devi's blog

What they don't teach you in many engineering colleges around the world - Soft Skills

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:27:00 GMT

This month, I had the opportunity to speak to students at a couple of engineering colleges. I spoke about essential skills they wouldn’t learn in engineering college – hard to teach and hard to quantify soft skills such as collaboration, customer empathy, creativity, integrity during execution and the ability to dream big. I don’t claim to be good at these soft skills but I do have the advantage of observing those who do possess an abundance of these soft skills.

In future posts, I will elaborate on the soft skills I introduced during these talks and maybe also publish and interview or two with some experts. In the meanwhile, here are some useful links for students to learn more about soft skills.

O msdn Success Builder – free courseware in softskills

O http://www.microsoft.com/india/successbuilder

O Microsoft S2B - Student to Business

O http://s2b.experience.com

O Office Online Career Center

O http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/career-center-for-job-seekers-powered-by-monster-com-FX010350405.aspx?redir=0

O Microsoft Dreamspark - Dream Today, Create Tomorrow

O https://www.dreamspark.com

O Microsoft Student – College Ready, Career Ready

O www.microsoft.com/student

- devindra

Adieu to Expression Program Management

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:44:00 GMT

I have transitioned into a new role. For the latest on Expression, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/expression

Expression Web available for purchase

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:24:00 GMT

Microsoft Expression Web is now available for purchase (as of Dec 4^th, 2006) for $299 US. Microsoft FrontPage customers can upgrade for US $99. For full pricing, availability, and new information about the product, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/expression which has recently been updated.

Training Videos for Expression Web Designer

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 02:37:00 GMT

New Expression Web Designer demo/training videos are now available on http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/demos.mspx?v=wd_layout

Getting Acquainted With The Microsoft Expression Family

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:47:00 GMT

Great article by Marius Bancila

Getting Acquainted With The Microsoft Expression Family

CodeGuru - 6/9/2006

See an overview presentation on the three tools from the Microsoft Expression family: Expression Graphic Designer, Expression Interactive Designer, and Expression Web Designer.

It's Here -- CTP1 of Expression Web Designer

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Mon, 15 May 2006 16:00:00 GMT

We are pleased to present the very first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Expression Web Designer.

To use ASP.NET-based features in Expression Web Designer CTP1, you need to download the Microsoft .NET Framework (see link below).
To uninstall Expression Web Designer CTP1, use the Control Panel (Start | Control Panel) instead of running the setup again.

Expression Web Designer CTP1 contains a known issue that causes the Help viewer to prevent you from downloading the latest version of Help.

Expression Web Designer CTP1 (230M)
Expression Web Designer CTP1 Help (1.2 MB)
.NET Framework Version 2.0 (22.5 MB)

CTP Resources

Register for Announcements
Join the Discussion Group (Browser based)
Join the Discussion Group (Newsgroup Reader based)
Report a Bug

Mix06 Videos

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Fri, 05 May 2006 19:34:00 GMT

Microsoft has posted videos from all sessions at Mix06. These include demos of Expression Web Designer among other cool demonstrations and keynotes.

http://sessions.mix06.com/

http://blog.mix06.com/virtualmix/

Lynda Weinman & Wayne Smith on Microsoft Expression Web Designer

What happened to Frontpage?

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 22:18:00 GMT

After nearly a decade of innovations, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. But we won’t stop supporting the product. Nor are we ignoring the needs of our existing FrontPage customers. Four new products will meet their diverse needs as well as those of professional web designers and developers.

Which tool is right for you?

· Use Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 if you are a solution creator using SharePoint technologies.

· Use Expression™ Web Designer if you are a professional Web Designer building standards based, broad reach CSS/XHTML Web sites.

· Use Visual Studio 2005 if you are a Web developer who wants to build high performance, robust, and enterprise ready Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0.

· Hobbyists and enthusiasts can also get Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which is a new, easy to use, and easy to learn development for building Web sites.

The RicRe value of a website

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 21:26:00 GMT

Rich versus Reach – We know that the richer a website, the poorer its reach. The Holy Grail for all websites of course is attaining the max value for (Rich) x (Reach) i.e. Maximum richness combined with maximum reach.

For the sake of discussion, let’s call the product of Richness x Reach of a website the RicRe value of a website.

Today,

Web sites built with Windows Presentation Foundation will have the maximum richness but the poorest reach.
Web sites built with Macromedia Flash will have very high richness plus impressive reach
Web sites built with AJAX will have impressive richness with extremely high reach

It’s hard to determine which of the above three options will have the highest RicRe value.

What is the RicRe value for your website?

How should we measure the richness of a website?
How should we measure the reach of a website?

Paying attention to Conversion Rates

4B4902D5-F4CA-4876-BAC9-A9008734B634 — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 20:17:00 GMT

One key facet of designing a great user experience on a website is paying attention to the website's 'conversion rates'. Conversion rate is the rate at which users on a website perform a desired action. Reading Jesse James Garret’s book on User Experience last night, I started thinking about the conversion rates for different kinds of websites.

For a retail site like Amazon.com, the conversion rate measures how many visitors actually purchase a product.

For a news and information site like cnn.com, conversion rate measures how many people sign up to receive email newsletters and become a part of the CNN news community.

For a customer support site like support.dell.com, the conversion rate measures how many people actually found the answer they were looking for.

As you design your websites, make sure you know what your conversion rate will measure, the target conversion rates, the actual conversion rates etc. Make sure you build features into your website to effectively measure and report progress on the conversion rate. This can help you design an effective user experience.