Inflated Expectations or Slope of Enlightenment?

I used to work for a small school district and it saddens and often sickens me to see so many schools spending so much money and so little time planning a district wide implementation of technologies. This includes iPads but isn’t specific to just iPads. I have found that many districts simply choose to implement these tools because someone else did. There are a lot of egos getting in the way of the education of our youth today.

Many administrators truly have little to no knowledge of what social media or personal devices such as the iPad can actually do, let alone how taxing on an already weak infrastructure they can be. They simply want it. Teachers have a hard enough time keeping their students on task let alone disciplined. Now add in a bunch of tools that have no management capability out of the box and you’ve got a nightmare on your hands.

I hope for our children’s sake these schools figure it out soon. A lot of money is being thrown at technology in hopes it will engage the students more so they can learn better. A great teacher can engage more students than a $10 app can and shame on Apple for not focusing more attention on that fact. Instead they are riding the hype cycle playing on the flat out inexperience of many school administrators when it comes to technology in education, and there are far too few IT Professionals willing or able to convince them that these are not well thought out ideas.

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A hype cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. The term was coined by Gartner, Inc.[1

Many of these early adopter schools are going to quickly fall into the Trough of Disillusionment regarding their revolutionary idea to implement a half-baked tool. These tablet devices are not suited for a business or learning environment until management features such as those noted below can be offered out of the box.

• Multi-Profile Support
• Central Permissions/Security Management
• Central Software/App Deployment/Management
• Central Update Management
• Non-Platform specific Apps for mixed environments
• Lower prices
• Remote Connection Capabilities
• Discontinued Need for Sync to other computer

Apple is one of the worst in my opinion because they are making a push to get themselves deep into the education sector with no accountability on their part. What Apple should be doing is donating money to the Department of Education to go towards the continuing education of our teachers. Then they should slash the prices of their equipment/software for schools in half. Until they do this, I have no respect for the company. Schools are not the consumer world. They are spending yours and my tax money and they are wasting it on gaming devices and incomplete un-managable software/devices that is attempting to monopolize education.

It’s time people start questioning their school officials over spending on frivolous ideas. If your district seems to have a big new technology project every year, perhaps you should ask for some results from the previous project.

It’s time school officials were held accountable for poor choices.

PDF Compatibility in SharePoint 2010

Out of the box SharePoint 2010 does not make it easy to store and work with PDF files. When you save a PDF to a SharePoint 2010 library there are four things you will notice right away.

1. There is no PDF icon
2. Opening a PDF results in a Save dialog box (see below) instead of opening in the browser or client
3. PDF files cannot be edited without saving locally first
4. PDF files are not supported in Search (Future Post)

This is going to get on your users nerves and it really detracts from all the cool things SharePoint 2010 can do. There are many posts out there giving advice as to what to do to resolve these issues. Most don’t address it properly, however. If you see any recommendations telling you to set your Web Application from Strict to Permissive then you need to disregard that advice. In a nutshell, setting the Web Application to Permissive allows any file type to be opened in SharePoint 2010 which can leave your network at risk.  So DON”T DO THAT!

We’ll first go over the process for getting the PDF icon to appear.

Add PDF Icon

Note: These instructions apply to any program file you want to add, not just for PDF’s

These steps are to be performed on all of your Web Front End Servers (WFE).

• Download the Adobe PDF icon (Click Here)
• Save the downloaded file as: ICPDF.gif
• Copy the ICPDF.gif file to the following location

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES

• Navigate to the following location

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML

• Edit the DOCICON.XML file
• Add the following line of code in the <ByExtension> section. (Preferrably you will put this in alphabetical order by the extension)

<Mapping Key=”pdf” value=”icpdf.gif” EditText=”Adobe Acrobat” OpenControl=”AdobeAcrobat.OpenDocuments”/>

• Save the DOCICON.XML file
• Perform an IISRESET on all WFE’s (note this will result in a short outage)

You should now see the PDF Icon  appear next to all PDF files stored in your SharePoint 2010 libraries and if you have Adobe Reader X you will be prompted if you would like to check out the file and open and then will open in your Adobe client software.

NOTE: This will address the ability to open and edit a PDF in your Adobe software as long as you have Adobe Reader X installed. Otherwise this will not work as expected.

Add PDF to Allowed Mime Types

Now we need to address the ability to open a PDF from the browser. This is predominantly important for environments that do not have Adobe Reader X installed.