2010 form without trouble but how often do you have good documentation available? How often do you make good documentation?
I've even been improving our documentation, but it's improvement is secondary to the immediate problems of conversion and troubleshooting. Documentation wasn't always a problem for me. In fact in programming I'm pretty good about commenting code and what-not. But SharePoint and InfoPath documentation are different because they're visual design editors with no way to comment segments. So documentation has to be put in a separate document. Which means if you update something, you have to update the documentation separately. And most of the documentation is done through screenshots of the layout and design.
I apologize to people reading this expecting to see solutions to problems on various systems. Perhaps I should move these rants to my other blog and start posting more technical things here...
Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.
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