Martin Pradny's blog

In recent months I did more and more integrations with different Microsoft platforms, being it good old AD, but also its Azure sibling and Exchange or Office 365. I had to learn a lot long the way and  last week I had opportunity to attend The European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference to get better overview of the ecosystem and future directions. Having almost 2 decades of experience with IBM collaboration tools, quite often fighting against solutions from Microsoft, this step was both sad and exciting. Sad in terms that when I started with IBM Domino, it probably had bigger market share in messaging than Microsoft and whole ecosystem was better at that time. Since then, many things changed and now Microsoft is not even mentioning IBM as competition at all. I'm not saying that there is no future for IBM collaboration tools, but market has moved on since last big updates were done to those platforms and I've never seen any big vendor to be good at caching up w...

This is awkward post, primarily to save the solution for future me. I have seen many people mentioning this problem over years and as I've struggled with it several times, I needed to find final and permanent solution. All editions of Microsoft Word from time to time suffer from bug in numbering. Instead of a number, black box is displayed. Sometimes it happens right after document is opened, sometimes during editing. Probably some internal structure of document gets corrupted, so based on level of corruption, different fixes could help. Many of them are listed at  https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/ms-word-header-styles-are-showing-black-boxes/c427b21c-dcda-46ce-a506-b9a16c9f2f3f I took different approach. Since docx is just standard zip package with xml files, I decided to try if I can fix it manually. And it worked. When I extracted the docx, there was file called numbering.xml in word folder. When I examined that file, I found strange se...

After missing last year event, I’ve returned to Engage conference, which was this time on decks of SS Rotterdam (unsurprisingly in Rotterdam, Netherland). While many things were familiar, like smiling faces of people from ICS community from all over the world, many things were different this year. From personal perspective, biggest difference for me was that for first time I took my family with me. It was our first trip abroad with our one-year old daughter, along with the older one. This required some compromises, including staying quite far from the ship, which saved me from drinking too much beer at captain’s/conference bar, but also missing some small talk that goes along with it. I haven’t written down any notes during the conference and every session added another piece to the puzzle of new ICS landscape that is just unveiling, so I hope I can describe what I think is current situation in community/ecosystem/partnerships, you name it. Last event I’ve attended was Social Conne...