Verticalware

Loss prevention -

Apparently in a down economy like this, one thing that goes up is shoplifting. According to a recent article in RetailWeek, The British Crime Survey, published in July, revealed shoplifting was up 10% overall in the past year. London saw an 11% hike while in the Northeast shop theft had soared 22%. Wow!!

Five suggestions for loss prevention

1. If you don’t have EAS tags on your high priced items...do it now

2. Put BI solutions in place to identify employee theft...if you don't know it you can't prevent it

3. Make sure anti-theft measures do not deter sales...don't lock down merchandise, instead use something like CheckPoint's 'keepers'

4. Video surveillance...install high res, ip-based, panoramic surveillance cameras..let me know if you need help finding one

5. Security personnel in store...dah!

Commerce Server 2009 CTP available for download

4-5-4 calendars

Something I learnt today...retailers divide the year into 52 weeks of 7 days each, thats 364 days, what do they with the extra day....apparently every 6 yrs an extra week is added to the year...this is going to happen 2012, get the retail calendar from NRF site: http://tinyurl.com/men5gr

The convergence of social networking and ecommerce

Facebook: 250 million users, 120 million logins a day, 5 billions minutes spent on the site each day

Is Facebook an ecommerce destination, retailers should be drooling at these numbers. Sears and Threadless already allowed people to add items to their cart on FB and now 1-800 flowers has opened shop on the community site. I just tried it and can tell you the experience is awesome, from selection to completing the transaction, you dont leave the FB site.

I also read somewhere that china's Alibaba is adding social networking to its ecommerce site...so they are coming from both ways...ecommerce vendors are going social and social sites are adding ecommerce...I love this convergence

What do you think, will this scare the users away from FB...I am a big fan of simplicity and consolidation...if there is one site I got to for my shopping, news, fun and to stay in touch with buddies...i would love it....its like a big online mall experience

Back in action

Hi there,

After a long hiatus, I am back to blogging again. I recently took on a new role driving the technology strategy behind our ecommerce solutions. I will be working with techies in the Retail industry again..hooorraay...as you all know industries is my passion, I worked with some great people in Retail and am looking to reconnect.

A bit about my fish bowl, ecommerce is evolving. Retailers are not only looking for online stores but experimenting with social computing / crowd sourcing. Only today, I saw two new items, Lane Bryant's blogging, pics, videos site and Lands End flashy (or silvery) page for kids to design toy backpacks. Companies like Nike, P&G has been trendsetters here. Amazon defined the bar for this with product reviews, merchant ratings, cross sell/up sell etc. Then there are analytics, the obsession to know what customers are doing online. As the traffic on their websites grow, retailers are eyeing advertising as a channel as well. All this stuff fits into what many people are calling digital marketing.

Microsoft has great products and partners in this area. Commerce Servers is the lynchpin of our strategy. What MS offers with a combination of CS, SharePoint, FAST (contextual search), Atlas (advertising analytics) is a comprehensive platform for digital marketing and ecommerce...More on this later...

A beautiful day...for SharePoint developers

The sun is out after days of rain here in Seattle, there is a new hope in the air across the country...but these are not the only reasons, today we released the developer guidance for sharepoint developers to

• Make architectural decisions about feature factoring, packaging, and the appropriate usage of design patterns.
• Determine design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
• Design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
• Set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
• Manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.

For the past few years we have been talking with customers and partners building SharePoint solutions, one common concern we have heard over and over is the baseline guidance on setting up SP environment, test driven SP development and deployment is missing. So, we in p&p started on a new project 6 months ago to dig into this and create this guidance.

More on Blaine's blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/blaine

Check out the release: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx

Download and participate in the discussions, give f/b:

http://www.codeplex.com/spg

Application Architecture Guide 2.0

We released beta 1 of a new application architecture guide last week at PDC, check it out and follow along as the guide is developed: http://www.codeplex.com/AppArch

JD Meier and his team is doing some ground breaking work, developing a practical handbook for you architects and developer out there to choose from a myriad of approaches and technologies and design and develop your applications, understanding and making the right tradeoffs. This guide is the Microsoft playbook for application architecture

This new architecture guide is all about putting the legos together, with Quality attributes, architecture styles and business imperatives, using the right abstractions to deal with complexity, Sw engineering is about abstractions - platforms, tools, languages, runtimes and patterns. To paraphrase Grady Booch, identifying, using patterns is a sign of maturity of the sw industry

It was Sir Issac Newton who said that “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." This guide lets you stand on the shoulder of giants, so to speak…some 60+ architects and technologists at MS such as Brad Abrams, Pat Helland etc has reviewed parts of this guide, the product teams has verified what we say about their products and how they fit into the bigger picture

Happy reading!

New coordinates...

After 4+ years in Developer and Platform Evangelism I moved to a new team. I will be the group program manager for a team called Patterns and Practices in the Developer Division at Microsoft.

PnP, is well known for its guidance, Enterprise Library is a household name with .NET developers. The team recently launched the Composite App guidance for WPF and released guidance for Web application security

While the coordinates change, my overall focus remains the same, evangelism, enterprise, architecture, guidance, reference apps, patterns/anti-patterns, industries etc.

Wish me luck!

OBA Mashups!

composition in the enterprise has been a holy grail, but the lack of a solid app platform that allows for decoupling and provide the 'containers' needed for composing components didn't exist. With SharePoint, we have such a platform. OBAs are composite apps, created by mashing up Web parts, content types, workflows, etc.

Yesterday, at the Office Developer Conference, we announced an OBA Composition Reference Toolkit that allows for easy mashups of OBA components to create OBAs. This is a very cool idea, Information Workers can use a WPF composer to select components from a gallery that based on meta data finds related and supported components. Once the components are assembled, IW can provision the OBA to a hosted SharePoint instance....just like that!

The idea is for developers to use tools like VSTO, SPD, VS to create components, make them metadata rich and an OBA component server can discover and make these composable. While the IW can create the end mashups that allow them to perform their task at hand

Watch me talk about this more at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=382063

You can download the content and the msi from msdn

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/cc196391.aspx

Book: 6 Microsoft OBAs for MOSS

MS Press recently published a book titled “6 Microsoft Office Business Applications for Office SharePoint Server 2007”.  This book highlights the breadth of approaches developers can take for building Office Business Applications (OBAs). These approaches, OBA patterns, are based on real-world implementations in many cases. In other cases, they are built on Microsoft Office features that have a generalized solution rooted in input from customers and partners. This reference delivers the seven key Microsoft OBA patterns and provides professional developers with extensible examples and the architectural guidance needed for developing OBAs.

Office Developer Conference

2008 Office Developer Conference is around the corner...Bill Gates is delivering a special keynote...I plan to be there, we are running the architecture track at ODC, so if you want to know the latest on OBAs, go register...I will see you in San Jose

Plant Floor OBA Virtual Lab

Whether you are on a slow bandwidth connection or are lazy to downlaod the OBA RAP for PF vpc, now you can see how it works using the virtual lab:

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7091160

Three new OBA RAPs

checkout the new reference architecture packs we released earlier this week

1. OBA RAP for E-Forms processing addresses common patterns in data collection and processing using InfoPath 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, InfoPath Forms Services, Outlook, and WF. While the scenario is based on the application form and process to obtain a hunting and fishing license from a state agency, the underlying solution framework is generic and can be readily adapted to enable end-to-end processing of similar forms

2. OBA RAP for Plant Floor Operations illustrate how to build an Analytics OBA using Office 2007, SQL Server 2005, and PerformancePoint Server 2007. The scenario is based on manufacturing plant floor operations in a fictitious Oil & Gas company and provides analysis and decision making for strategic, tactical and operational levels

3. OBA RAP for Health Plans shows how to build architectures that unify people, process and technology through familiar Office 2007 user interfaces using Windows Live platform for member and coach identification, Windows Live Service Agents as automated bots and SharePoint Server 2007 for coach and member collaboration

creating web parts without writing code

I stumbled upon this nifty SP Web part that can host any ASP.NET web user control, check it out:

http://www.codeplex.com/smartpart

Development on your fingertips: Microsoft Office Developer Map

very cool:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb497969.aspx

Everything an OBA devloper needs, resources, content, documentation on object libraries etc, all bundled in a nice WPF app