It's Day 3, and the Ann Arbor Give Camp is just wrapping up and we're about to start the report outs.  (If you don't know what Give Camp is, see here --  suffice it to say it's about developers banding together to crank out projects for charities in a 45 hour funfest).  All the work that will be done this weekend has been done.  Now, it's time to celebrate! 

The Ann Arbor Give Camp is the third give camp, following on earlier events this year in Kansas City and Dallas, and I'm sure there will be more coming.  We had over 100 developers working on projects for 11 charities, and it was truly amazing to see teams of people from Traverse City, MI, to Knoxville, TN, pulling together for a bunch of good causes! 

Huge credit for this event goes to Jennifer Marsman, who spearheaded the whole thing.  I know Josh Holmes, John Hopkins, Todd Bohlen, and many others were critical to pulling things together, too. 

Beyond just being a fan of the Give Camp, I'm especially thankful for the work done for the Golightly Academy of IT, as I'm on the Board there.  I wish the staff at Golightly could've been here this weekend, but they were off at the Annual NAF conference.  I did my best to stand in for them, and we're finishing the weekend with a solid foundation that the Golightly Academy of IT can build on.  Yeah! 

Thanks to Telerik for donating a Sitefinity license, to Verio for free hosting (the site's not quite live yet, waiting for verio to finish activating the site), and Microsoft for donating the software needed to maintain the site going forward.  And most importantly, special thanks to the awesome team that worked on the Golightly Academy of IT site! 

• Sarah Dutkiewicz
• Kevin Shin
• Mark Gilbert
• Brian Kriesel

Thank you thank you thank you!!!

Content Technologies presented at the Content Management Strategies conference in Santa Clara, California, this past April on their DITA Exchange product.  Being a DITA XML authoring, collaboration, and publication management solution built on MOSS 2007 makes DITA Exchange pretty interesting.  Even more interesting, Content Technologies unveiled an OBA (Office Business Application) during their talk in Santa Clara.  Basically, it’s an add-in for Word 2007 that lets subject matter experts contribute DITA XML content using Office Word without ever having  to even see an XML tag.  Cool!  I wouldn’t call myself a DITA expert by any stretch – but I started looking at DITA about 9 or ten months ago.  My impression was that DITA was a pretty valuable concept… structured topic-based SME authoring, document assembly – really good stuff. 

But I also noticed that successfully adopting DITA in the real world seemed to require a significant investment in specialist tooling and training that eroded the actual payoff of DITA.  So Gabor Fari (also of Microsoft) and I began discussing a Word-based OBA with Content Technologies that could complement DITA Exchange.  Would a Word OBA for DITA Exchange, I wondered, help Content Technologies take a great idea – DITA – from the specialist Content Management community and democratize it?  In other words, could Content Technologies successfully leverage the familiarity and ubiquity of Office to make DITA approachable and practical for widespread SME use? 

Gabor and I recently had the chance to catch up with Steffen Frederiksen, one of Content Technologies founders, via email on DITA and OXML, their OBA, and Danish beer.   Here’s our version of “20 Questions”. 

JM: Tell me a little bit about yourselves

SF: We all have an extensive background in the content- and document management space. Some of us have worked with structured writing methods since 1990  - and with SGML and later XML since 1996.  Managing the total content life cycle – with nothing left out – has played a major role in our professional lives: Making it easy to find and read content, collaborate around content, enabling content reuse, doing single-source publishing, making XML really useful even for people with no XML expertise and changing technical documentation from being a cost center into a real business asset – these are all key themes for us: Make it simple, to make it work!

JM: Tell me a little about Content Technologies

SF: Content Technologies was founded in 2000. Throughout its life, the company has focused on XML-based authoring tools and content management solutions – but in 2006, we redefined the company around the release of SharePoint 2007. This new version of the SharePoint platform held enormous potential for building real business solutions – and we wanted to go there with everything we had.

JM: Content Technologies has a solution built on MOSS called DITA Exchange – what is DITA?

SF: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is really two things: It is a topic-based content architecture and it is an XML-based open standard for creating and publishing reusable content.  It was originally developed by IBM for internal use and has since been released to the open-source community (now under the guidance of OASIS). The DITA OASIS Standard defines an XML architecture for designing, writing, managing, and publishing strongly typed topics, mostly for technical documentation on print and on the Web. DITA builds content reuse into the authoring process for document creation and management.

Focusing on a common topic model as a conceptual unit of authoring, DITA provides a core set of topic types derived from concept, task, and reference. DITA defines a specialization mechanism for extending markup to represent either new topic types or new domains of markup common across sets of topic types. DITA maps can combine topics into various kinds of deliverables. Content can be shared among maps or topics. Class-based processing ensures that new specializations can be supported with existing tools, speeding up the testing and adoption of new designs.

DITA has been and is being adopted by Fortune 1000 companies around the world with an unprecedented speed at the moment. The business drivers in this are both huge potential cost savings and (equally or even more important) reduced time-to-market for products and services.

JM: Why would someone use DITA vs. OXML or a proprietary schema for high end xml content management?

SF: First of all, building solutions based on proprietary XML schemas is something a lot of companies have tried – and in many cases failed with: It leaves you alone, with no-one else to share tools, costs, or even your content with. Been there, done that – and it just did not provide the business value it was supposed to deliver.  Secondly, the direct comparison of DITA and OXML is a false one:

DITA is strongly typed and has very strict rules for content structure and sequence in reusable topics. OXML on the other hand has been designed to be able to handle both unstructured and structured content, both transient content and reusable content: OXML has to be able to handle any kind of content in any kind of structure (including pure ”spaghetti information”) that anyone could ever think of putting in a Word document. Not an easy task – but I think the OXML folks have actually met this objective. As an example of this enormous flexibility in OXML – it can actually host the strongly typed DITA topics!
OXML is like a large container ship: It can handle thousands of different containers – with whatever goods they might contain. DITA is more like 5 specially designed containers – that can only accomodate a special type of cargo.   

JM: What makes DITA Exchange different than other DITA solutions – or other doc assembly, single-source publishing, topic-based authoring solutions?

SF: Four words: Standard, Open, Simple, and SharePoint! Our solution combines the strengths of the DITA standard and the SharePoint market standard. It is extremely open, so users can collaborate on DITA content using their favorite XML editor, Word 2007, or just a browser. It is simple: You can get started and produce results without being confronted by even a single XML tag – and without having to be a DITA expert. And then DITA Exchange offers our customers the richness of the SharePoint platform: Collaboration, authentication, records management, web parts, versioning, workflows, skinning, personalization, LOB connections, etc. All in all, this is a very hard cocktail to beat for our competitors.

Furthermore, we offer DITA Exchange either as a hosted service or as an inhouse solution – with a highly scalable monthly fee per user: This makes it very easy and fast to get started with DITA Exchange, with a minimal up-front investment. You can demonstrate real business value from day 5! Again, this is quite different from most of our competitors.

JM: Why did you start Content Technologies?

SF: Well, at least for the restructuring around DITA Exchange: We spotted this gaping hole in the market. There was a huge latent demand for an easy to use yet sophisticated DITA solution based on SharePoint. We had the ideas and skills needed to fill this gap and bring the solution to the customers.

JM: You just presented at the Content Management Strategies conference – what was that like?

SF: It was a very nice experience – for many reasons: Many are just taken by the ease-of-use and richness of a SharePoint-based solution. Others have chosen to implement the DITA standard – at the same time that their company has decided to use SharePoint as the common platform – so they have been strugling with this “two-standard-compliance”. Obviously this is a perfect match for DITA Exchange.

JM: What kind of response did you get?

SF: Well, 4 large companies asked us at the conference how they could get started with DITA Exchange asap, 3 other companies wanted to sign up with us as distributors or resellers – and then there was a large number of companies that wanted us to get back to them with more information and to setup webinar demos. Not bad.
Interestingly, several of our direct competitors in the DITA CMS space came to us to discretely tell us: “You have some really good stuf there”. That felt good.

JM: Why did you decide to build DITA Exchange on MOSS?

SF: SharePoint 2007 added a number of critically important features that made it possible to implement a full content management solution based on a complex XML standard on the platform. Furthermore, there is just no way any large company get a succesful DITA implementation if it is based on a highly specialized, closed XML-based content management solution: This will lead to an isolated “inside the tech-doc-silo” solution – and the real business value of DITA (cost savings and faster time-to-market) will evaporate.

To get the full value of DITA, you need an open, scalable, corporate collaboration platform – and SharePoint 2007 is currently being chosen by companies around the globe.

JM: I know you mentioned something about a Word 2007 OBA for DITA Exchange in your CMS presentation – what can you tell us about that?  For example, what does it do?  Is it for general SMEs? xml specialists?  Everyone?  Is it generally available?  Has it been hard to build?  (and why or why not?)

SF: The main objective for the Word 2007 OBA is to allow subject-matter experts and DITA experts to use the rich, familiar Word 2007 environment while participating in DITA content collaboration projects and workflows within the DITA Exchange/SharePoint 2007 platform. The idea has been to reuse all the MOSS-integration features in Word 2007 while replacing all Word’s formatting with one single ribbon, that contains and handles all the formatting available in the DITA standard. The OBA actually converts DITA xml to OXML (using custom xml parts within the OXML) and back in order to allow users to use the Word canvas for editing – plus it offers a handful of nice features that support the DITA authoring process in general.

By far the hardest part to accomplish this is to include and support the entire DITA schema from within Word 2007. The DITA schemas are complex, and although Word supports custom schemas, Word 2007 is basically an OXML-editor tightly bound to the OXML schema. The OBA is built from scratch with Visual studio 2008 using VSTO 3.0, .NET 3.5 and the SDK for Open XML (which is still in beta). From way back in the days with Word 97, we have a lot of experience in designing and developing similar solutions that provides topic-bases content authoring by using VBA and custom COM add-ins. Moving to managed code, utilizing Word’s XML-features (since 2003) and now the OXML-format gives us some obvious advantages and allows us to produce this OBA a lot faster than back in the VBA-days.

The OBA will be available as part of the DITA Exchange license around  July 1^st.

JM: What has the reaction been like to the OBA so far?

SF: A lot of companies are even VERY excited about the OBA solution: This will open the door to collaborate effortlessly between XML, tech-doc specialists and engineers, product management, marketing and other subject matter experts. So far, this kind of collaboration required that you could ”force” a special XML editor on all of these people – and they tend not to respond favorably to this! This has been a real stopping block in many organizations that we work with.

JM: Content Technologies is based in Denmark, and I know you’ve had the chance to work with a number of different companies in the US and Europe and maybe other places as well – have you noticed any regional differences in how people approach DITA and Content Management?

SF: Practically all of the companies we are working with are really global companies, trying to deal with global issues. Furthermore, the DITA standard – and the SharePoint standard - provides us with a common understanding, or a shared conceptual framework – that makes it easy to communicate around the globe.

So the answer really is: No, we have not found this to be the case at all.

JM: Your solution is very robust – something that a big enterprise would want to use.  But your company is fairly small and young (how big are you again?) – what is it like serving big companies, but not being a big company?  Are there special challenges that go with that?  How do you handle them?

SF: First of all, a lot of the robustness of our solution is actually derived from the SharePoint platform. So thanks to the SharePoint folks in Redmond. Secondly, we are busy implementing a global network of DITA Exchange implementation partners. Right now, I think we are represented like this in 15 countries. These partners will do a lot of the implementation and customization work with our large customers – leaving the core product development and overall marketing and support to us.

This model has proven itself to be very effective and profitable for our customers, for our partners, and for us.

GF: Content Technologies is a very small company, and Microsoft is a very large organization.  Can you tell us a bit about what your experience has been so far, working with the Microsoft team to develop this OBA?

SF: We are indeed a small company, but we thought we had a big idea – and it was a real pleasure to find that the people in Microsoft we are working with (primarily John Mullinax and Gabor Fari) enthusiastically supported this. They have really been extremely helpful and responsive, provided us with prospects, helped expand our network of partners, provided direct access to technical expertise inside the Redmond product teams – as well as provide vital feedback on some of our ideas for the product. In other words: It has been a pleasure!

JM: I understand you offer DITA Exchange as either on-premise software or as a hosted solution….  Are there differences between them?  Can customers use the OBA in either model?  Can customers tap into line-of-business systems data with either model?

SF: Yes, DITA Exchange with the OBA can be used in both models. We have taken great care to design our solution inside the SharePoint “envelope”. This means we profit from all the SharePoint connections and wiring.

JM: Describe the ideal customer situation for DITA Exchange – where it can really shine.

SF: Here are some key characteristics for the “ideal” customer and use case:

• Global company, with operations around the world
• A lot of reusable content, for example product documentation
• A lot of translation needed
• Fast product cycles, many product variations
• A lot of compliance issues
• Multi-platform publishing needs
• Dynamic web publishing
• Many sub-contractors (need to exchange component documentation in standard format)
• Time-to-market is critical

JM: What kind of scenario would NOT be right for DITA Exchange?

SF: Keywords:

• Content is created ad-hoc, no reusability
• no translation needs
• no component doc to customers or from sub-contractors
• no compliance issues
• no SharePoint installation or plans
• no DITA decision

JM: What’s next for Content Technologies?

SF: Serving our customers! Marketing the OBA solution. Expanding our network. And then all the new stuff that we are busy with behind the scenes…
Our mission is simple: We want to create the best SharePoint-based DITA solution in the world.

JM: If I come to visit you in Denmark, what is the best beer that I should try?

SF: …. Sam Adams (no, that was a joke). Go for “FUR Renæssance”

JM: Anything else you want to add?

SF: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” - Leonardo da Vinci

More information on Content Technologies and DITA Exchange can be found at http://www.dita-exchange.com. 

Ever wondered how the ad industry works?  If so, you'll be happy to know that Ian Thomas from Lies, Damned Lies..., wrote a good introduction.  Part one focuses on the players in the value stream: content publisher, ad network, ad agency, and advertiser.  Worth a look.   

UPDATE: Jon Box presented some slides at the beginning of the session today, and a request came from the audience to get a copy of the slides.  I've added those slides as an attachment to this post.   

How?  Go here and sign up!  The session is a 1-day overview seminar in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 12, 2008.  PluralSight is truly among the best of the best at training folks in rich web and client technologies, so if you can make the time and place don't miss your opportunity! 

Location

Microsoft Mason Office – (Cincinnati)
4605 Duke Drive, Suite 800
Mason OH 45040

More info...

Event Overview

In this seminar, you will take part in a technical exploration of the latest technologies Microsoft has to offer, and how you can take advantage of those technologies to provide a truly next-generation user experience in you Windows and web client applications. During the seminar, the instructor will guide you on a technical walkthrough of each technology, demonstrate the technologies' capabilities, and show the tools and techniques used to provide those capabilities.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) -- WPF is Microsoft's next-generation presentation platform. WPF is built into Windows Vista and also runs on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. WPF allows rich client applications to take full advantage of the graphical capabilities of a modern PC. Its powerful and flexible programming model integrates support for flexible layout, high-quality text, resolution-independent graphics, animation, video and 3D. While it is designed to exploit the full capabilities of today's high-performance graphics cards, it offers high-level abstractions that offer great power to the developer for less development effort than ever before.

Points of interest will include:

   * WPF Framework Architecture and XAML

   * Controls and Layout

   * Data Binding

   * Styling and Templates

   * 2D and 3D Graphics

   * Animation

   * Building Custom Controls

   * Text, Typography, and Documents

   * Building Connected WPF Applications

   * Interoperability between WPF and Windows Forms

Microsoft Silverlight -- Silverlight is the Microsoft's latest technology for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including video, audio, animation, and graphics for the Web and beyond. Utilizing a subset of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language)-based Windows Presentation Foundation technology, Silverlight enables the creation of content and applications that run within multiple browsers and across multiple operating systems (Windows and Macintosh) with a standard programming model. Consistent with Web architecture, the XAML markup is programmable using JavaScript (in version 1.0), or any .NET language (in version 2), and is able to work in tandem with ASP.NET Ajax.

   * Silverlight XAML

   * Input handling, scripting events

   * Graphics – shapes, text, images

   * Layout and Controls

   * Video and audio

   * Trigger-based Animation

   * Server communication – client-side HTTP networking, Web service calls

   * Data – caching data in the client

   * Browser integration

   * ASP.NET integration

   * Using Ajax and Silverlight together

   * Application deployment

ASP.NET -- ASP.NET has established itself as one of the most productive environments for building web applications and more developers are switching over every day. The 2.0 and 3.5 releases of ASP.NET builds on the same componentry of 1.1, improving productivity of developers even further by providing standard implementations of common Web application features like membership, persistent user profile, and Web parts, among others. With more than 50 new server-side controls and many new pieces of web infrastructure, ASP.NET brings more new features than any web development technology in recent memory.

   * Partial class code-behind model

   * Declarative data sources and the new data binding model

   * Security controls and the membership provider

   * Master pages and site templating

   * Themes and skins

   * Cross-page posting, caching, and form validation

   * Client-side scripting

   * Navigation controls and data sources

   * The new WebControls

   * New features of ASP.NET 3.5

   * Asynchronous pages and ASP.NET Ajax

Do you like robots?  How about the idea of robots?   Wish you had your own, but don't have time to build from scratch or a few thousand dollars to buy one?  Ever think it would be cool to control the Mars rover? 

If so, check out RoboChamps where you can develop and control robots without actually needing the robot.   Write real code to control simulated robots in simulated environments over the Internet!  There are even challenges to complete, and yes, you can program and control the Mars rover (at least, a simulated version).  The only way to have more robot fun would be if someone gave you one... and if you compete the in tournament someone just might! 

Why RoboChamps and whose behind it? 

Microsoft created RoboChamps to help people overcome some of the traditional challenges of learning to develop for (ok, play around with ) robots, and to help folks interested in robots discover the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio CTP1 that was recently released.   Excerpt from the RoboChamps overview page:

"While there has long been a large audience interested in robotics, there have also been a number of barriers to entry, both real and perceived. Robots are not widely available in traditional retail stores. If one could find a programmable robot, the cost was often times non-trivial. In addition, the ‘robot’ that could be purchased was often in the form of a kit and required hardware knowledge and skills. And if one could both find and afford a robot, there was a perception that programming one must be difficult.

"RoboChamps is a new robotics programming league that removes those barriers to entry and makes robotics available to a broad audience. RoboChamps is based in simulation, which removes the barriers to entry of availability, cost, and deep hardware knowledge."

The RoboChamps site has a community dimension (forums, blog, etc.), learning materials, a competition league, and you can get a Vista sidebar gadget to keep track of feeds and competition standings, as well as other "robot bling".   You can login with your Windows Live ID, and all the software needed to control your RoboChamps robot is free and downloadable via links on the RoboChamps site -- and it's the same software you would use to write code for real robots.  

Are you thinking, "Cool, but so what?"

Check out Mary Jo Foley's post, Why business users should grab a copy of Microsoft’s new robotics toolkit.  Would you have guessed that MySpace uses the current version of Microsoft's Robotics Studio toolkit to program across it's own distributed network?  In particular, they (and others) are interested in somethings called the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) and Decentralized Software Services (DSS) for developing multi-core distributed systems.  CCR makes easier to handle IO asynchronously to smooth data flow and better manage computational resources.  Essentially, think "theory of constraints" on a micro scale. 

The DSS provides "a flexible foundation for defining applications as compositions of services interacting in a decentralized environment" (see here).  Among other things, DSSP helps you create applications that are contextually aware and can change behaviors based on events like changes in state within an environment -- even across many different sensor inputs.  For a conceptually simply example:

"If gas tank is less than half full, set transmission shifting pattern to 'fuel-saving' profile." 

Or, you might orchestrate a system to adapt it's behavior based on a composition of many services:

"If gas tank is less than half full, set transmission shifting pattern and engine control unit strategy to 'fuel-saving' profile unless there is a gas station along my route AND gas is less than $2/gallon AND the gas station is closer than my estimated "miles-until-fuel tank empty". 

These embedded automotive examples are a small-ish conceptual step from robots, but it's also possible to use DSS (as well as CCR) in many others kinds of systems -- including enterprise applications, modeling, scientific computing, etc. 

Finally, here's a little bit of what BillG has to say about Robots (more here) a few months back:

"The challenges facing the robotics industry are similar to those we tackled in computing three decades ago. Robotics companies have no standard operating software that could allow popular application programs to run in a variety of devices. The standardization of robotic processors and other hardware is limited, and very little of the programming code used in one machine can be applied to another. Whenever somebody wants to build a new robot, they usually have to start from square one…. Despite these difficulties, when I talk to people involved in robotics–from university researchers to entrepreneurs, hobbyists and high school students–the level of excitement and expectation reminds me so much of that time when Paul Allen and I looked at the convergence of new technologies and dreamed of the day when a computer would be on every desk and in every home."

Good luck with the Mars Rover! 

Jon Box has produced another interesting post -- this time on the Office Ribbon (aka the Fluent UI).  In particular, he points out a cool add-in from Office Labs that called "Search Commands" that will help you find your favorite commands in the new UI.  People are different, and like a lot of other things, how long it takes someone to adapt to the new UI can be plotted on a distribution.  If you happen to fall on the end of the distribution that takes a bit longer to adjust, you might find the Search Commands add-in that Jon talks about to be helpful.  I tried it myself some time back (before it was publicly available), and while I almost never actually used it, there were one or two times when it really helped. 

As a coincidence, the Office 2007 UI (aka the Fluent UI) came up at dinner last night with Josh Holmes and others.  (Yes, this is what Microsoft people talk about at dinner ).  One person said that it only took a very short time to get comfortable with the new UI.  Another person at our table claimed that it took them a month to get used to the new UI because they were a "power user".  That's an assertion I've heard before -- that power users take longer to adapt.  I think the rationale is that the more commands you use in the old version, the more commands you need to re-locate in the new version.  I think there's some truth to this in the aggregate, and yet it's not true to say that a power user will take a long time to gain equivalent proficiency with the new UI. 

Which brings us back to distributions.  For a refresher, here is a picture of a normal distribution (the red line) -- often called the bell curve.  This is not a histogram, but it's similar -- in a histogram, the x-access plots an observed value, and the y-axis plots the how many times that value is observed.  In the chart of the normal distribution, the red curve is a probability function that predicts the likely-hood of any observation.  The connection between the two is that for many phenomena in the natural and behavioral sciences, if you took an infinite sample and plotted the observations on a histogram the result would be the shape of a normal curve (thanks to the central limit theorem). 

And now (finally) coming back to the Fluent UI, there are many independent factors that determine where someone falls on distribution curve of how long it takes to gain an equivalent level of proficiency with the Fluent UI that they had in the last version of Office -- the degree of  "power user-ness" is just one.  It may be true that power users, as a group, tend to be toward one side of the normal curve (the side that takes longer to gain proficiency with the Fluent UI equivalent to what they had in Office 2003), but that does not mean that an individual power user definitely *will* take longer to adjust to the Fluent UI. 

For example, I would consider myself a power user of Office 2003 (especially Excel) and it took me less than 2 days to get comfortable with the Fluent UI in Office 2007.  In fact, I would say that within a week I could do significantly more significantly more quickly in Office 2007 vs. Office 2003.  So if degree of power user-ness is not the only driving factor, what else helps predict the adaptation rate?  I'm sure I don't have a complete list, but would hypothesize the following factors could help predict how fast a person adapts to the Fluent UI:

• The particular commands a person uses -- few people use more than 25% of Office capabilities, but there are thousands of capabilities and we all use different ones.  If you tend to use commands that are surfaced in the top two context layers of the Fluent UI -- as most people do -- then you will probably have an easier time adapting. If you often use commands that are more rarely used and got less prime real estate on the Fluent UI, then the adaptation process may tend to take a little longer (all other things being equal). 
• Innate orientation toward change -- some times change is easy, sometimes it is hard, and sometimes it is harder.  I don't have anything precise here, but I suspect some part of that equation comes down to us -- our personalities and strengths/weaknesses.  We all have strengths and weaknesses, but they're not all the same. 
• Attitude -- for someone who loves being the person in the department who knows how to do (formerly) complex things, and who takes pride in helping others tap into the Office "power features", the Fluent UI could be a bit of a blow.  Now, for example, pivot tables are easy for everyone.  I imagine the irritation around the Fluent UI for someone in this situation would only partly be that they now do pivot tables differently (after all, they invested the time to learn how to do it when it was much more difficult... now that it's become simple it surely is not beyond their capacity).  Rather, there may be a sense of loss in play as the power user's Office expertise becomes just a little less valuable when others can do more for themselves. 
• I'm sure there are others -- what would you add?

After all of this, the larger point is don't be afraid of the new UI -- even if you are a power user.  Think about where you are likely to fall on the distribution curve, and pick a good time to upgrade (e.g., not the night before a big PowerPoint presentation or an important Excel analysis is due).  In the end, most people find that before long they can do more, more easily in Office 2007 than in Office 2003 -- even many power users -- because in Office 2007 they are almost instantly capable of many features that were previously hidden deep in the Office 2003 menu structure. 

Where adaptation challenges are most significant, I suspect it's for folks who need the commands that are obscure in both the old and new versions of Office (but obscure in different ways).  If you think you might fall toward the longer side of the adaptation curve, or need commands that are obscure in both versions of Office, definitely go to Jon Box's post and grab the Search Commands add-in from Office Labs.   You may also want to check out the Office team's "Help and How-to" site, as well as the especially cool, Community Clips (also from Office Labs)! 

If you've not heard of Community Clips, the site describes itself like this:

If you've ever struggled with a feature in Office, if you want to increase your Office know-how, if you want to show others your favorite feature or trick, or if you've had trouble explaining to your friends how to do something, start using Community Clips today!

It's basically a video sharing site dedicated to sharing short screen-casts on how to do different things in Office. 

Stumbled on this recently, about how finance and marketing work together -- entertaining and thoughtful!  An excerpt: 

As an ex-finance guy who now works in marketing, I have been involved on both sides of this cycle for twenty years.

I have come up with a model, based on Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying, to help finance people better understand marketing people during the budget process. Think of it as the financial controller’s field guide for understanding marketing behavior. By using it, you can ask your marketing counterparts the right questions during the budgeting process using language they understand in a nonthreatening way to help reach closure around budgets. Just like the model in Dr. Kübler-Ross’s book, which I first read in high school a long time ago, not all of these stages occur in all marketing people, and they don’t always occur in order. But they all occur.

Stage One: Denial
"I am going to ignore your email asking me to justify the cost of the local golf tournaments we plan to sponsor next year. You obviously sent it by mistake, and if you didn’t then you just don’t get it. Maybe you’ll go away."

More here: The Five Stages of Death and Marketing - Deciphering Marketing Speak

From Miguel's de Icaza's web log:

Now that controls are part of Silverlight 2.0 and that most of the high-level controls have been open sourced and that they are incredibly powerful and great to skin it makes sense to think again about native desktop applications using Silverlight.

He also talks about some very cool stuff the Moonlight project is doing around standalone Silverlight apps for linux clients, as well as offers a few thoughts on what's needed to make cross-platform Silverlight desktop apps a reality. 

Thanks to Josh Holmes for the heads up. 

If you live in New York, Atlanta, San Antonio, or San Francisco, that is.  That's because today marks the debut of Microsoft  Surface in a production, retail environment.  AT&T is using Microsoft's revolutionary Surface tabletop computing device to help consumers compare cell phones. 

The NY Times has more on what AT&T is doing here.  I have more on Microsoft Surface here.  For me, what makes Microsoft Surface is really special is that it brings 4 things together in an elegant way:

1. Multi-touch computing  -- that is, the computer can receive and process multiple simultaneous inputs.  A traditional mouse driven human-machine interface handles only one input at a time: click here, and then click there. 
2. Machine vision -- a series of infrared cameras inside the table make sure that the computer knows what's happening on the surface.  This is used for object recognition -- items placed on the table are identified by dot patterns stuck on the objects that the cameras capture and the PC inside the table recognizes. 
3. The beautiful, immersive user interface.  Designed and implemented with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).  You may not have machine vision and multitouch on your PCs yet, but with WPF (write your own and/or use these controls) you can have beautiful, elegant applications that make your life easier and better. 
4. The table form factor. The fact Surface is basically just a Windows Vista PC with some fancy peripherals and special mutli-touch interface is significant -- it portends a future of intelligent objects that are simply part of our environment.  Perhaps somewhere Mark Weiser is smiling?  :-)

BTW, If you don't know about Mark  Weiser's work, he's often considered the father of ubiquitous computing and identified four principles for ubiquitous computing -- listed by Wikipedia as:

• The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
• The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
• The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
• Technology should create calm (where "calm technology" is "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention").

For those in the Healthcare and Life Sciences industries... Ben Flock sent me some info on what sounds like a fantastic -- and free-- event he's working on (below).  Sounds super interesting, and it's a great way to learn about what Microsoft is up to on a variety of strategic, technical, and solution-oriented topics in the Health and Life Science space.  And if Ben's involved, this is bound to be a top notch affair.  If you can be in Atlantic City, NJ, April 22-24th, definitely check this out!  More info here.

---------The invite is below----------------

Microsoft would like to invite you to the 2^nd annual Health & Life Sciences Industry Developer & Solutions Conference (Event Highlights & detailed Agenda below).  It’s going to be a great event including Peter Neupert (Microsoft’s Healthcare Strategy Leader), US & Worldwide industry representatives, a broad range of Microsoft Product/technology experts, and the Surface Computing team!  We’re expecting 400+ customer/partner attendees from the Payer, Provider, Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, and Medical Device Industry…best of all, it’s a free event!  The event covers a broad range of subjects geared for development & architecture leaders along with executive technology and business decision makers.

Microsoft Health & Life Sciences

Developer and Solutions Conference 2008

Overview

This is a unique event designed for developers, architects, technical and business decision makers in the healthcare industry. Please join us to discover how Microsoft, its partners, and customers make possible the delivery of Software + Services in Health & Life Sciences.

Keynotes

Topic: Microsoft: Improving Health Around the World

Peter Neupert - Corporate Vice President Health Solutions Group, Microsoft Corporation; Steve Aylward, Health & Life Sciences Industry General Manager, Microsoft Corporation

At the heart of the health information management dilemma is the fragmented nature of how health data is created, collected, shared and stored.  Few industries are as information-dependent and data-rich as health care and few are so siloed.  It is our philosophy that technology is a cornerstone of enabling a critical and sustainable shift in the way that healthcare is delivered and managed: aggregating data within and across provider organizations, aggregating data for consumers across all of their sources, and ultimately connecting these views for better-informed health decisions and better clinical outcomes.  A company with the reach and resources of Microsoft can play a major role in addressing these challenges and make long-term contributions towards improving the cost, quality and delivery of care.  This keynote session will help instantiate Microsoft’s overall vision for improving health, and its commitment to achieving transformation through industry-leading solutions.

Topic:  Microsoft Connected Industry Framework:  An enabler for meeting today’s demands and tomorrows expectations

Paul Mattes - Industry Managing Director, Health & Life Sciences,  Microsoft Corporation

Every vision and strategy must have a plan - a blueprint for execution from both a near-term and long-term perspective. In this session we discuss Microsoft’s Connected Industry Framework, providing specific context and solution strategy across the Health & Life Sciences Industry.  Our Premier Partner Sponsors will describe how they are leveraging the Framework in the delivery of Health & Life Sciences Industry solutions.

Topic: Microsoft Health Products:  Technology Roadmap & Customer Experiences

Grad Conn - Senior Director Health Solutions Group, Microsoft Corporation

Amalga, Amalga HIS, Amalga RIS/PAC, and HealthVault.  Some of you may have heard about them, others may be scratching their heads in bewilderment. This is a great opportunity to gain business insight and technology perspectives on Amalga and HealthVault - Microsoft’s flagship Health Product brands.

Touch the Future with Microsoft Surface

You’ve heard of it..but NOW you can touch it. We will have a Microsoft Surface device available during the entire event – attendees will be able to view, interact, and see compelling demonstrations of how Microsoft Surface can be used.

Solutions Focused

· Health 2.0 – Health & Life Sciences version of web 2.0

· Connected Industry Framework (CIF) – “SOA enablement for Health & Life Sciences”

· Office Business Applications for Life Sciences  – “solutions for Life Sciences”

· Consumer Enablement Reference Architecture(CERA) – “empowering consumers in the new Healthcare age”

· Patient Safety Screening Tool (PSST) – “saving patient lives through proactive measures”

Deep Technical Content

Confirmed Technical Sessions include:

· Programming Microsoft Silverlight 2.0

· Building Secure ASP.NET AJAX Applications

· ASP.NET AJAX Design & Development Patterns

· SQL Server Data Services – scalable, easily programmable and highly available utility-based data store

· Building Enterprise Office Business Application Mashups

· Windows Presentation Foundation for Information and Data Visualization

· Managing the Application Lifecycle with Visual Studio Team System

· Presence and speech enabling your applications with Microsoft Unified Communications

· Architecting for High Performance and Multicore with Microsoft HPC and the .NET Parallel Framework

· Maximizing Data Value through Design of Charts and Visualization

Who Should Attend?

· Development and Architecture Leaders

· Executive Technology/Business Liaisons

· Technology Decision Makers

April 22-24, 2008

Sheraton Hotel

Atlantic City, NJ

Enabled by our Partners

03

Adam Kinney has a great write-up and preview on the most ambitious web media project ever attempted: NBC's site for the 2008 Olympics.  How big is this? 

For the first time, the web will be the first class channel for experiencing the Olympics.   And with almost twice the hours of coverage, access to broadcast content, interactive HD video, multiple simultaneous streams, social networking features, and more... the comparison is not even close.  TV, please take a seat in coach.  :-)

An excerpt from Adam's post:

PC World published a great article on the Olympics website last Friday which, before going into feature and technical details, begins with this:

How would you like to be handed this IT project: create a website that will present 2,200 hours of live, interactive video, plus integrated broadcast coverage. The site will have huge spikes of traffic, and operate under worldwide scrutiny, so it has to be designed for performance. It has to be done in the next 150 days; no schedule extensions are possible. And it  must deliver a brilliant user experience.

Adam also has a link to demo video shown at MIX.  See more here: NBC Olympics Silverlight - site preview review. 

And thanks to Jon Box for a heads up on this post! 

Like many other folks, I got an email today from Jim Womack, founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute.  Like all his emails, it's great, insightful reading.   I wanted to blog this one, and hoped to find a direct link on the www.lean.org site -- but no luck.  So i'm re-posting Jim's email below in its entirety.  (If anyone  knows how to find the text of his Jim's email online, please say where in the comments :-)  ). 

Dear John,

Every day humans eat very nearly the same number of meals and sleep in the same number of houses and travel the same number of miles to work. All of these numbers increase slowly with population growth, but the number of us on the planet and our needs don't change rapidly.

So how can we have dramatic short-term gyrations in an economy whose business is to supply what a relatively constant number of us need? I think of these gyrations as another form of mura, the term used by lean thinkers to describe short-term variations in demand not caused by a change in the long-term desires of the consumer. I call them the "big mura" in contrast to the "little mura" seen in most value streams every day when lagging information flows, big batches, and process instability cause "bull whip" effects all the way up each stream.

Years ago Dan Jones and I wrote in Lean Thinking that leaning the world's value streams to level demand from a pacemaker point and to produce goods in small batches with much less inventory would damp not only the little mura but the big mura as well. And there is some evidence that this has happened. The total amount of inventories needed to support a given amount of sales to end customers has been falling and the recession of 2001 was milder than many expected it to be. But we still have gyrations in the economy and as I write it appears that we are heading into another, beginning in North America.

Economists and policy makers have long accepted that these gyrations are human creations and that attempts should be made to level demand through fiscal policy, financial system regulation, and transparency -- other forms of heijunka. But until humankind gains more knowledge about how to do this – and more wisdom as well to damp the booms that soon become the busts – economic gyrations will continue and lean thinkers can't prevent them.

What we can do is to prevent the lean movement from being damaged by this recession. It is predictable that as the economy slides and companies get into deeper trouble, company executives and "lean" consultants will soon emerge with plans to get "lean and mean". Headcounts will be rapidly reduced as sales fall with the claim that value streams are being re-engineered to require less human effort. But what will actually be happening in most cases is that companies will simply be creating less value with proportionally fewer people. Then, when the recession is over and orders surge, they will rehire employees to behave just as they did previously. (Or they will convert former employees to contractors, with lower wages and fewer benefits.) There is nothing lean about any of this.

What we have always tried to do in the lean movement is to create more value for society while protecting the employees creating the value from short-term variations in demand. Unfortunately, in the present circumstance a few organizations will need to reduce their number of employees significantly simply to survive. And "some jobs" is always a better outcome than "no jobs". But their managers should call this what it is: a reduction in employment that permits them to do less with less. That is, less value creation with proportionally fewer employees in a slumping market. They should never call it "lean" because it isn't.

Most organizations will face a different choice in this recession. They can either treat their employees as an expense to be pruned quickly to protect earnings in the short term. Or they can treat their employees as an asset to be protected for their ability to create value in the long term. And lean managers will do the latter. They will view their employees -- with their accumulated knowledge of how to solve problems in order to continually reduce muda, mura, and muri -- as their organization's core advantage for success in the future even if there is cost to the organization in the short term.

I wish I could count on all managers to behave like lean managers. But I can't. Over the past twenty years many of us have worked very hard to introduce a new way of thinking about value creation and how to treat fairly the people creating the value. It would be a tragedy if the big mura of this moment discredits lean ideas and alienates employees from a way of thinking that can create a win-win-win for companies, employees, and customers in the long term.

I am therefore hoping that members of the lean community will speak out loudly whenever they see activities being labeled as lean that are only mean. And I would love to hear about positive examples of organizations with lean management that are taking the long view by finding ways to protect employees in the current downturn while laying the ground work for success in the next upturn. Indeed, these stories would make an excellent subject for a future e-letter.

With best wishes,

Jim

James Womack

Founder and Chairman

Lean Enterprise Institute

Update: Copyright 2008 Lean Enterprise Institute. Reprinted with permission.

To sign up to receive Jim's emails directly in the future, just register at the Lean Enterprise Institute.

In case you missed it, ISO has approved Open XML as a standard.  Brian Jones has more here.   What does this mean?  Well, among other things it means that the next version of Office ("Office 14" is the inspiring code name) will use an ISO standard as it's native file format.  And going forward, the evolution of the format will be managed through ISO.  Office file formats have not always been open, but have been a defacto standard for years.  Opening the file formats and making Open XML an official document format standard shifts control to Microsoft customers and the national standards bodies that make up ISO. 

Microsoft has long supported partners building on Office as a platform, and this continues to be true.  Hopefully, making the format specification open and independently managed will give customers and third party solution providers an even greater level of confidence and certainty when directly implementing the standard themselves -- for example by programmatically creating, reading, and manipulating Open XML documents. 

Similar in spirit, you might also be interested in Microsoft's "Open Specification Promise". 

On a personal note, as I travel around and meet with customers and partners, people often say things to me like "Microsoft has changed in the last few years -- you guys are more open, humbler, and better at listening to customers and partners."  I love hearing this, and hope that things like supporting ISO standardization for OXML, OSP, our collaboration with Novell/SuSE and Miguel de Icaza around Mono, the WS-* work, implementing part of the CLR on multiple platforms for Silverlight, etc, will help us keep moving in the right direction.  :-)

Timeless advice is always timely.  This, from David Olgivy by way of Branding Strategy Insider, is worth a few minutes.  

An excerpt:

• What you say is more important than how you say it.
• Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop.
• Give the facts. The consumer isn't a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.
• You cannot bore people into buying. We make advertisements that people want to read. You can't save souls in an empty church.
• Be well-mannered, but don't clown.

See the full list here: David Ogilvy Campaign Commandments: Branding Strategy Insider

Most of the debate around ISO standardization of Open Office XML file formats -- the native file format of Office 2007 -- is terribly acrimonious and FUD-filled.  For a different and interesting take on the debate, see here.  Why interesting?  The blog makes argues that the point of of ISO standardization is to actually take control of OXML away from Microsoft and place it in the public domain -- something important to society given how many people use Office. 

Rob seems to be under the impression that ISO-approval is some kind of quality badge of honor that you can proudly carry around. First of all, I think we can all agree that ODF itself is a clear example that ISO-approval not necessarily implies quality, interoperability and clearness. Secondly, how the specification was made is not the first priority when talking ISO-approval. The first priority should be:

We need to take control of OOXML out of the hands of Microsoft and back into society as a whole

This was imho the focal point of Patrick Durusau's support of DIS 29500 approval. Amongst other things he said that

Patrick Durusau: The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written (bold emphasis from original post).