Craig Bailey on Microsoft

The links between Atlassian and Microsoft Office grow stronger with Atlassian’s latest Connector between Confluence (their Wiki product) and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this case the Connector allows content on the Confluence Wiki to be imported, edited and updated from Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Check out the super simple 3 and half minute video to gain a good understanding. The thing I like about the Atlassian offering is how damn simple it is!

(Note: This is different to their SharePoint connector beta that they released last October)

This is of particular interest to us at Elcom because we’ve recently started work on a Microsoft Word Connector for our Community Manager product. The result will be to allow editing/update of content (ie content management) directly from Word. (Note: not to be confused with document management eg how the Office suite does works with SharePoint – which is something else entirely, but something we are also looking at). 

BTW if you are interested in Atlassian and Microsoft Office then make sure you’re at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) next week (Wed 27 Aug) - we’ve got Mark Hetherington (from TileFile) talking about how he runs his whole software company on Atlassian JIRA & Confluence, and then Alistair Speirs talking about how to improve business processes using Forms in Microsoft Office. Well worth attending – details here.

(via Alistair Speirs)

The Techies at Elcom completely reformatted my machine a few weeks back and installed Vista 64bit. This has been great because I can now access all 4GB of RAM (woo hoo!). But there's been another unexpected benefit...

It turns out that there's no printer drivers for our Elcom printers that work on Vista 64. So, for the last 4 weeks I've been unable to print anything.

Here's the thing: For the first few days I found it really annoying - I'd lost a part of my normal daily processes. But after that I didn't notice it all. In fact, I haven't printed a single thing for almost a month. And I don't miss it.

I tend to take my notebook to more meetings (since I use it to pull up meeting agendas etc) and that in itself has been a bonus - I spend far too much time in meetings these days, and being able to check email, intranet articles, etc has been a productivity boost.

So Microsoft, whilst I may have started this post tongue-in-cheek, I finish it with thanks. Seriously.

(I've told the Techies NOT to tell me if they find any drivers that work...)

We're launching a new product this week. This Thursday morning to be exact.

You may know that Elcom, where I work, is a web company that builds products for medium to large companies. We do intranets, extranets, portals, web sites, etc. Plus we do a fair bit of customisation.

Over the last few months we've been turning things around a little and 'productizing' our custom projects into products in their own right.

TrainingManager.NET is one such product.

Although it's already live in two reasonably large companies, we're only now doing the official launch. It's a breakfast this Thursday and I hear the food is going to be good!

There's a press release here if you're interested in the marketing spin :-)

Here's the details if you are interested in coming along (free to attend):

• Date: Thursday 29 May 2008
• Time: 8:00am - 10:00am
• Location: Hamilton Parkes Room, NSW Trade and Investment Centre, Level 47, MLC Centre, 19 Martin Place, Sydney, NSW
• Register here

It's got a little bit of press (here, here and here), but the main thing I like is that it is running on .NET 3.5 - yay for that! Of course you shouldn't just consider a product based on the underlying technology - that'd be a feature not a benefit right?

So, what does TrainingManager do? Here's an description (complete with terms like 'cutting edge' ;-)). We'll have some nicer collateral coming in the next few weeks with cool screens shots, a micro site, etc.

Basically - as the name suggests - it allows a company to manage all the training for its staff and customers. It covers training pathways, competencies, face-to-face training, training events, testing & verification, plus a whole bunch of other goodies. If this is of interest let me know and I'll post a few more details (or contact me and we can chat).

BTW we're thinking of re-branding the product with a cool, hip, sexy name. Angus suggested 'Mustang'. Why? No particular reason - it just sounds cool. Elcom Mustang. Hmmmmm I think I like it.

I'm open to suggestions...

I'm heading home from the US of A today, which sees me arrive back in Sydney (hopefully) on Thursday morning 24 April.

CodeCampOz

The next day I head down to Wagga for CodeCampOz. That finishes up on Sunday (27 April) and I fly back to Sydney that night.

Elcom

On Monday I'm back in the office, ready to start spreading the good news to the team (within NDA guidelines of course - the best comment I read on Twitter regarding disclosure was this: What happens in Seattle, stays in Seattle).

It's going to be an interesting week. We've been working through the Elcom strategy lately, and it's time to change gears a little. The MVP Summit couldn't have come at a better time.

SBTUG

Next Wednesday (30 April) we've got the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) on. Mitch Denny is presenting on the Evolution of Enterprise Software Development. This will be interesting for all attendees since Mitch is such a thinker as well as accomplished developer. More details here.

Perhaps not quite so interesting (and hence why I'm presenting second - you can leave after half-time pizza if you like) will be my presentation on the Microsoft 2008 stack. I say 'perhaps' because if you have been caught up in all the recent launch events then you'll know pretty much everything I'll be covering.

It'll be a high level overview of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. It'll be focused on business benefits of these products, as opposed to just highlighting features, and I promise not to get caught up doing marketecture fluff. It'll be looking at things like the differences between Windows Standard and Web Server editions, the benefits of IIS7, What it means to 'target' different Framework versions, Why spatial data types are important and things like that.

At our last meeting there were a number of people who requested more information on the stack, so my session aims to introduce it all. In future meetings we'll drill into a little more detail.

But make sure you come for Mitch Denny's session.

Brad Marsh has a few screenshots of our upgrade experience from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to 4.0

Summary: it went extremely well.

My comment: CRM 4.0 seems to be slower than 3.0 but since it's running on an old server, it was expected (new server infrastructure coming in the next few weeks - Yay!). Overall, no real problems. Our CRM scenario is pretty standard with only a few customizations, so we aren't really representative of companies that have lots of changes.

We've done a little more testing of our product on the Microsoft 2008 stack and I'm pleased (and a little worried) with the results.

The pleasing part: we are now showing results on the 2008 stack as being 16X faster than the 2003/2005 stack.

The worrying part: results of 16X faster are very high - what if we've tested something incorrectly...

So, the goal of this post is to explain what we did and how we measured the results. Then, I'm after your feedback on what else we should be checking.

Background

First, the background.

In January we moved our Elcom web site over to the 2008 stack. That is, we recompiled our entire Community Manager application to target the .NET 3.5 Framework, moved to SQL Server 2008 CTP5 as the back-end and hosted it on Windows 2008 Server RC0. We immediately noticed that the site was much quicker. Browsing the site was faster and managing the content (through all the web based administration tools was very snappy). We then did some basic testing by launching 1,000 concurrent requests and measuring the delivery times. You can read the full results on Alan's blog, but in summary, the 2008 stack was 5 times faster. Impressive stuff.

We always wanted to do some more detailed testing, but it wasn't until Windows Server 2008 finally RTMed two weeks ago that we started testing again. This time round the techies wanted to beef up the testing a little.

Latest testing

Whereas our initial testing had been a simple comparison between Windows 2003 Server, SQL 2005 and .NET 2.0 versus Windows 2008, SQL 2008 and .NET 3.5, this time Alan set up testing for all 8 scenarios so that we could isolate which components of the 2008 stack were contributing the most. eg is Windows, SQL or .NET that is giving the improvement.

He also changed the testing method. This time, instead of just firing 1,000 requests he kicked of a loop of 1,000 sets of 20 concurrent requests. This is a more realistic scenario for what our sites experience. He fired this via a wget based Linux bash script.

The machines he used are as follows:

2008 stack machine: Intel Core2 Dual core 2.12 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB Seagate SATA drive.

Testing (Linux) machine: Intel P4 3.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB Seagate SATA drive [ie This machine is acting as a client]

As you might notice, the 2008 stack machine was acting as both the IIS and SQL server. Although not a production architecture, this was deliberate to ensure that network affects were minimised.

Results

Here's the results so far:

A few observations:

1. We haven't finished all our Windows 2003 testing yet. They take almost 4 hours to run, and the guys are fitting this testing all in amongst their normal daily work :-)
2. The main improvement is (obviously) due to Windows Server 2008, and IIS7
3. Running the 3.5 Framework on 2003 with SQL 2005 is actually slower than with 2.0
4. Some of the other results are also puzzling... for example:
5. On Windows 2008, using SQL 2008 is slower than SQL 2005 when we target 2.0 but faster when we target 3.5
6. Happily, the best result is achieved when using the full 2008 stack

If I put the results another way, we can see that adding 2008 components (Server, then .NET, then SQL) has incremental improvements eg

But there's no escaping that the major improvements are all thanks to Windows 2008 Server. In general Windows 2008 is much faster, and our techies have already switched to using it as their desktop OS.

FAQ

Some questions. I'm trying to look at our testing as critically as possible. After all, 1600% improvement is something not to be taken lightly, and there will likely be a few people reviewing these results. So, I want to be clear on where we stand.

The first thing to state is that we are not a certified testing lab. So, this testing has been conducted on simple server hardware, and with tests that are geared to how we operate. We didn't have any of our big rack servers available for testing, so the results are pretty 'real world'.

Q: Why does it take almost 4 hours to do 20,000 requests on Windows 2003? Something must be wrong...

A: Yes, this concerned me as well. But here's what I didn't mention earlier. Each request we submit is returning our home page, plus graphics, plus all links from that page and any graphics and documents from those pages as well (ie wget with the u directive is basically spidering from the page). It turns out that each request is returning 6.4MB of data. Thus, 20,000 request in total is returning about 120GB. This is to emulate load testing the server. With Windows 2003 this takes over 3 and a half hours.

Q: Did you test on a smaller page?

A: Yes, we also performed testing on a landing page that returned 70KB. The results were much quicker, but in the same proportions.

Reducing page size down further to very small (eg an empty page, but still delivered by our Community Manager product) brought the comparisons closer, with Windows 2008 being only 4X quicker than Windows 2003. The 1,000 X 20 concurrent requests took 51 seconds on Windows 2003, but only 12 seconds on Windows 2008.

Q: Are the actual durations meaningful?

A: No, the durations on their own are not that meaningful, since changing hardware will obviously affect the results. What is meaningful is comparing the durations between the different scenarios.

Q: Did you try on different hardware?

A: Yes, we've managed to get our hands on a beefier machine (Quad Core 3.5 GHz, 8GB RAM) for a few days. Initial testing has shown quicker results on Windows 2003, but in the same order of magnitude (ie hours). Full results from that machine will be available in the next few weeks.

Q: How many times did you run these tests?

A: Most tests have been run a few times as the techies were setting them up and performing initial loops. All the test results are from testing scenarios run by Alan. Brad was then asked to run a few of the tests again independently. He verified the baseline 2003 Server result and the first of the 2008 Server results (ie with 2.0 and SQL 2005)

The results above are based on the last and most thorough pass (by Alan). Thus, it is the actual result, not an average of repeated tests. Ideally multiple results would be better, and as time permits, we'll re-run all the tests, and provide averages.

Q: Did you perform any optimisation of the 2008 setup?

A: No, all test scenarios were conducted on freshly installed, out-of-the-box setups.

Q: Did you try optimising the Windows 2003 setup?

A: Yes, we did. The techies tried different combinations of turning on compression, increasing memory, CPU monitoring, tweaking application pools, and other memory changes. In all cases there was very minimal change in Windows 2003 performance. The results tabled above are based on the untweaked out-of-the-box installation.

Q: What version of Windows Server is the Elcom web site running on?

A: The actual live Elcom web site is still on Windows 2008 RC0. We aim to cut over to the RTM version once our SPLA license is finalised... 2008 SPLA licensing should be available this month (fingers crossed).

Q: Are you using any .NET 3.5 specific features in these scenarios?

A: No, we've made sure that the code base is exactly the same, the only change has been the framework version targeted during compile (and of course the IIS settings).

Next steps for Elcom

So, where to from here?

We'll be moving a few of our client sites over to Windows 2008 hosting in the coming weeks (assuming licensing is all sorted). A few of our staging servers are already in transition. And from April onwards we plan to move all our hosting onto Windows 2008. [We'll still be supporting clients who host on Windows 2003 of course.]

Next, we are upgrading clients to .NET 3.5.

Our next Community Manager.NET release (in mid March) will be available in both 2.0 and 3.5 versions. The 3.5 version (which we are referring to as Community Manager 2008) will be essentially the same code base, with only a few new 3.5 features used for off-line services (the new System.AddIn stuff).

Our code base will be branched into the two versions for approximately 3 months until we've completed our testing and moved all clients over to .NET 3.5. After that we will return to having the one code base (ie just targeting 3.5).

SQL Server 2008 is still too early to make plans for. Whilst we will continue testing with it (especially with CTP6 just released), we won't be moving any production systems (other than our own web site) over to it until much later in the year.

Over to you

There's our situation. I hope it is helpful (or at least of some interest).

I'm keen to answer any questions, hear any criticisms and take on board any suggestions.

Please contact me via any method on my Contact page.

As Angus notes, we've got a nice little flash animation on the Elcom web site alerting users to our Community Manager CMS product running on the Microsoft 2008 stack. Here's the details of how we installed and tested, and the result: 500% performance increase. (You read that right - 500%)

Brad Marsh, one of the techies at Elcom, discusses his experiences with SQL Server 2008 database encryption.

Further to my post about career plans for developers at Elcom, I wanted to mention the approach of encouraging staff to build their personal profiles.

It can be summed up in this attitude:

Your job (as a developer and employee) is to be so good that you are being chased by head-hunters all the time.

My job (as Technical Director) is to make the work environment so good that you don't want to leave.

I feel this is a sensible approach, for a number of reasons:

Firstly, I don't want staff who aren't improving. Rather I want them continually pushing themselves to do bigger and better things. Momentum must be maintained. If we aren't improving, then realistically we are going backwards...

Secondly, the better skilled they are, the better the result for Elcom.

Thirdly, the better well known they are, the more well known Elcom becomes.

Fourth, the better well known Elcom is, the better the caliber of candidate we can attract to join and grow Elcom.

Keeping a great team in place is a tricky thing, and I'm not claiming to be an expert at it. But in case you think that encouraging developers to be head-hunted is a crazy notion, here's a few tidbits I've observed over the years.

The job market is tight

The first is that the IT market is very tight. If a developer wants to find a new job, they won't have much trouble. And *some* recruiters are becoming more ruthless and unethical by the day...

So, if you assume that your staff will stay on board simply because they can't get another job - you are deluding yourself - either that or they are so bad that they really can't get another job and you should have fired them ages ago anyway!

Feeling valued

The second is that most developers want to feel as though they are making a contribution that is both valuable and valued. (Note: This, sadly, is the reason many look for another job - they feel a sense of being valued when some other company offers them a job). Thus, by encouraging developers to better themselves, and perhaps become well known in the community, we are encouraging them to feel valued.

We're people after all

Thirdly and most importantly, developers are people. Sure, they are an asset, resource, body, project plan item, etc too. But the important thing is: we as people grow via our relationships. At work we need to remind ourselves every day that our relationships with our colleagues are what affect our morale, productivity, generosity and ultimately longevity in a company. Common sense I know. But easy to forget in the over-worked, email deluged, constantly interrupted hours between breakfast and bed time.

Have I missed something obvious? Please leave me a comment.

I'm not sure if I agree with the simplicity of this, but it does highlight a common misconception about CMS systems. The CMS manages the content of course, but these days it often needs to provide much more 'out of the box'. At Elcom, where I work for example, we are positioning our CMS product as the platform that you build your line of business (LOB) applications on. It needs to provide a solid, scalable, highly performant, extensible foundation that can be easily integrated with your other business processes.