Making better products

I am currently working as a program manager on couple of MOSS 2007 collaboration portals and it has been very good. The power which MOSS brings into your applications through out of the box features is very rich. Remember, this is a non techies view, so please feel free to correct me.

The other aspect to this, if you look at it from the angle of user experience and providing a rich user interface, MOSS portals can be totally customized with your HTML and hence people might not even be able to figure out that it is built on MOSS. We did some very good customization on the MOSS portals that we built by providing a very rich and interactive user interface and at the same harnessed the power of MOSS in the backend.

The following are some of the collaboration features that I found really helpful which are available out of the box.

• Blogs
• Surveys
• Wikis
• Announcements
• Events

One painful thing which I found was that MOSS does not support AJAX completely (at least this is what I heard from the dev team) and this is a barrier. But I am hoping that they will soon provide this support as AJAX is something we have all got used to in this Web 2.0 world.

The other thing which I would love to see in MOSS would be support for Silverlight. Think about the user experience in Silverlight and the power of MOSS in the backend.

 Popfly is a fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.  They have a tool called the popfly creator which can be used to seamlessly build webpages, applications and gadgets. The interesting part is that they also have a plug in tool for Visual Studio which will enable developers and advanced to tweak the HTML and also enable them to play the role of designers.I think this is a really interesting space and I can realize why Microsoft is spending so much effort and time into building this, as most customers I meet these days want a rich user interface and experience. This is acceptable considering the growth of the RIA space and the need for a page to be engaging and enthralling. Check the links below for more information. Note that this is currently in private alpha and is open by invitation only.

http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/ 

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=91175 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=381

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=308460

Following are some screenshots.

You hear about this a lot.. everybody wants an engaging, attractive and sticky site. A lot of paradigms seem to be changing with regard to what looks jazzy and what is attractive. I came across this nice piece of slide deck on slideshare about creating and designing user interfaces for the new web.

Throughly enjoyed reading through this one, gives you a lot of valid inputs about keeping design simple and helps you to think through some very usual interface design problems.