Category: Blog

So, okay. I’m writing all kinds of technical articles, that are almost like knowledgebase pages. I’m basically using this blog as a public documentation of different solutions I’ve found.

But then I’m also writing these slightly more personal blog posts, that aren’t exactly related to any technological solution per se. Some of them are personal professional updates, but some are actually more like rants.

This category is for the latter. You can find the non-personal blog posts here.

Koskela - SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2019 on 6/16 session.

Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Nashville 2019!

I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2019 again, and it was a lot of fun! I had the chance to meet a lot of new (and some “old”) people. And what a crowd – so many (difficult) questions about SPFx & Teams development… 😬😂 (Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just here for the materials? Well, they are here: SPS Nashville 2019 materials . Thanks for your interest!) SPS Nashville 2019 from a speaker’s viewpoint Posting the materials took me […]

Internet Explorer finally gets left behind

The boring version of browser wars is upon us

The next browser war is upon us, and this time it isn’t fought on the battlefield of proprietary API implementations and badly implemented CSS and JavaScript standards, but rather it’s different ecosystems battling it out with their respective variants of Blink, which itself is a part of open source Chromium. Sounds boring, right? And to some extent it really is. No Firefox fanboys, no Opera elitists and Internet explorer normies keeping to their respective corners of the public space, each group looking down on the […]

Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks!

I’m trying out a new, more long-form content on this blog – tell me what you think about it in the comments section below! This article explains one of the only cryptocurrency initiatives I find to be kind of level-headed – Basic Attention Token – and the browser that’s pretty tightly coupled with it, Brave. Note: If you just want to skip all the banter and download the hecking browser, click this. Preface As far as different cryptocurrencies go, there have been quite a few […]

Speaking at SPS Nashville 6/15/2019

Exciting news to share again! My session on using SPFx to extend Microsoft Teams got accepted to SharePoint Saturday Nashville next June. I’m excited to return to the Music City – it was a lot of fun last time, and I have a new session to present this time! Correction: The title has been fixed – it used to say 6/16, but the event is on 15. SharePoint Saturdays are typically on Saturday 😁 Thanks for pointing that out! What will I be speaking about? […]

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Thanks for an amazing 2018!

Year 2018 is drawing to an end, and it’s a good time for some reflection on what an interesting year it’s been! Personally, quite a few things have happened in the last 12 months – I moved to Canada, started a new/old job, became a father, spoke at awesome events, met a lot of cool people – just tons of awesome stuff. But personal things aside, 2018 has been an interesting and rewarding time to be writing this blog! 2018 was the year when the […]

The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud

Note: While this was originally posted around the Christmas of 2018, and some company or seller names might not be relevant as scammers come and go, the principles in this blog post seem to be valid since early 2000s to probably until 2038 (when the Internet ends due to the Epochalypse). Tis the season for gifts, and lots of y’all might be thinking about giving out a digital gift. Maybe some of the more practical ones think about gifting someone a subscription of Office 365 […]

Speaking at SPS New England on 10/20/2018!

Another exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New England on 20. of October in Boston! My session about Microsoft Flow, Azure Functions and a bit of Cognitive Services was accepted for the developer track. I’ll be presenting at 9:00 – 10:15 AM in room Cranmore. There’s a lot of awesome sessions and other awesome speakers, and I’m honored to share with the community what I’ve learnt lately while playing with some of the latest and greatest of Microsoft’s tools! :) […]

Microsoft Stores Backups For 14 Days, But Restores Them in 15

A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online

So Microsoft keeps 14-day rolling backups of your SharePoint Online sites. That’s awesome – no need to take backups anymore, right? Not so fast. It’s not always so easy, and by just relying on these backups, you risk losing your data. Forever, I might add. This cautionary tale is about SharePoint Online, but I’d say you’ll need to take caution anytime you’re dealing with Microsoft’s automatic backups. The story starts with the client doing something unwise – a prime example would be them removing the […]

Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville!

I was at Cloud Friday and SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2018 (SPSNash18), and had my session on Saturday – that was a lot of fun! I had the chance to meet a lot of new (and some “old”) people, and I think the community liked my session about Citizen Development tools (for “actual developers”) quite well! Posts Related to “Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville!”:Materials for my SPS TC session: “Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers” now…The Scary Anatomy of […]

SharePoint Saturday Houston session banner

Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18!

This Spring is crazy – so many cool announcements to make! I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Nashville on 5.5.2018. This one’s a completely new SPS event for me, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track! Based on the feedback from earlier sessions, I’m really excited to speak to the community about the cool new toys Microsoft is giving us! :) Posts Related to “Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18!”:The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site […]

Citizen Developer tools session at SharePoint Saturday Houston

Thanks for coming to SPS Houston! Check out the slides and demos :)

I had awesome time at SharePoint Saturday Houston! I had a lot of fun meeting a lot of new people, and I think the community liked my session about Citizen Development tools quite well! Posts Related to “Thanks for coming to SPS Houston! Check out the slides and demos :)”:Materials for my SPS TC session: “Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers” now…Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville!Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness

Speaking at SPS Houston 4/28/18!

Another exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Houston on 28.4.2018! It’s a completely new SPS event for me, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track with some other really professional speakers. I’m really hyped to share more of the cool stuff I’ve been working on! Posts Related to “Speaking at SPS Houston 4/28/18!”:The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License FraudSharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to!Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18!

Materials for my SPS TC session: “Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers” now available!

Whoops – this post comes quite late, as the session was a couple of weeks ago already. I recently had a session at SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) and thought I’d share my materials and document my experiences. Oh, and do the shout-outs, since I referenced some and tools by some extremely talented people! Posts Related to “Materials for my SPS TC session: “Citizen Developer Tools are not just for Citizen Developers” now available!”:USA, 2: Traveling to Chicago O’Hare for Business and LeisureA […]

Speaking at SPS Twin Cities on 4/14/2018!

Exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) on 4/14/42018! It’s one of the biggest SPS events worldwide, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track. I’m really hyped to share some of the cool stuff I’ve been working on! Posts Related to “Speaking at SPS Twin Cities on 4/14/2018!”:The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site collectionSpeaking at SPS Houston 4/28/18!

Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness

I won a hackathon! They had fun topics, it was a cool challenge, a well organized event, and had cool prizes. Since this is the first hackathon I ever took part in, I thought I’d post something about my experience and the solution(s) I figured out. Posts Related to “Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness”:SharePoint-Teams -integration using a tabThe Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License FraudA cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online

USA 5: Working for Valo Intranet – and what’ve I been up to last few months

I haven’t actually written that much about my daily work on this blog. I’m currently mostly involved with the Blue Meteorite’s North America team, and specialized in partner acquisition and support. Most of my time is spent either onboarding new partners, or supporting the old ones in their Valo Intranet deployments. And boy, is that not a lot of fun to do! Never before have I been able to work with so many talented people from so many different organizations, and that’s been both challenging […]

EIG sucks, Site5 sucks, Bluehost sucks, Hostgator sucks...

One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting (EIG / Site5 review) – part 2

I was able to actually get most of the money EIG got from me back from them by opening a Visa claim. In this short post, I’ll try to explain how you can stop your money from being funneled to EIG’s greedy hands… Even if your hosting provider was taken over by them. What happened to Site5 (and others that were acquired/savaged by EIG)? I was a customer of Site5 pretty happily for a long time, until Endurance International Group (EIG) took them over, wrecked […]

USA, 4: You really, REALLY need a car to get around. Hence, Cadillac!

This is the fourth post depicting me and my wife’s excursion to the USA. We are in the country to study, travel, business and leisure. Short version of the post: we went and got a car, because we didn’t have any other options. So, what’s up? We’ve been in the country for a couple of weeks. If there’s one thing, that’s become painfully clear, it’s the fact that you really need a car to get anywhere in this country. The only stores in Whitewater are […]

USA, 3: Epic and local IT industry excursions

This post is about our first excursion with the international student group to see Epic System’s HQ. During the first days I also walked around the town a bit in search of wall plug adapters, and accidentally made contact with the local IT industry. Getting my weird EU tech working in the States I took some tech with me to States – namely a laptop, its dock and a couple of mobile phones. I didn’t want to purchase transformers and charger for all my devices, […]

USA, 2: Traveling to Chicago O’Hare for Business and Leisure

This is the second post about me and my wife’s excursion to USA and all the traveling we did. We’ll be spending 6 months in the country, to study, attend conferences, travel and compare the culture to Finland. Hopefully we’ll learn something about ourselves and the world along the way! Transatlantic flight The trip from Kangasala to Whitewater was definitely not a fast one. Driving from Kangasala to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in Finland took a few hours, we had to wait for the flight for a […]

USA, 1: Initial Thoughts

I’m staying in the United States of America for the first 6 months of 2017 for both work and leisure. In case you’d need to contact me during that time, that’s doable by normal means (Twitter/email). Just the timeframe’s a tad different due to my location being 8 hours from Finland (-6 UTC time zone). This blog post kind of sets the initial mood and expectations for the trip. Excuse me – who’s doing what? So – we are going to United States. But why? […]

One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting (EIG/Site5 review) – part 1

Okay, so this is going to be a bloggish rant about EIG – Endurance International – a web “hosting” company that’s ruining the web for everyone. If you hate salty rants, browse something else, please! I’ve been an independent web developer since around 2004, and even though maintaining and hosting websites is currently more of a hobby than anything else, I still do have a few dozen customers with one or more websites or other systems hosted by me. For more than 10 years I’ve […]

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Solutions are worthless unless shared! Antti K. Koskela's Personal Professional Blog