Author: mattkirbylondon

  • Some thoughts on the Hodge Review

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    Here are my immediate thoughts/hot-takes on the Hodge review of Arts Council England. First, some quick ones: Of particular interest to me… Given my background and the work I’ve been doing of late, I’m really interested in the proposed reform of reporting requirements and the publishing of a data and reporting strategy. The current system…

    Screenshot of the heading of the Hodge ACE review
  • Not the f*** off bot

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    Often AI powered chatbots frustrate customers – Oura’s chatbot is actually useful.

    Screenshot of an in-app chatbot
  • Transforming Collaboration During COVID-19

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    A blast from the past this one! During 2019 we stated rolling out Office 365 – putting Teams front-and-center. By the start of 2020 the roll-out was largely complete – but training wasn’t fully ramped up and staff were still getting to grips with things. Then COIVD hit, and office staff all suddenly had to…

  • Automate Contract Generation with SharePoint and Adobe Sign

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    I have previously written a couple of blog posts (1, 2) about elements of this system – but haven’t done an overview – so here it is! We issue data sharing contracts with third parties – sometimes several a month. The basics of these contracts are exactly the same with only a few details needing…

  • Improving Audience Surveys for Cultural Organisations

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    In the UK, many cultural organisations receive funding from Arts Council England (ACE). To help justify this funding ACE would like to know a bit about the audiences that these cultural organisations attract. And this data is also useful for the organisation itself – it can help the organisation understand their audiences and show how…

    Screenshot of the words "Audience Survey", with a photo of a theatre auditorium behind
  • “What idiot did this?”

    How often have you looked at a setup and said one of these? And how often have you found yourself in a situation where you are setting something up and thought: You’ve got to start from where you are Resource pressures are ever present. If we have the time, we don’t have the money. If…

  • Remote Desktop web client errors after TLS/SSL certificate update – how to fix

    We make heavy use of Remote Desktop web and the HTML 5 client. However – whenever the TLS/SSL certificate is updated, we used to get service desk calls saying people can’t login, with the error “Your session ended because an unexpected server authentication certificate was received from the remote PC”: The usual “fix” offered is…

    Screenshot of error message from Remote Desktop Web
  • Hide Automate Button in SharePoint List CommandBar with JSON

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    A while ago I was playing with a Sharepoint list for generating data sharing contracts, and added a context-sensitive button in a column to trigger a flow. This would send the data to AdobeSign to fill into a template, and set off a signing process. Since then I’ve found a whole collection of JSON snippets…

    Screenshot of menu option in a SharePoint list
  • Enhance SharePoint Lists with JSON Snippets for Advanced Formatting

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    This will be less of a blog post – and more of a place for me to save a useful resource so I can find it again: https://github.com/pnp/List-Formatting This is a collection of JSON snippets to add enhanced formatting for SharePoint lists. Why? Let me give you an example. Currently I’m moving our cyber risk…

    Screenshot of SharePoint list showing custom formatting for a "high medium low" option
  • CrowdStrike – there but for the grace…

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    I’m writing this a few days after the global IT outage that pulled TV stations off the air, grounded planes, and made it tricky to purchase your morning coffee. And more seriously prevented 911 calls from working in Alaska. Where I work was largely unaffected. Our servers kept running, payments kept being processed, and staff…