Small businesses can win competition by collaboration.

Many small businesses are creative, efficient and provide flexible solutions. However, they feel weak in competition with larger businesses. They do not have as much funding as larger corporations for branding and marketing. Or do not have enough resources to grow their business.

What are the potential solutions to help small businesses to gain strength in competition?

I work for BSUPERIOR who is pursuing collaboration as a winning tool. Each small business has strengths that covers the weakness of other small businesses.

For example, we are helping a junk removal company in promoting their business. They are good in removing construction junk and we are good in tech such as website development, and digital marketing. This company does not have enough funding and resources to compete with larger junk removal companies. But with the power of collaboration, more opportunities will be available to win. We both benefit from this collaboration.

We encourage small businesses to collaborate together and create opportunities for each other. We can’t compete with larger companies without helping each other.

But how if our small business turns to a larger company. Would we forget our values in empowering small businesses?

Challenges of Using Slack in Our Team

In this blog, I share our experience of using Slack and explain the difficulties and challenges we faced.

Not Friendly with OneDrive

Our team includes Excel & Macro Developers and we are constantly working with Microsoft Office and Excel. We use OneDrive for cloud storage because it’s friendly with Microsoft Office. However, Slack and OneDrive aren’t friendly with each other!

To share a OneDrive file on Slack, we need to manually copy the link of the file and paste it into Slack. However, sharing a file from Google Drive and Dropbox is much easier. With a few click of a buttons, Google drive or Dropbox files can get uploaded and shared into Slack as shown in the image below

We are not sure why sharing OneDrive files is not as easy as sharing Google Drive files. But we know this is a huge turn off and disadvantage for us.

Message Threads Weakness

Slack has introduced message threads recently; however, it doesn’t seem a well integration. The thread is shown as a sidebar not in the main chat area like the image below. It feels like messages are kept separately instead of integrated.

On the other hand, a slack competitor like Microsoft Teams has a good user experience while messaging. All replies to a thread are listed below it in one place not on the sidebar. We prefer this style of Microsoft Teams (like the image below) more than Slack’s style.

Lack of Supporting Right To Left Languages

Our web application development team is multi-cultural! Members speak different languages which might involve right to left writing. Our web programmers tend to communicate in details and obviously they are more comfortable talking in their mother language. Therefore, we need to provide support for their language. Other slack competitors like Microsoft Teams and Google Hangout Chat supports right to left writing but Slack has no support for it.

We contacted Slack, asking whether any time soon they will support RTL languages and they replied they have no plan for it at the moment.

With no RTL support, some of our members face challenges and it’s a huge disadvantage for us.

But a Good Side of Slack

We should admit that Slack has a better pricing at least compared to Microsoft Teams. That’s a reason why we still thinking about Slack. However, Google Hangout Chat which will be released soon, might have good pricing. At the moment, we are trying Google Hangout Chat thru Google Early Adapter Program.

 

How to apply for Google Early Adapter Program (EAP) to Try New Google Hangout Chat

In this blog, I share our experience in applying for EAP on Google Cloud and how we solve it. We are Excel & Macro developers and would like to try out the new Google Hangout Chat & Meet. The Hangout chat right now is only accessible thru EAP .

We have a G Suite account and I’m already an admin. I followed the instruction and logged into https://www.cloudconnect.goog/community/customers. I took a screenshot of the page which is,

As it says, Early Adapter is for customer only. I’m already have a G Suite subscription and I’m admin. If you don’t have a subscription, you might not be able to apply for this program.

Once I clicked Early Adapter, I redirected to a page with an error, “but it looks like you don’t have access to this place or content. If you think you should have access to this space, try logging out and back in again …”. I tried to logout many times but no help.

I contacted Google Cloud Support Center. You can find its link at the footer on https://www.cloudconnect.goog/community/customers. Please keep in mind, if you applied recently in G suite, it might take 24 hours for your Google Cloud Support Center to get activated.

A couple of days after, they replied and with a couple of back and forth emails, I found out that we need either cumulatively billed for at least USD 30, or pay 30 USD upfront as a credit on our account.

I loaded my account with $30 however they told me changes on our account will take effect within 24-48 hours.

 

My first experience in Airbnb in Vancouver

I tried my first Airbnb just a few days ago and would like to share my experience which might be useful for some especially for those interested to give Airbnb a try for the first time.

Airbnb is actually someone’s place. From what I heard, house owners in Vancouver can only offer their place on Airbnb if the owner is already living there. So don’t get surprised if someone is living in the same floor as yours! But we actually got the whole floor (downstairs) and the owner was living upstairs. They were quite and honestly I didn’t notice if someone is living there.

We rented a place not actually within Vancouver city but close to it, Squamish. It’s located North side and is around an hour drive from downtown Vancouver. Squamish has lots of big houses and our Airbnb place was large as well. It had a huge kitchen in which you could fit three queen size beds! A large screen TV was in the living room. Usually, you can’t find these kind of TV’s in hotel rooms and also it was connected to Netflix which is also not available in hotels.

Towels were provided with shampoo, soap, dish washer soap, and any washing necessities. I thought we needed our own towel but hopefully, clean towels were available in the bathroom. Even they had a laundry (both washer and dryer) but not dish washer. It was a good experience to wash dishes by hand!

Additionally, they had a large yard and a fire place in the middle. Sadly, it was August when fire ban is in place in Vancouver so we were not permitted to use it. But I’m pretty sure we could use it any time of the year without fire ban. The yard was large enough to play Frisbee.

Unexpectedly, it was a better experience than a hotel and the owner provided everything we needed. We had a good sleep on a clean bed.

The only drawback is lack of communication with the owner. For example, when we got to the house it was pretty dark and it took us time to find the door. The lock was also tricky to open. We couldn’t find someone to ask these. The owner was on the top floor and the only communication method was thru text which is slow and not efficient.

They had also a desk which was perfect place to work a few hours of web application projects and Excel jobs.
As a whole, it was a good experience and I would try Airbnb in Vancouver again.

Best public place for programming in Vancouver BC

Are you a freelancer or a programmer looking for a place to do your job? ​I am also a programmer and part of my job is web application programming in PHP. I usually do coding at home, or office or other places. My favorite place is not actually my home, office or coffee shops!

I have a portable monitor which can get connected to my laptop by USB. It’s easy to carry so I could turn anywhere with Internet to an office by setting up my monitor, keyboard and mouse!

I tried programming in different places even in coffee shops. However, it is hard to find a power plug in most of the Coffee shops especially Tim Hortons. In Starbucks, tables are usually small and hardly a laptop with monitor can fit. I also do Excel VBA programming so I prefer to work with at least 20″ screen to view my entire excel spreadsheet. That’s why I carry a portable monitor.

At home, I am usually too relaxed so not much work can be done. Everyday programming at office can also get boring. Among all these places I prefer programming at library.

In the library, it’s quite and peaceful to focus on  programming. Desks are large enough and even seats are more comfortable than coffee shops seats. Library has multiple levels and huge space so I could seat at a different places everyday. I even met different people at libraries like business men who use library as their office too!

But there are many libraries in Vancouver. Which library in Vancouver is good for programming? The worst library for programming I believe is down town library because it’s crowded and actually dirty! I enjoy coding in North Vancouver library because it’s new and has a good view. The only drawback of this library is difficulty in finding a place to seat near a power plug especially during school exams. I also enjoy the libraries in West Vancouver, Lynn valley (North Vancouver) and metrotown in Burnaby. I haven’t tried all  libraries in Vancouver but I believe all of them should be good for programming except the one in down town.

In conclusion, home, office and coffee shops are not suitable for programming or freelancers. In my opinion, best places for programming include libraries especially new libraries such as the ones in North Vancouver.

Exporting SharePoint List to Excel But Getting Error “An unexpected error has occurred.”

I am an Excel developer and tried to export a custom SharePoint List unto Excel. On the page, I clicked List tab and then Export to Excel (screen shot is available below).

Then my Excel 2016 opened up; however, an ugly error came up saying, “An unexpected error has occurred. Changes to your data cannot be saved.” The error is because the connection cannot be made with your SharePoint site which requires authentication.

I found a solution to force authentication of Excel by using >File >Open >Other Web Locations >Browse and entering SharePoint site information. Now I tried again and worked!

Please keep in mind that you might get another error if you’re using older version of Excel. I tried to export SharePoint list to Excel 2007 but I got error, “You do not have adequate permissions to modify the list. Changes to your data cannot be saved. ”

I do not have much experience with older version of Excel. If you know a method to fix this issue, feel free to leave a comment, please.

Error 406 – Not Acceptable on Shared Hosting

We are a web application development company and some or our applications based on Laravel. We were running a web application on chrome but I got Error 406 – Not Acceptable, in the Console. In this blog, I share my experience how I ended up fixing it.

The application is based on Laravel and Vue.js framework on front end. I got this error during some requests from front-end. The content of this error was, “Generally a 406 error is caused because of a request has been blocked by Mod Security. If you believe that your request has been blocked by mistake please contact the website owner.” This error could be displayed on Chrome Console or on Network tab.

My application is hosted by inmotionhosting. I believe inmotion has disabled some of requests (other than POST and GET requests) so this error is raised. Your hosting can turn off Mod Security on your hosting to fix this issue; however, your website might get more vulnerable, for example it might cause unauthorized changes to your site. A better solution would be not to use requests that are not blocked by your hosting, or you could get a virtual server!

As I know, shared hostings cannot turn Mod security off for only part of your website or some directories. They need to disable for the whole hosting account. To do this, you could directly contact your hosting and just ask to turn Mod Security off. On shared hosting, website owners usually don’t have access to manage Mod Security, so it’d be better to contact them.

UPDATE: I found out on inmotion hosting blog that “the PUT and DELETE functions are not enabled on shared server due to the security flaws involved with these functions.” Well! This would be frustrating while developing a web application.

I included screenshot of my application displaying Error 406 at Console.