Say what? Microsoft Malaysia One ISV Technology Blog : InnovateOn

Innovate In Malaysia

hoongfai — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:24:56 GMT

FAQ for Innovate On

Q. I have already profiled my solution on Innovate On portal but I didn’t print out any web pages during the solution profiling process. How do I go back to my solution profile details?

A. Login to www.innovateon.com using your Windows Live ID. You will see the following Innovate On homepage. You solutions are listed in the “My Solutions” section somewhere in the upper right-hand corner. Please note that you may have multiple solutions profiled.

Click on the solution link. This brings you to the solution profile web pages. Example of the first page is illustrated below.

Innovation - Ready

hoongfai — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:30:22 GMT

Microsoft Innovation Day MSC Technology Commercialization Center @Cyberjaya (21st October 2008)
This event had attracted 43 attendees. Developers from Shell IT, Jabatan Perkhidmatan Awam (JPA) and Sapura IT were among the attendees.
The technology focus for this month is Windows Presentation Foundation and the next generation browser, Internet Explorer 8. Mr Peter Tam, Senior ISV Manager from Microsoft gave a welcome remark which emphasized on Metro Early adopter program and InnovateOn. Chris Leong, the Technology Advisor from Microsoft then demonstrated to audience on how to differentiate their product from competitors by employing Microsoft's presentation frameworks such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.
Another hot topic were addressed by Mr Rohan Thomas, a Senior Web Platform and User Experience Technology Advisor who had demonstrated what makes IE8 the best browser to render Web 2.0 web solutions. The session was ended with the entrepreneurial talk by Aila Zafira, the Assessment Manager from MDeC on Technopreneur fund, which is a conditional grant given to Malaysian to develop their business idea into commercially viable ICT projects.

Innovation - Get Set

hoongfai — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:06:58 GMT

Microsoft Innovation Day MSC CyberCenter, Plaza Sentral @Kuala Lumpur Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) @Cyberjaya (5st August 2008) – Repeated event

This event had attracted 87 breadth audiences ranging from project manager, architects, developers, IT professional to students.
With the theme of Software plus Services(S+S), Mr. Aaron Tan Dani, Director of Financial Platform Strategy at Microsoft completely fascinated the audience with his simple explanation on how S+ S evolves to deliver promising IT solutions by leveraging both of Software and Services worlds. His personal touch on the real world scenario used to demonstrate the importance of S+S effectively addressed the true meaning of S+S.
The duo presentation by Patrick Yong, Application Platform Advisor from Microsoft as well as Ervin Loh gave the developers a good start to create S+S enabled application using Visual Studio 2008. The audiences were also given a short entrepreneurial talk by Jaime Haniff, a senior executive from MDeC on Technopreneur fund to develop their business idea into commercially viable ICT projects.

Innovation Day - where innovation is sparked

hoongfai — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:03:17 GMT

This event report came from my colleague, Rahimah, who is the Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) Manager at Cyberjaya.

Microsoft® Innovation Day events offer an inspiring and productive day of previews of emerging technologies and trends, resources, and business benefits that will keep you competitive and help you to energize and maximize your technology. See firsthand, real-world demonstrations that will motivate you to create exciting new products and amazing new solutions for your customers!
This monthly event is brought to you by Microsoft Innovation Center Cyberjaya, a physical facility designed to foster strong, self-sustaining local software industries. This center empowers local startup to focus on innovative development, technology and software solutions through technical consultancy, training, industry partnership, references and best practices.
We have successfully conducted 3 events under Microsoft Innovation Day. More information about innovation day can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/events/innovationday/

How to profile your solution on InnovateOn

hoongfai — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:59:36 GMT

In one of my previous blog posts, I talked about InnovateOn and what are the benefits to you for profiling your solution.

Here are the steps to profile your solution on InnovateOn.

Sign in using your Windows Live ID at http://www.innovateon.com
Under My Solutions, create a new solution profile.
It takes 3 easy forms to profile your solution, as illustrated below:

Enroll Solution	Programs	Profile Details

When you click on Finish, the following screen appears:

Voila, you're good to go.

What's the reality for a small-sized ISV trying to get help from its technology principal

hoongfai — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:48:55 GMT

Let's face it, the reality for a small-sized ISV trying to get help from its technology principal, be it any technology vendor is rather bleak. They may end up in any one of the following situations:

you may not be in their radar
you're being shoved aside
you don't know who from the technology vendor's local office to contact
you're being ignored from its technology forum because your problem is one in a million
fine, you got the business card from one of their technology specialists,you call him/her, and your first line was "hey so-and-so, remember me, I met you at this event?", and s/he said "huh? who's that? sorry I don't do this, could you please go to http://support.company.com
you're working way into the graveyard shift, and you're going crazy because you just can't find that piece of code sample that could resolve everything in your app
[fill in the more in the comments of this blog post]

I know because I was in their shoes once upon a time when I was working as the R&D Manager in a mid-size ISV in Singapore. My technology principal was a couple of J2EE Application Server vendors, a mobile phone vendor, and a developer tools vendor. I thought to myself, those guys are jerks, they don't care about their ISVs who are toiling day-in-day-out developing an excellent solution on their technology platform.

The table has turned on me. I now work for a technology principal or vendor, Microsoft, and there are heaps of ISVs out there in Malaysia. I know of very small ISVs which are so short-staffed that even the Managing Director does some level of coding. Heck, even my former CTO could whip out a connector to a SMSC in a mere 4 hours. Internally, these group of ISVs are categorized under Breadth ISVs. I bet that some of them may be upset at me for not remembering their names even though I had just spoken to them at TechEd, or ISV Innovation Day recently or as far back as in the year 2003. Or that they'd sent me an email by saying something "I am using WF to develop a workflow on MOSS 2007, but I couldn't deploy it on the *(*^^%&^ server, but this is as much information as I could provide to you". I must have been a jerk (like what I used to call those guys). I apologize if I had been all that.

We hear you, and we are trying to the best of our abilities to address the 800-odd (some say 1000+) ISVs out there in Malaysia. As a ISV Technology Advisor, my goal is to drive technology adoption among my managed ISVs, One ISV Connect ISVs, and breadth ISVs. The technology that I could "evangelize" to you is as much as your appetite for technology, and your adoption of course. If all my ISV partners are presented in a pyramid, you know where you fit, you get the drill? Scaling out is an everyday issue that hangs in my mind. Fortunately, there's help out there, and that's when we encourage our breadth ISVs to check out all the resources online. Before you jumped into any conclusion, by saying something like "I could guess it already, http://msdn2.microsoft.com, aren't I right?", hold your breath, here's what we have for you.

There are heaps of benefits by signing up on Innovate On. All you need to do is to use your Windows Live ID to sign up, then just tell us about the solution that you are developing. And off you go to search for all the technical resources for the solution that you are building. How does the Search know what technical resources apply to your solution? Well, when you profile your solution, you would have selected all the Microsoft technologies that you use in your solution, in turn the Search returns what's applicable to you. You could also further tailor your search in this cool Silverlight search application (I deliberately right-mouse clicked on the Silverlight app to show that it is indeed built on Silverlight)

You could tailor your search based on

Microsoft technologies
Audience target
Stage of product

But the juiciest benefit is ISV Technical Support!!!!

5 hours of free email tech support for your Windows Mobile solution

10 hours of free email tech support for your Windows Vista solution

10 hours of free email tech support for your 2007 Office system solution

The types of support requests you can raise are:

· Best practice

· How-to question

· Code sample

· Technology adoption guidance

I've said enough, click on that Innovate On image!