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17 June 2004
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We have a new sharepoint portal site at the office that I'm responsible for. As with most similar installations at consultancies it holds whitepapers, templates and a wealth of other information designed to make our consultants even more productive without loading up increased pressure on them. The problem is getting them to actually use it. If you're a consultant out on site billing the last thing you want to do every now and then is run up a browser, connect to a remote sharepoint site, log in, navigate to a topic to find a form and then do wnload it before filling it out. That's a bunch of steps that your average overworked consultant just doesn't want to do. This gives me a bit of a dilemma. I need to make sure that they all use sharepoint portal and the aim ultimately is also to disseminate a lot of news and other tidbits about technology, the company and everything that's going on it. This is going to be a pretty pointless exercise though if no-one ever logs in.
So, I go to thinking about the problem today and a great solution hit me square between the eyes; .NET, and the Office 2003 suite. Office has always been wonderfully extensible, but in 2003 there's a whole bunch of features in there for connecting the Office apps to a sharepoint repository. Perfect. That answers how to get information back into Sharepoint easily, but what about getting it out in the first place. Well, Visual Studio .NET's Shared Add-In project template suports every member of the office suite, so it should be fairly easy to do a nice add-in for Outlook, Excel and Word to get to the sharepoint directory. In fact, the Office apps can all open documents directly from a sharepoint library without explicitly having to navigate there manually. So the whole problem is really a training issue, but I'm still not convinced that even with training the consultants will buy into the whole thing as quickly as we want them to.
Then the primo piece de la resistance solution hit me. I'm currently working on our development process framework (it's not a method, it's a framework, there's a big difference). For that I've got a bunch of document templates that fit into the various stages of the framework that ideally the consultants would fill in rather than creating their own weird and wonderful formats on the fly. Now, Office can actually attach XML schemas to document templates, turning the office apps into the most glitzy
XML data editors you have ever seen. In fact, that's all Infopath is in total, but that's a whole other story. Anyways, if I get a nice big well structured schema developed for the whole framework and then map that onto the document templates I've got I can have them upload XML to Sharepoint. I can even use Infopath forms for things like feature and change requests that need to go through a small business process before their finally accepted into the project. Now, with XML documents stored in Sharepoint consultants, program managers, project managers and directors have a very compelling story for logging in and seeing what's new. Sharepoint allows you to query the data you have in Sharepoint to see it in different views. You can even take query results and merge them into whole new documents. I could even knock out Infopath forms to do a lot of this merging automatically making team and individual progress reporting a breeze - just find me all the tasks for project XYZ that I completed this week, export the data into the form in Infopath/Excel/Word/Whatever and boom - instant reporting. Want to know how many change requests that customer has put in over the last month? Another quick query and boom, and instant view of them all.
At the moment though is still a very exciting but highly technical pet project. I need to look into it all a lot more to come up with some really compelling use-cases to justify it's development and more important it's adoption. Any ideas ?
10:09:44 PM 
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I'm all signed up for TechEd 2004 now (although the organisers for some reason decided not to send me club tech ed membership despite going to the event every year for the past 3). The TechEd team at Microsoft have done their usual impressive job of setting up the delegate website and showing just what can be done with Windows Server, ASP.NET and Exchange.
You can find me on the delegate site if you go into the Peer Networking section and search on my name (I'm listed as Peter Wright, not Pete). I'm more than happy to meet up with anyone that wants to, to shoot the techie breeze, play spot the American (a fantastic game if you're out and about anywhere touristy in Europe), talk books or just go drink beer. I'll kick your ass at Xbox too if you wanna take me on ;) I'm also signing up to Tech Ed bloggers so expect the tone of this blog to drop even more the week after next.
See you there.
10:09:37 PM
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I've always thought that the killer application for Tablet PC is reading. There's just so much information out there now in electronic form (be it in PDF's, on the web, text files, word documents, Reader books etc) that we need a really decent and intuitive way to read it all. Sitting at a desk hunched over a mouse peering at your desktop monitor is simply not intuitive. Running something like Acrobat Reader 6 though, on a Tablet PC, in portrait mode and full screen is much nicer. It's almost like you are actually holding the document in your hands. It's a demonstrationg that I give to a lot of Tablet unbelievers and it's usually compelling.
Looking through Stephen Toub's blog today I found to my delight that MSDN magazine is available in CHM (Windows Help) forma, for download and perusal at your leisure. I've historically just gone to the MSDN magazine website and printed to PDF anything that I needed to read offline. Having the whole magazine in CHM format is definately going to make things a lot easier, especially if it's searchable (I haven't had a chance to check yet).
A colleague also showed me a neat app called Zinio yesterday. My Acer came with the Zinio reader but not knowing what it was I deleted it soon after I booted the tablet for the first time. It turns out though Zinio is an awesome reader for working with the magazine formats downloaded by Zinio.com. I'm now totally in love with it and have subscribed to a couple of my favourite magazines safe in the knowledge that never again will I have to hunt for them in the local bookstore and then put up with the extra weight they add to my bag during the long commutes to London. It's really worth taking a look at the website, even if you never intend to spend any money there; the software is free to download and there are free trial issues of a bunch of magazines that you can download without any commitment whatsoever. At the very least it's a great demonstration of just how user-focussed (it's beyond user-friendly) software really can be.
Just in case anyone connected with Zinio is reading this, I do have a couple of suggestions. First, when running the tablet in tablet mode, it's dead hard to put an application in full screen mode by tapping Alt-Enter. You can pop up the tablets input panel and send the app the right keystrokes. The presence on the screen though of the startbar and the tablet input panel causes some confusion with Zinio. It doesn't bother trying to cover them up and does this annoying pseudo full screen effect. The only way to get decent reliable full screen magazines that I've found is to open the tablet up in order to physically hold down the Alt and Enter keys.
THe other suggestion would be to do with the annoyingly large nav bar at the foot of the screen, and toolbar at the top. It's not really that hard to make an appbar slide in and out based on where the mouse is, and again it would make the whole experience of working with Zinion on a tablet PC a whole lot nicer.
10:08:52 PM
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I'm all signed up for TechEd 2004 now (although the organisers for some reason decided not to send me club tech ed membership despite going to the event every year for the past 3). The TechEd team at Microsoft have done their usual impressive job of setting up the delegate website and showing just what can be done with Windows Server, ASP.NET and Exchange.
You can find me on the delegate site if you go into the Peer Networking section and search on my name (I'm listed as Peter Wright, not Pete). I'm more than happy to meet up with anyone that wants to, to shoot the techie breeze, play spot the American (a fantastic game if you're out and about anywhere touristy in Europe), talk books or just go drink beer. I'll kick your ass at Xbox too if you wanna take me on ;) I'm also signing up to Tech Ed bloggers so expect the tone of this blog to drop even more the week after next.
See you there.
6:47:09 PM
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2004
Pete Wright.
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