Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference

Join Microsoft MVPs from the Americas’ region as they share their knowledge and real-world expertise during a free event, the MVP Virtual Conference.

The MVP Virtual Conference will showcase 95 sessions of content for IT Pros, Developers and Consumer experts designed to help you navigate life in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Developer Platform, Steve Guggenheimer, will be on hand to deliver the opening Keynote Address. Why attend MVP V-Conf? The conference will have 5 tracks, IT Pro English, Dev English, Consumer English, Portuguese mixed sessions & Spanish mixed sessions, there is something for everyone! Come learn from the best and brightest in the tech world today. All of the sessions will all be delivered by the Americas’ Region Microsoft MVPs. These MVPs are experts who present at premiere conferences, independent community events and local user groups all over the globe.

This is a technical conference focused on helping attendees to learn and develop skills for everything from everyday technical work to wackier weekend projects. Whether it is on the IT Pro, Dev or Consumer side of things, you can bet that the content of MVP V-Conf will be cutting edge, exciting and relevant.

Be sure to register quickly to hold your spot and tell your friends & colleagues. The conference will be widely covered on social media, you can join the conversation by following @MVPAward and using the hashtag #MVPvConf.

Register now and feel the power of community! http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualconference.aspx

SharePoint 2013 Migration: Stress Free! (SharePoint Federal User Group in Ottawa presentation)

I gave this presentation at the SharePoint Federal User Group in Ottawa recently - based on some recent project work we have been doing I tried to distill the migration tips down into real world tips and tricks. It led to an interesting discussion since lots of people were interested in the topic and had approaches they had tried or wanted to ask about. Here's the presentation on SlideShare:

Migrate to SharePoint 2013 Stress Free from Nick Kellett

Choosing and Using Cloud Services with SharePoint

Here’s a copy of my presentation for the SharePoint Summit 2013 in Toronto. I spoke about tips and tricks for evaluating and managing cloud services with SharePoint, including some common gotchas and considerations.

Because it was such a wide-ranging topic I tried to anchor it with the story of StoneShare’s own journey to the cloud. I like to keep my presentations “real world”

I hope this is of value to someone – please feel free to contact me on LinkedIn if you have any questions about it.

Choosing and Using Cloud Services with SharePoint from Nick Kellett

SharePoint Summit Toronto 2013

I’ll be speaking at the Toronto SharePoint Summit 2013 again this year. My topic is “A No-Hype Approach to Choosing and Using Cloud Services with SharePoint”.

I’ll be doing a really-practical deep-dive into SharePoint and related cloud services. I’ll talk about best practices, issues, opportunities and risks for using cloud-hosted business and infrastructure services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Yammer, CloudShare, and other popular offerings, with SharePoint. I am putting together a lot of real-world examples and facts that we have found at StoneShare. It’s going to be wide-ranging and cover compliance issues, branding and user experience, popular service offerings, integration and platform decisions, up-front and hidden costs, and business and IT benefits. Phew!

The good folks at Toronto SharePoint Summit also want to get the word out – so if you are interested in attending the conference, come to SharePoint Summit 2013 – Toronto.

Here’s a blurb on the event:

This year in Toronto, there is an exceptional speaker lineup with some of the top industry known SharePoint influencers and MVPs including Andrew Connell as the keynote speaker.

Benefits for your organization include:

- Learning about the SharePoint 2013 platform and its new features

- Understanding the power and potential of SharePoint

- Discovering and exploring the options for deploying SharePoint in the Cloud

- Improving your understanding of information architecture

- Understanding key SharePoint modules and how they can support solving your business problems

- Cases studies of companies that have implemented SharePoint solutions

- Discovering the best development approaches when dealing with SharePoint

You can register here. Hope to see you there!

SharePoint Conference 2011: Using Claims for Authorization in SharePoint 2010

Rough notes of the presentation by Antonio Maio at Titus Inc. Antonio walked everyone through a complicated Claims setup and made it look pretty easy.

Agenda

• What are Claims?
• How they are used in 2010
• Enabling Authorization through claims
• Customer requirements and scenarios
• Infrastructure and Architecture
• Demonstrations
• Benefits and Goals

What are Claims?

User attributes

Metadata about a user

AD Attributes / LDAP Directory Attributes

But really it’s an assertion I make about myself – “I’m a senior product manager” – and claims can be believed if they are backed up by a trusted identity provider.

Allows us to solve problems like federation and complicated authentication schemes

Deciding what we can see and do not only based on who we are but on our clearances or the type of data, or even if we connect via a secure connection and so on.

Examples – Claims about Antonio

• Name: Antonio Maio
• Department: Product Management
• Security Clearance: Secret
• Employment Status: FTE
• Country of Birth: Canada
• ITAR Authorized: No

How Are Claims Used In SharePoint 2010?

• Authentication
• Single Signon across systems across domains
• Maintain End User privacy (you can configure who can see what)
• Authorization

Claims for Authentication in SharePoint 2010

New option in SP2010

Allows: Claims Based, Classic Mode (Windows), and Forms Based – must be configured via claims

Using Claims – authorization can be specific to the user. Can be dynamic – ex changes in security clearance. Consider environmental attributes (ex current time, geo location, connection type, etc).

Enabling Authorizations Through Claims

Infrastructure and configuration has to be considered. Where are you going to store, manage, and retrieve claims.

Planning is required – policies

Development required or 3rd party applications. Native SharePoint 2010 functionality is manual. Use WS-Trust and WS-Federation to retrieve and validate claims. Design apps to verify specific required claims only – remember privacy.

Customer Scenarios

How do customers want to make use of Claims?

Document Metadata + User Claims

Ex Document classification and a user’s security clearance

Goal: Sensitive content sitting beside non-sensitive content

Policies and rule-based system that determines access control

Automation is critical and policies are simple to start.

"I believe you shouldn’t let security policies dictate where you manage your content”.

Keep policies simple to start and let the business drive new requirements.

Customer Scenario #1:

Claim: Employee Status.

Document Metadata: Classification (High Business Impact,Moderate Business Impact, Low Business Impact)

If employee.status=FTE and document.classification = HBI them PERMIT access to document

If employee.status=Contract and document.classification = HBI then DENY access to document

Customer Scenario #2:

Claim: Group membership

Document Metadata: Project

If user belongs to GroupX and belongs to GroupY and document.project=”eagle” then PERMIT access to document

If user belongs to Groupx and DOES NOT belong to GroupY and document.project=”eagle” then Deny access to document

Customer Scenario #3:

Claim: Client Case Numbers

Document Metadata: Document Case Number

If document.case=X AND client.casenumbers includes X then PERMIT access

If document.case=X AND client.casenumbers DOES NOT include X then DENY access

Infrastructure and Architecture

Client Web Browser talking to SharePoint:

1. User login (with user name and password)

2. SharePoint requests token  from Secure Token Server (ADFS v2 is an example)

3. ADFS2 wants to get claims about the user

4. Packages these claims up and signs them. Because there is a trust relationship set up between SP2010 and the claims provider SharePoint will trust this package

5. Then SharePoint does something with this claim token for authorization. SharePoint is the Relying Party application (it is RELYING on the trusted identify provider (ADFS in this case) for the claims

Demo

AD is running on its own W2008 R2 server. Using default schema, using OrganizationalStatus attribute

Setup

1, ADFS v2 Configuration – installed as Federation Server and IIS has self=signed certificate

2, Use Wizard to create new Federation Service in IIS – note the Federation Service Name.

3. Add a Claims Description – note the claims type URL

EmployeeStatus added by Adding Claim Description – uses this URL – http://schemas.sp.local/EmployeeStatus in the example and sends Claim to calling application

4. Add Relying Part Trust – selected WS-Federation Passive Protocol. Relying Part URL = “Federation Service Name” + “/_trust/”

Relying Party Trust Identifier – urn:ServerName:application – urn:sp-server-2010.sp.local:sharepoint2010

5. Create Claims Rules for the Relying Parties. Add SharePoint 2010 trust rule – use templates – Send LDAP attributes as Claims which allows us to map LDAP mappings to claims.

ex LDAP attribute: mail maps to E-Mail Address outgoing claim attribute

LDAP attribute: organizationalStatus maps to EmployeeStatus which we created earlier

7. View and export the ADFSv2 Token Signing Certificate = c:\adfs20Certificate.cer

Transforming Claims – Claims Rule Language

example: send custom claim called “EmployeePermission” with the value of Full Control if the user belongs to the SeniorManagement group and if the value of the employee’s organization attribute in AD is “Titus”

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd807118%28WS.10%29.aspx 

SharePoint 2010  Configuration

1. Create a new web app in central admin. Use Claims Based. Use NTLM to start. Ensure public URL matches the one in the ADFSv2 certificate – trust between this web app and the ADFSv2 server

Do not create a site collection yet

2. In IIS, setup SharePoint Site to use SSL

3. use powershell to map the claim types in SharePoint

Have to run new claims using Powershell

Will be provided on Titus.com blog where the information will be available on these steps.

4. In Central Admin, access authentication providers and check Trusted Identify Provider and then check next to the ADFSv2 Provider you added. Normally you would remove NTLM

5. Create your site collection.

6. Create sites and libraries.

 

Authorization Policies

Questions you need to ask:

• Which policies are right to protect the business?
• Which user attributes are important? Are you using AD or LDAP or something else?
• Which content items or content types are important?
• Which policy language do you need? (XACML, SECPAL, etc)

Tip: Keep it simple

Titus Demo

Install Metadata Security product as a Farm Solution

Apply rules to items or folders

Created 3 rules – High Business Impact, Moderate business impact, Low business impact.

Showed how Bob could log in as a contractor and not see HBE docs, could read Moderate impact, and could edit low business impact.

Then changed Bob in AD to be a Full Time Employee, and now Bob had full control over everything.

Goals and Benefits of Titus Metadata Security

Benefits:

• Security is automated
• Security is consistent
• Data Governance and Compliance Policies are fine grained.

Summary

Authentication and Authorization are different but both important. Use Claims today in SharePoint 2010.

Infrastructure and Planning is required

Plan policies with business stakeholders – Keep Simple to Start!

SharePoint Conference 2011: How eBay Successfully Upgraded their Intranet to SharePoint 2010

These are my rough notes of the presentation by Ramin Mobasseri and Chris Givens of eBay. The Hub is pretty impressive for the way it organizes information for its users and the lengths it goes to in order to default metadata for improved searching.

Agenda

• Why upgrade?
• Methodology
• About the Upgrade (Technical)
• About the Upgrade (Tactical)
• About the Upgrade (Functional)
• Q&A

Why Upgrade

On MOSS 2007.

Got more complex requirements from business users who didn’t want to write code.

Better search.

Enterprise Social Networking

Better device and browser compatibility.

Demo: The Hub – the core eBay site. ESN is Enterprise Social Networking. Proud of combining managed metadata store with FAST search.

Extensively branded (yellow, large icons for the main menu items.

Global Nav

• Who We Are
• News
• My HR
• Teams
• Workplace
• Our Businesses

Have people search and all sites search at the top of each master page.1 click people search using FAST and typeahead

People results

Contact Info, Department info

Search Best Bets

People look for 3 scopes of things at eBay

1. Business Unit

2. Location.

3. Organization

Managed Metadata filters on the left to allow those scopes. DIfficult to tag pre-existing sites with managed metadata

Upon creation of a site you get Best Bets added automatically

Visio Services

Used by IT Tools team – wanted way to watch health of their servers at all times. Didn’t want to spend money. Took 45 minutes to draw visio diagram and connect to backend systems. Can filter by Production and DR environments or by Dev environments.

Why Upgrade

Social Media at work – did pilots – decided on Yammer, Chatter, Newsgator, and other social networkings. Decision to not dictate technologies on end users, but recommend tools they feel are best.

1st Attempt – try to integrate these tools. If it doesn’t succeed, we aggregate.

List of social networking services under My Social link

End users can make a post and it sends to multiple networks.

Expertise locator tag cloud

Expertise Search

Better Browser and Device Compatibility

Built feature grid – against all browsers. And put a level of support from 0 to 4.

Better performance: Increased performance by 29% (for global users) since servers are based in Denver.

Upgrade Methodology

Upgrade took 3 months.

Agilistic Scrum over the Spiral Waterfalls!

Blend of project methodologies. Started in Agile mode. Had MS Architects vet the scrums to make sure everything was in place. Meanwhile business analysts could create waterfall project plan.

Communication Plan: Write to end users, team site owners, don’t surprise them. They used a grid:

Subject | Type | Target Users | Description | Date Sent.

Governance Plan: Your blueprint. Over 345 new features – yes or no answers with each team and work with IT Operations to get their blessing. If “Yes” how is it configured and who can do what?

Feature Matrix for each set of features.

About the Upgrade (Technical)

Had access to MS Architects to ensure everything was possible.

Project Requirements:

• 3 month timeline, multiple solutions to be upgraded.
• Data  Mining/ Farm Documentation
• Detailed Analysis of existing farm
• 3rd party solutions audit.

Ran a source code comparer to diff the SharePoint files in 12 hive against the OOTB files.

Biggest challenge was 3rd party solutions. Had to build whole mockup of 2007 environment and then try migrations into 2010 to see what broke.

You need business users who can test this to see if it works or not.

Environment:

Large server farm. 14 servers, 20,000 users world-wide, 12,000 sites and 33,000 My Sites. 20+ content databases.

Disaster Recovery. Redundant Data Centers for failover.

eBay has full failover – 4 hour failover time window.

$1.5 M of hardware.

Hardware and Performance Topics

Farm Configuration: Had to figure out capacity planning, how many servers, what the SLA’s are and tolerance for risk. For Disaster Recovery you might have to double the costs.

Microsoft offered access to MS Data Centers to test performance. Problem: eBay required other systems to be connected so that didn’t really work. Microsoft provided Architecture review.

IOPS are VERY important – FAST requires high Input Output for disks

SANs – very expensive, work with SQL Server. Everything else is Direct Attached drives for WFE and App servers.

Capacity Planning -  how many users concurrently – what will the transaction mix be? Plan for growth.

VS Ultimate Test Tools – allows for performance testing of your applications.

Performance Optimizations: Page weights, global network.

High latency network can cause end user dis-satisfaction. Top 3 HTTP request types tend to be: CSS, Images, JS

How to minimize the page weights?

• Minimize the CSS (remove un-used CSS classes)
• Compress the CSS
• Make images 1px wide
• Minify the JS files

Got page weights down to 67k. Users were happier in global locations

Caching:

• IIS Output Cache – causes weird page weight issue with browser
• ASP.NET Caching
• BlobCache -
• ProxyServers
• CDNs

About the Upgrade: Tactical

Provisioning a site – a  custom form. Long running process within a webpart. Anyone can create a site, IT gets a notification.

You specify a Business Unit, Organization, and Office Location default values using Managed Metadata. So when they search it will automatically filter from those sites with those values, they don’t have to do anything. They can find their site using their keywords. This took the longest time.

Rich Proifles: Encourage the end users to modify their user profiles

Offer them incentives.

Get rid of unwanted unused sites (clean your house)

Start your brownbag series early

Build an Upgrade Community to get feedback

Have weekly status meetings with the stakeholders

Make sure you have a Technical PM on the team

Watch out for the phrases: “That’s taken care of” or “That’s finished” – you have to test.

Test test test test

Productivity Hub

Power User Training

About the Upgrade: Functional

Master Pages – colliding requirements between functional groups

Editorial Issues: Did you use Word to edit in MOSS

Watch out for DIV and SPAN tags

Rich Text Editors and Content Editor webparts

The Ribbon: You will see some resistance. Users will settle after training

3 sets of users: Pioneers, Settlers, Stay-Behinds

Managed Metadata Services - Brilliant for search. Allow time for Information Taxanomy, do not rush! Planning to add them to lists and libraries (auto-tagging)? Watch out for Datasheet views.

Service Packs – don’t do SP for 6 months. But plan for it early

Questions

How many people were on the project? 3 devs, 3 IT Pros, 2 PMs (9 or 10 people for 3 months)

Physical or virtual? FAST and Admin was virtual, otherwise it was all physical (due to internal eBay policies)

Training: 20,000 user base – have trained 150 users so far. Train the trainer – Productivity Hub is 3rd most visited hub in the last few months so this is helping with training

Methodology – what do they recommend? Use whatever works. eBay recommends Scrum in Dev and get branding requirements via traditional models. Dev moved ahead while waiting for requirements (had a general idea)

Did you have to change any functionality? Had to rename thousands of host header name changes. InfoPath data connections were statically set – big issue.

Did you have constructive feedback on the intranet? Yes – put up a blog on the issues – have weekly call with Microsoft on post-upgrade lessons learned keeping Microsoft informed

Migration Approach? Was Database Attach in new farm. All database fail – that’s a given. The amount of time it takes to upgrade is directly related to the number of sites – so delete all the empty ones.

Familiar Faces at the SharePoint Summit 2010

Just got back from attending the SharePoint Summit 2010 in Montreal with my business partner Keith Carter.

One of the nice things about the summit (apart from being in Montreal, which is always fun – awful traffic excepted) was that I saw a lot of familiar faces.

There were a lot of vendors I knew from my days on the SharePoint trade show floors – folks like Gail Shlansky, Yancy Lent, and Ken Allen from Axceler, Dave Seaman from Syntergy, Michael Potter from Nintex, and Tony Lanni from AvePoint.

Other familiar faces included speakers like Ruven Gotz and Wouter van Vugt.

This year, I had a happy surprise - a lot of my former colleagues from Parks Canada were present. We had worked together in the Office 12 TAP days when SharePoint 2007 was about to release and it was  a nice reunion.

Like any summit, it was also a chance to meet new folks. Before the summit kicked off, there was a dinner for all the speakers at the Greek restaurant Restaurant Ilios, organized by Danny Boulanger and Alain Lord. We had some nice chats about SharePoint, Holland, and Canadian culture (it turns out we do have one!).

There were a lot of Canadian government folks at the conference – it seemed like a majority of the participants in fact were public servants. There were some interesting chats about the challenges of buying and deploying SharePoint in the government.

On Wednesday I presented on migrating to SharePoint 2010.The interest in upgrading to SharePoint 2010 was high, so the room was full. I’m embedding my slide presentation below:

SharePoint Summit 2010 - Stress Free Migration

View more presentations from Nick Kellett.

It was a good conference and I look forward to the next one!

SharePoint Best Practices - Another Great Year

We enjoyed another great year of Mindsharp's SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego. Thanks to Mark Elgersma, Ben Curry, and Bill English as the chief organizers, although I know there are lots of other Mindsharp folks who worked hard to pull this off.

UPDATE: Just heard back from Ben - the primary conference organizers were Bill English, Paul Stork, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Bleeker, Steve Buchannan, Pamela James, Brian Alderman, Ben Curry, and Mark Elgersma. Thanks again guys!

Given the grim economy it was noticeable how many people showed up - over 350 attendees I believe in addition to all the vendors and organizers.

I attended with echoTechnology's Director of Sales, Sean O'Reilly. He's a real hoot - a bit of a legend on the conference circuit. We arrived on the Sunday. Since Sean and I are now using demo laptops and have the exhibit booth process nailed down after numerous conferences, it only took us about 15 minutes to setup the booth before we could unwind.

That night the BPC kicked off unofficially with a Super Bowl party in Ben Curry's suite. It was great to watch the game with various attendees and exhibitors.

Joel Oleson gave a funny keynote on Monday morning, talking about the 10 steps to success.  He argued that SharePoint is plastic and so just because you can do something with it, doesn't mean you should. Some of his analogies included Robot Barbie and headless chickens. Also there was a disapproving mother ("IT") and finger-painting baby who got paint all over the wall ("the business").

One quote he mentioned from Gartner says that by 2010 less than 35% of WSS sites will put effective governance in place!

Programming Best Practices

In between exhibit hours and meetings, I was able to attend only one seminar, given by Francis Cheung of Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Group. This was a really neat explanation of best practices for programming against SharePoint.

What was interesting was Francis showed how object oriented patterns like the Repository pattern could be used to abstract out SharePoint-specific resources like list names, loggers, and so on. Francis also pointed out the need to create strongly typed business entities for SharePoint, rather than straight calls against SP objects.

This provides an additional layer of abstraction that allows mocking and unit testing. The idea is that for code testing purposes you should be able to swap in mock interfaces without relying on SharePoint being available. For instance you should be able to run unit tests against SharePoint code without the SQL database even being available.

These entities also make it easier to work with presenters/controllers without worrying about looking up Site or List GUIDs, or provide an easy way to do CRUD operations.

Microsoft currently has a patterns and practices guidance available at www.microsoft.com/spg. From the guidance doc:

This guidance discusses the following:

• Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
• Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
• Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts.
• How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
• How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
• How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
• Team-based intranet application development.

This approach is actually a standard approach to custom code development but SharePoint has tended to blur the lines a little bit. What is very interesting is that more and more of the BPC seminars were about programming and unit testing. People were even talking about Test Driven Development (TDD) against SharePoint!

What this indicates is that organizations are starting to treat SharePoint seriously as a development platform. This has always held potential but required a steep learning curve. For example, at the Best Practices Conference last year there was very little on these sorts of developer-centric practices. This year it was all about programming against SharePoint in the traditional way - using unit tests, mocking, web smoke tests, and OO patterns.

There hasn't been a killer app for SharePoint yet but it's coming.

Best Practices For Centrally Governing Your Portal and Governance

On Wednesday morning I gave a presentation on helpful tips for centrally managing a portal. I showed a governance site collection I have been working on and talked about how it can be used to make it intuitive and easy to run a portal.

I'm including my powerpoint presentation here.

There are no screenshots of the governance site collection yet although I am uploading a couple as part of this post.

 

Hope this helps!

Hello, New York!

Next week I'll be exhibiting echoTechnology's latest version of echo for SharePoint in New York City, at the SharePoint IMAGINE 2009 conference.

The conference is billed as "SharePoint in the Real World". Its focus is on how businesses use SharePoint to solve their specific real world needs, and how SharePoint impacts their bottom line.

It's organized by Impact Management and is taking place at the Microsoft NY Center at 1290 Avenue of the Americas on Wednesday Jan 21 from 9 to 4. Attendance is free so if you are in the area you should definitely sign up...you can do that here.

I'll be in NYC from Tuesday evening to Thursday afternoon, attending the conference and meeting with a variety of echoTechnology partners - so my itinerary is very tight. Still, it's a great opportunity to return to NYC, where I lived for a short while.

Good Times...

I moved home right after the awful 9/11 and the Dot Com bubble burst, and this is my first chance to go back. Although I was only living in New York for a year, it left an indelible impression on me - as it would on anyone.

My first professional programming job was in 2000/2001 as a Java programmer. I took New Jersey-based IT training company SetFocus' intense but great 3-month Java Master Track, and was then placed with an online education company in New York City.

We were developing a web-based learning system using JSP and servlets, in a cramped little office downtown on the corner of Church and Warren.

At first I lived in West Orange New Jersey with a small gang of roommates, and then we all moved to a small building in Astoria Queens. This was inhabited by a porn star, an aspiring model, an unkillable cockroach (we learned to live and let live), and a foul-mouthed talking parrot named Sammy (not necessarily in the same apartment).

Some of my favourite memories are: exploring the parks and trails on the edge of Battery Park City; bar crawling with my roommates and friends; celebrity spotting; conniving my way into an amazing hidden club called Light, marked only by bouncers and a lit white window and way too cool for me; eating lunches on the steps of Federal Hall in Wall Street and exploring Manhattan on foot during lunch hours; and wandering the streets of Brooklyn Heights.

...Followed By Taxes

Living there was also an exercise in paperwork. Due to my particular circumstances I paid 7 levels of taxes at various times that year:

1. New Jersey state income tax
2. New York state income tax
3. Connecticut state income tax
4. New York city sales tax (anytime I bought something)
5. US Federal income tax
6. Canadian Federal income tax (although I was out of country, as a Canadian even death can't cut short your obligation to pay taxes); and
7. Ontario provincial income tax

To this day the state of Connecticut faithfully sends me an annual update on my pension plan, which currently sits at 13 cents a year. I'm sure just mailing me costs more than that! Luckily they report that they are investing great time and attention to increase the yield, so when I retire in 30 years, my pension will be at 14 cents and I can finally buy that tropical island.

Anyway, if you're in the area and want to say hi, drop me a line!