Craig Bailey on Microsoft

Fin has posted the news that Steve Ballmer wants to chat with developers when he comes to Sydney in November. Get ready for all those ‘Developers, Developers, Developers’ jokes. Seriously though, I think this will be a good thing – at the MVP Summit earlier this year, listening to Steve talk about his passion for the developer community was really inspiring (note: not to be confused with this). I’ll be cancelling anything I need to in order to attend.

I only just downloaded the new beta of Windows Live Writer today. I’ve been using this gem of a program for the last few years, and it just gets better and better. The UI is ever so slightly improved (especially the toolbars) but other than that it is essentially the same awesome program its always been.

By the way I’ve finally started using the hot keys (I can’t remember if they were there previously – probably):

F2 will show/hide the properties form

F9 will show/hide sidebar

I went along to the Sydney ALT.NET User group tonight, and was well rewarded.

This was the kickoff meeting for the group and was an excellent start to what is sure to be an extremely useful gathering each month.

Richard Banks was MC for the night, and started with news. I was pleased to hear good discussion amongst the attendees, and comfortable interaction. There’s nothing worse than a meeting where people don’t get involved (cues *sound of crickets*). Part of the reason I suspect was the meeting room (generously provided by ThoughtWorks) which had a huge conference room table, surrounded by 30-40 comfortable board room style chairs. Everyone was comfy.

After news, and then pizza, we moved into James Crisp’s session on Ruby and Rails. James gave a simple, extremely useful, high level overview of the language, variants and tools. The inevitable ‘which is better’ question when compared to .NET came up, and was answered well by James (it comes down to ease of getting stuff setup and done quickly on a new project). By the way, someone asked for examples of Ruby on Rails sites – Twitter was mentioned of course, but I don’t think anyone mentioned Bumper Sticker (from LinkedIn) - the biggest Ruby on Rails app in the world.

James’ session will available on his blog here shortly.

Following that Richard Banks presented an intro to Rhino Mocks, explaining the various use cases, differences between implementations in C# and VB and the general reasons for using each. I was interested to learn that roughly half the attendees use mocking in their production level testing. Question and their answers were a highlight of the session – the meeting has a very informal format and questions were welcomed throughout.

Richard’s session will be available on his blog here.

Overall, a very worthwhile event. Full marks to Richard and James for starting the group initially, and for making the first meeting so smooth.

Make sure you check out the next meeting – they run on the last Tuesday of every month.

Microsoft Research have released the Image Composite Editor (referred to as ICE by some, including the installer). It is ‘an advanced panoramic image stitcher’. It’s only 3MB and does a very nice job. It’s also very fast.

Here’s two photos from our trip to New York that I stitched together. Plus I used the perspective tool to add some interest.

Just for fun I tried to stitch together two completely unrelated photos. Here’s the result:

And here’s 3 shots of Grand Central Station that it stitched together beautifully.

The only thing missing is a copy to clipboard button. Currently you have to export everything to a file and then open it in another program in order to copy it into a document.

(via John OBrien on LiveSide)

Microsoft gets more than 25 million spam submissions a day. Makes sense I guess, they’re a big company. I discovered this staggering stat going through their Microsoft IT* Showcase write-up on moving to Exchange Hosted Services.

I’m not an IT Pro so the article probably isn’t aimed at me – but I still found it an interesting article to scan through. Microsoft basically transitioned the entire organisation to exchange hosted services (EHS) in under 6 months, resulting in higher protection against spam and viruses.

Here’s the growth in spam over the last 5 years – you’ll see that the last 12 months has seen a jump from 11 million to 27 million (per day) and constitutes the majority of all email received.

I recommend the site, there’s a bunch of interesting case studies (some are audio).

*Microsoft IT is the Microsoft Information Technology division that delivers all the global IT services for Microsoft.

(via Jeff Alexander)

Benchmarks are like statistics – they are only relevant in context.

Take this new TPC-E benchmark from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) as an example.

If you were to read the gushing Microsoft Press Release you’d be forgiven for thinking that SQL Server 2008 topped out the list of all major database vendors in terms of price/performance. Here’s the quote:

Of course what they don’t mention is that when you look at ALL the results, the only databases being evaluated were SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 (as of 23 Sep 2008). At least we should be glad that SQL Server 2008 is better than 2005.

(Interesting to see how this has been pumped out by various news outlets.)

You may be interested in the ‘other’ TPC benchmark – the TPC-C – where there’s a different story in the results.

There’s a new Outlook Connector released, and this one improves the sync features with Windows Live Calendar. Supposedly.

I had a play with Windows Live Calendar and I quite liked it. Having the connector would make it seamless to share calendar items. So I downloaded and installed it. Ran up Outlook and it crashed. Try again. Crash. Uninstalled the Outlook Connector and it still crashes. But at least now I can see some details – it seems to be crashing due to my LinkedIn toolbar add-in.

So I start in Safe mode (just hold down Control when you start Outlook) and disable the LinkedIn add-in. Everything is back to normal.

Now, I’ve been using the LinkedIn toolbar for a while with no problems, so I can only assume that both it and the Outlook Connector share some DLLs and the Connector install has put on a different version to the one the LinkedIn toolbar was using.

Anyway, lesson learned – always be careful with Beta software…

UPDATE: To clarify: I wasn't able to get both the Outlook Connector and the LinkedIn toolbar to work. I had to choose one of them and keep the other disabled.

If you are brave you can download the Outlook Connector here.

If I were a software company producing productivity enhancing tools I’d love to have a tag line of:

Use ‘X’ – it’ll save you at least a minute a day!

I think this would be interesting for a number of reasons:

1. It’s believable
2. People would be able to easily verify the claim (much better than that ‘improves performance by 39.8%’ tosh we get bombarded with)
3. The claim is so tiny it makes you think. What seems laughable at first, is actually useful over time ie 6 hours a year
4. You’ll probably assume this is the minimum and look for more benefits (ie expect to be over-delivered to)
5. The company will have credibility early on (since they don’t make outrageous claims)
6. You may laugh and tell your friends

Which brings me to ClearContext. I’ve been using ClearContext for 9 months or so now and I think it is pretty useful. It’s not revolutionising my daily productivity or anything outrageous like that, but I can tell you that whenever I re-install my machine, Outlook seems pretty vanilla until I get ClearContext re-installed.

ClearContext is an Outlook add-in. It’s basically a tool for organising and managing your Outlook ‘habit’. The premise is that we live most of our working day in Outlook, so by adding a few simple shortcuts we can make our day more productive. Even if only by a few minutes here and there.

I couldn’t really do justice to all its features (and I only use a few anyway) so you’re better off checking out the site directly. For the record my favourite feature is the ‘Defer’ button.

It’s a great product and I recommend it. They have a free version and a Professional version (which I have – yep I shelled out the bucks).

My only problem with ClearContext… their claims. If I’d seen their annual saving calculator before I’d purchased I’d have thought twice… If you want an example of ROI marketing gone too far make sure you click on the Calculate button.

They’ve just released their new version which I downloaded and installed straight away. As usual it is fast, intuitive and saving me time – a minute at least :-) - every day.

Product good. Marketing… not so good

It’s been an interesting exercise thinking about marketing at Elcom over the last few months.

In my opinion (biased as I am) I think we have an excellent product. However, something we haven’t been very good at is the marketing side of things. Often people have heard of us, but they don’t really know what we do. We mention that we have  a content management system (CMS) product and they ask how it compares to Wordpress… 

We’ve obviously not communicated our differentiation very well! (And conversely Wordpress has been very good at getting its brand out)

A change is coming

But I’m glad to see that our marketing is starting to change (although it is only early days) and we are getting the message out a little better. If you take a look at our new site for example, we’ve aimed to highlight our products as well as focusing more on what our customers (and potential customers) are looking to solve.

Working on the wrong stuff

A trap of course, is that many companies (Elcom included) tend to take on the wrong kind of work. A profitable opportunity comes along and we find it hard to resist, even if it is a departure from our core skill-set. This is problematic (since we probably won’t deliver a superior solution) and costly (especially in terms of opportunity cost – our resources could be better utilised elsewhere)…

What’s the point of this post?

Apart from being a shameless plug for Elcom :-), it’s also an important reminder for technical people in general. My role is primarily a technical one, and yet more and more it is clear that I’m really in business development.

As developers we can often fall into the trap of thinking that great technology is all it takes (ie ‘build it and they will come’). This is only half of the equation. As developers we need to understand the problem from a business perspective (as well as a technical challenge). Obvious I know, but often neglected.

Combining this thought with the trap highlighted earlier, we can see where marketing fits in: It’s about ensuring there is a good fit between the problem our client is experiencing and the solutions we can provide. Clients want to find someone appropriate to solve their problem, and we want to work with clients that we can greatly help.

And by marketing I mean the strategic market segmenting, informed targeting and proper execution (ie it’s not about having a few brochures, glossy web site and generalised AdWords).

So, here’s my point: Marketing is a good thing. It’s all about getting the right people connected.

(Interesting factoid: Microsoft has more people in sales and marketing than they do in development)

About Elcom

So, given that this post is 50% advertisement for Elcom, let me at least take the opportunity to clarify what we do:

What does Elcom do?

Elcom is in the Web Content Management space (Wikipedia article here). That is, we help clients use their web, intranet and extranet to improve business.

Companies have woken up to the fact that their web assets need to improve processes, bring in revenue, cut costs etc, not just act as brochure-ware (and note: I’m including fancy Flash, Silverlight and dynamic sites as brochure-ware).

Elcom is both a product company (see our products) and a services company (see our services).

What does the CommunityManager.NET product do?

Community Manager* is our flagship Enterprise Web Content Management product. It’s been around for a while (very stable), has a ton of modules (this should clear up any comparisons with Wordpress) and is well supported (we have a dedicated helpdesk and technical support team).

The key to content management is simple tools. Community Manager has a really slick interface for managing thousands of pages easily and securely. It is perhaps ironic, that with all the features our product has, often the highest priority for clients is just having something that their staff can actually use!

(You’d be surprised at how many CMS products are practically useless once you start managing more than a hundred pages or have multiple content authors)

Aside: Our latest version is released later this month (sneak peak here). And we also have products for managing corporate training, and enabling enterprise search.

Our clients

Our products are targeted at mid-to-large size companies (ie with possibly hundreds, but usually thousands of pages). Community Manager is behind many large sites you may have dealt with (eg Austrade, Hyundai, Lend Lease, D-Link, Selleys).

Many of our clients are running their entire business on Community Manager.

How can Elcom help?

Our clients tend to be a little confused (possibly frustrated) about how to best harness the web, create a useful intranet, enable an extranet, put up an online store, manage a portal, etc.

We’ve been able to help them

• sort out their real business requirements
• deal with all the stakeholders, and then
• provide all the services they need in order to make it happen, including:
  • project management
  • scoping
  • information architecture
  • graphic design
  • SEO
  • custom development
  • implementation
  • hosting
  • helpdesk

Here’s a few interesting scenarios we’ve delivered lately. And here’s a few case studies (with plenty more being written up in the coming weeks).

If you’ve got any questions feel free to give me a call to discuss: +61 2 9209 4468 (or use my contact page)

Summary

We’ve finally woken up to the fact that marketing is a good thing!

Our product and service offering isn’t changing much, but the way we connect with companies is. It’s about ensuring we’re a good match and probably saying ‘No’ more often.

End of advertisement :-)

* We refer to it as Community Manager, CommunityManager.NET and CM depending on the context. The names are interchangeable.

Referral: We’ve engaged The Jenkins Partnership to help organise all our marketing strategy and execution. Feel free to contact Leighton if you need some of his help.

Top image credit: FAIL Blog

I can’t believe I didn’t know this – you can easily switch between the different functions in Outlook (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc) using Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, Ctrl+3, etc.

Yet another reason why you should be reading the Outlook Team Blog. See their other keyboard shortcuts here.

Here’s the full list:

(via Melissa MacBeth)