Making better products

It’s now almost an year since I started blogging seriously - blogging about work, about trends in technology, product management, user experience and usability.

It’s one year down and this is my 50th post on this blog. Not bad after all, an verage of four posts a month, a post a week!

The other I was just going through my blog stats and wanted to check out the most popular posts etc.

Here’s an excerpt

Top 5 posts and pages of all time along with the number of views

Here’s the traffic snapshot over the last year. I think that this is fairly consistent, but would like to hear from experienced bloggers about this trend line.

Any finally search engine terms which brought me in traffic, here are the top terms along with the number of clicks

Thanks for all your support, keep the comments and feedback flowing!

Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.

Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.

Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’

One particular line caught my attention

The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.

And this

 That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.

This is a very interesting snippet of information. The table on the right says it all, of course it is heavily based on the valuation from the Microsoft deal, which happened a few days back.

The $15 bn evaluation makes Facebook No. 5 on the most valued pure Internet based companies in the US. Only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon have larger market capitalizations than Facebook. This is quite incredible, considering the other honchos on this list.

The list of other top valued firms are below and Microsoft of course tops the list. Quite amazing that Facebook is valued more than AOL, MySpace and a bunch of other long timers.

Image courtesy : Techcrunch

After much speculation and rumours, looks like Microsoft has won the Facebook deal with a $240 million investment for 1.6% of the company. If Microsoft’s investment is indicative of what Facebook is worth, its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion. After having lost out on some other high profile deals such as MySpace, this will be great joy for Microsoft.

The deal makes Microsoft  the sole advertising provider for Facebook in the United States and internationally. With facebook’s mamoth user base, this definitely means serious business for Microsoft.

The crucial aspect is how Microsoft takes this forward and improves it’s partnership with Facebook. There is a lot of scope for Microsoft to leverage this deal and work on it and bring on enhancements which will enable some Microsoft Products such as Live Messenger and the Live platform as such to be integrated with Facebook.

My bet is that this is going to be a very interesting time for the Web 2.0 space as we see major players getting into this space.

Image Courtesy : Webcommunityforum

More coverage below

The social news

ZDNET blogs

Boston Herald

For Microsoft, Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 have always been dear products, with a lot of sales and marketing activity happening on this front. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s idea for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

Microsoft is going Web 2.0, and what better way than to go with Sharepoint. Some of my previous posts talk about MOSS 2007 and building Web 2.0 sites using MOSS.

Microsoft recently announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software  company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The   partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint.

The big picture which Microsoft is of course looking at is to sell SharePoint as a social collaboration platform rather than just an enterprise productivity platform by adding more Web 2.0 features such as collaboration, user generated content etc. The other IMHO is of course the limited out of the box functionality which Wikis, blogs and other web parts provide in MOSS 2007 and customizing these can take quite a hit on the timelines and cost of a project.

According to this source,  Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers. So this definitely seems to be a win win relationship and a great advantage for SharePoint users.

There is in fact a new connect launched by Atlassian which is available for download.

I’m pleased that Microsoft responded quickly to the demands of the online community. They have made available patches to the calculation problem which involves calculations around the number 65,535 and 65,536 in Excel 2007 and Excel services.

Here’s the take of the problem from the Excel and Excel services team blog.

The Problem
” This issue was introduced when we were making changes to the Excel calculation logic in the Office 2007 time frame.  Specifically, Excel incorrectly displays the result of a calculation in 12 very specific cases (outlined below).  The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet.  Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).”

The good part is that they will be pushing this out with Windows update, which mean you can have the potential fix without any explicit download. The fix will also be available along with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2007 (official date of release for which has not yet been announced).

The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!” 

The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.

After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.

The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.

The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.

Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market ADITI’s UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)

At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.

Microsoft has finally officially announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support. Silverlight is Microsoft’s direct reply to Flash and is expected to play a big role in the future of Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Microsoft’s Silverlight will be supporting Moonlight, the Linux implementation as part of the their partnership with Novell, which was signed earlier this year. They have some really cool partners including Entertainment Weekly and the WWE.

According to Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Developer Platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell. “Novell is excited to work with Microsoft to extend Silverlight beyond Windows^® and Macintosh to Linux with Moonlight, so Linux users everywhere can enhance their rich media and interactive experiences on the Web.”

Most RIA enthusiasts are however looking for the release of Silverlight 1.1 which will support the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in .NET and make writing applications for the web much easier.

However this is going to be a very interesting period, with Microsoft penetrating into the Linux user base and enhancing their experience and with Adobe working on various improvements to flash at the same time.

This post is long pending. I have been fascinated by the new generation of composite applications which are very powerful and help in boosting productivity and operational efficiency. So let’s take this step by step.

What are OBAs ?

OBAs are basically a new breed of composite applications which enable information workers to work on their legacy systems and other systems in the backend with a Microsoft Office 2007 front end. These systems surface up the data from the Line of Business (LOB) applications and enable people to perform actions on them.

What is the need for OBAs ?

People typically perform significant additional work outside of the formal processes of a line-of-business (LOB) system as they collaborate with other people via phone and email, obtain information from multiple sources in the form of documents and spreadsheets, and switch between online and offline modes for meetings and business trips. OBAs help simplify this interaction by fitting within the informal processes that information workers actually follow. Organizations can use OBAs to build their won solutions, integrate with it and connect to an external line of Business (LOB) application so as to ensure that information is easily available and people can be more productive. This also rules out the need for getting resources trained on the Line of business applications.

Typical scenario for an OBA

Let’s look at a typical scenario where OBAs can be used and how they can help solve problems within the existing systems. The legacy systems are based on transactional processes that are necessary in order to accomplish specific tasks—for example, creating a Purchase Order. What is not effectively captured are the ad hoc, local people-driven processes that people do in order to accomplish a task like this. For instance – people have to collaborate with other members in their team to get required inputs from them for completing a purchase order. The purchase manager will also require to get information from suppliers and other requirements which need to be collated. Once he has completed the purchase order, he might also have to get it approved from his maanger. The exisitng systems do not support these activites and they are outside of the system.  So these systems are being used for merely storing the data and not for collaboration and decision making.

However using an OBA, the purchase manager can collaborate with other people in his team using a sharepoint team site, brainstorm on ideas using a wiki and then collate all this information easily as this available in one single place. He could also have ad hoc meetings and discussions if his MOSS portal is integrated with Live Communication Server, enabling him to start a chat conversation with any of his colleagues or suppliers. On completing the purchase order, he has a custom workflow which routes the document to his manager and once it is approved, he has it automatically sent to the suppliers. The business application simulates the actual way the work gets done rather than just being a repository for information.

If you are interested in browsing OBA solutions built by Microsoft Partners, check

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 is now in vogue. I can see a lot of traction from companies and partners who want to build content management systems on MOSS 2007. It is also being increasingly used for collaboration portals and building Web 2.0 communities. MOSS combined with the power of Sivlerlight, flash and AJAX can give a site built on any technology a run for it’s money.

My last two projects have been on MOSS and providing a rich user experience and building a rich internet application (RIA) have been the core focus points. The original paradigm of using Sharepoint as an intranet facing portal is now rapidly changing. 

Below is a list of MOSS based internet portals and I’m trying to make a comprehensive list, so if I’ve missed out some site whic you are aware of, leave me a comment. I have added to some from here.

·  OBS

·  OBA Central

·  Bio Conservation

·  Bio Diversity Hot spots (Virtual earth integration)  

·  Alphamosaik (Partner - France, Multilingual)

·  HedKandi

·  ShareView.co.uk

·  CORGI (UK)

·  speakTECH

·  Paul Mitchell

·  Tyler Butler

·  Microsoft-Oracle

·  ThreeWill

·  EmpowerID Demo

·  Oasys (French)

·  InfoCision

·  Ruijin Hospital Group

·  UCB (Une societe de BNP PARIBAS)

·  Satama

·  Reveu-d-Etudes (French)

·  Formextern (French)

·  Cegos (Professional Services) (French)

·  Sharesquared

·  FIFTEEN

·  Guildford Grammar School

·  Australian Innovation (2007 Innovation Festival) by Eclipse Group

·  JTC Corporation (Singapore Government)

·  APAC SharePoint Conference 2007 by Microsoft Australia and Unique World

·  AATorque (New Zealand bro)

·  Wise Woman by CodeAndContent

·  Komatsu (by UniqueWorld)

·  Ditributed Logic Platform (Partner)

·  MyTalk (Southern Cross by HotHouse)

·  Hawaiin Air

·  Performance Food Group (by Dominion Digital)

·  Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust (AA Compliant)

·  Direct Energy

·  RBS Lynk (FSI)

·  McGrathNicol (by Dimension Data)

·  cScape

·  cScape

·  Games for Windows

·  WesternAustralia.com

·  Tourism Western Australia

·  Microsoft Flight Simulator Insider

·  Architecture Forum (Australia)

·  South East Water Limited (by SDM)

·  LivePoint (Partner)

·  EchoTechnology (by LivePoint)

·  Migros

·  Glu Mobile Games

·    Hawaiian Airlines

·  Virtual TechEd 2007