Island Web Works

As Charles alluded to in his last post, MIGTurbo 2.0 is coming on apace, with no lack of focus on maintaining its high levels of usability. We’ve been thrashing a number of ideas around in various forms to try and come up with a system for Securing data with the flexibility required by regulatory and legislative requirements but without losing usability and comprehension. We hope to post more on how this is going in the next few days, including some of the first screenshots from our new product.

The “other” big product announcement you may have heard about is the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) of Windows 7 by Microsoft. Windows 7 is what many see as what Vista should have been and has been widely accepted and praised as being an outstanding improvement not only on Windows XP, but also Windows Vista. Microsoft really seem to have pulled it out of the bag this time, with one user claiming to have installed it on a 266MHz Pentium II with 96Mb of RAM. If you’re already using Windows 7 in its Release Candidate or if you’re lucky enough to have a copy of the RTM, try these Keyboard Shortcuts which really open up usability when working with windows on your desktop. Some of them will also work in Vista. Try them out, you’ll be surprised what you didn’t know. Our favourite? Windows+Shift+Left/Right to move windows between monitors.

Staying with Microsoft, there’s been a widely publicised outpouring of grief resentment over the continued use of their old Internet Explorer 6 browser. Twitter and various other sources have mounted a number of campaigns to try and encourage users to ditch the IE6 browser in favour of more modern versions such as IE 7 or 8. IE 6 has been the bane of web developer’s lives, with its quirky rendering mechanism and requirements for bad practices in order to force web pages to work as the designer intended. We’d all like to see it pass on, but reality will see that there are many reasons why the browser will hang around for a few more years yet, not least of which is Microsoft’s commitment to support the operating system it shipped with till 2014. Persuading users who are visiting YouTube, Orkut or other sites which are now actively eschewing the IE6 browser is one thing, but persuading corporate IT departments to move away from IE6 is quite another. Coupled with the requirements of IE7 being Windows XP or later, existing Windows 2000 users don’t even have the choice. As such, IE6 continues to represent a sizeable chunk of browser traffic.

In the office, the debate continues about the benefits or otherwise of Office 2007’s new ribbon interface, an interface that has been extended to the rest of the Office suite of products in the 2010 Technical Preview. The detractors have a very valid point in that it significantly reduces usability for users who just want to “get the job done” as they have been trained. My own discussions on Twitter this week highlighted the other side of the argument, which is that maintaining legacy user-interfaces is detrimental to innovation.

Twitter conversation with @alexdegroot

It would be nice to achieve a happy medium, much like the Lotus 1-2-3 emulation mode previously in Excel to try and entice old-school Lotus 1-2-3 users over to the product. I guess when it comes to migrating users who have already “bought in” to your product it becomes a less viable feature proposition. Two of the guys on the Office development team at Microsoft have built a site dedicated to soliciting user feedback, cunningly titled “Make Office Better“. As most users in businesses spend most of their time in Microsoft Office, it’s perhaps an opportunity to drive the future of the product from the “grass-roots”. (It’s also got a great logo.)

Nathan Friday Feeling Internet Explorer 6, MIGTurbo 2.0, Office 2007, Office 2010, Windows 7

Our 5th Friday Feeling shares some of the things that have given us pause for thought this last week.

So you’d have to have been living on Mars not to have known that Michael Jackson died recently. As with Elvis, John Lennon and Princess Diana, the world has gone crazy with news, gossip, rumour and outright lies. The difference this time is the 24 hour news channels and Social Media-effect. #MichaelJackson content has been widely published on various internet platforms including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to name but three. Watching Sky News and BBC News Channel stumble through their various “Breaking News” items around his death has been equally uncomfortable. It seems Google were also made to feel uncomfortable with the speed of the spreading of the news around the Internet. Indeed, they saw the sudden queries for Michael Jackson as a possible attack on their extensive infrastructure.

Charlie Hamilton, a fellow regular at the Isle of Man Social Media Club, shared a link she found on Google regarding how a web site may be unwittingly the victim of “black hat SEO”. Search Engine Optimisation is an inexact science and respectable web development companies will always recommend you create well designed, written and promoted web sites as being the best way to achieve a high Page Rank in Google. So-called “black hat” optimisation is where a web site employs tricks and cheats to try and circumvent Google’s checks and balances. It turns out that if a site linking to your site has traits of being “black hat”, your own site may be penalised as being an accessory-to-the-fact. Always a good reason to check people who want to link to your site.

Finally, if you’ve ever wondered what Web 2.0 actually means … or meant, an article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle might just clarify it for you. Tim and John look back over the last 5 years of “Web 2.0″ to see how the web recovered from the dotcom-crash to become an essential marketing and networking platform. New data providers such as SmartPhones combine with “crowdsourcing” to produce highly accurate data such as virtual state outlines within Flickr, Google can predict the flu-epidemic within the United States and Microsoft can create 3-dimensional imagery based on users’ photographs of common landmarks.

That last article is a long one, but well worth the read. Will keep you entertained for the weekend.

Nathan Friday Feeling Google, John Battelle, SEO, Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0

It’s Wimbledon and my favourite time of the year where my two favourite world of tennis and technology collide. IBM, the technology partners of all the Grand Slams including Wimbledon, always do a fantastic job of managing the vast amounts of statistics generated by the tournaments. This Wimbledon is no exception with integration into Social Media using Facebook and Twitter and the introduction of an iPhone application. Also interesting are the smaller innovations which occur on the outside of the core technology, such as meta-data attached to landmarks which are used to full effect by the new Google Android phone. Imagine the possibilities of local-based meta-data in CRM, giving you an extra level of detail on client and support sites. BBC Digital Planet showcase this feature as well as provide a sneak look inside the tech hub of the Wimbledon broadcast centre.

The power of social media has just bitten Microsoft in the backside with regards their next version of Microsoft Outlook 2010. The fixoutlook.org campaign has created a very simple page that creates a viral campaign over Twitter. What’s their beef? The continued lack of web standards in Microsoft Outlook. Although there are no official web standards defined by the W3C (or anyone else) on presenting emails effectively in email clients using XHTML, there is best practice. Without best practice, end-users may not find their email as well formatted as the designer, which can detract from a marketing message. Unfortunately, any degree of movement towards best practice is hampered by Microsoft’s response. This time, it seems, they are not interested in defining the standard themselves. Maybe they were stung by the standards they created alongside Internet Explorer 4 through 6?

Document Management comes in many forms and MIGTurbo provides its own document functionality alongside additional integration into third-party document management systems, such as LaserFiche. Our clients’ use of document management is wide and varied, ranging from a simple archival or audit trail for compliance requirements to paperless offices where forms are scanned and sorted electronically for later access. Before jumping in to investing in a document management solution, it’s well worth stepping back and considering how you will use such a system to its fullest extent within the resources of your business. We found a great article giving 8 things to ask yourself before jumping in to Document Management. Well worth reading, if it looks of interest both ourselves and our technology partners would be happy to help answer any questions you may have.

That’s it for this week, hope you have a good weekend.

Nathan Friday Feeling CRM, Document Management, DocuMentor, IBM, LaserFiche, MIGTurbo, Office 2010, Wimbledon

It’s Friday again, and what a glorious Friday it is! The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the mountains white with snow. Hopefully this weather will keep for the weekend as well. But, this being a weekday, we’re still all stuck in the office, working through our seemingly never ending lists of projects.

This week I’ve been playing around with our blog settings, switching to the iNove theme and changing the colours around a bit. I also thought it would be nice to have our mug shots as avatars next to our posts, but then Stephen had the good idea of using silhouettes instead. So, faced with the usual protests (”No! I can’t have my picture taken today!”) I’ve been taking profile snapshots of my colleagues and then photoshopping them into silhouettes. I think it turned out rather nice in the end.

Nathan has been getting far too excited over Scott Hanselman’s essential .NET Developer Tools. If you’re a developer (.NET or not) this is a list of tools well worth looking at. It covers .NET, XML, Debugging, Launching, Viewing, Editing and pretty much anything else. It’s like a sack-load of Christmas presents for a developer.

Charles is busy evangelising why CRM is ‘too strategic to abandon in recession’. He found a research article by Gartner which highlights how customer relationship management is too strategically important for businesses to abandon in the recession. As the recession deepens, however, companies are looking to drive greater efficiency and lower the costs of their CRM projects. Gartner believes that CRM is seen by many businesses as an important tool in the worsening economic environment, as it minimises customer churn and the value of each customer. The survey found that the CRM projects concerned will primarily focus both on improving customer retention and increasing wallet share. Gartner found that while there had been a shift in thinking about new CRM initiatives, the news was far from bad. “The responses to this later survey [December] indicated that, as expected, some budgets for CRM initiatives were negatively impacted, but the latest survey results showed that their earlier budget allocations for CRM initiatives largely remained in place,” said Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Stephen has reluctanly had to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 from his machine for the time being. The latest release, although more compatible with existing web sites than the previous Beta 2 release, seems to be more unstable with frequent crashes and other issues. Hopefully the final release due this summer will have addressed this.

So there you have it. Another week gone. As usual it’s been both challenging and rewarding, making you look forward to a couple of days off but also feeling rather excited about what next week will bring. Have a good weekend, people!

Andreas Friday Feeling Gartner CRM survey, iNove, Internet Explorer 8, Scott Hanselman

Kicking off our new blog, in which we hope to give you a glimpse at inside of the  Island Web Works’ team, each of us has come up with a site that helped, inspired or made us smile this week.

Andreas has been tentatively getting acquainted with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, ready for working with ASP.NET which will form the backbone of the new version of our MIGTurbo CRM application. Tentative steps indeed, a committed user of Adobe’s suite we all have a bet on whether he’ll switch to the [superior?] Visual Studio environment sooner than he thinks. We think he should check out some case studies to help decide.

Charles currently has his nose in figures spewing from one of the more advanced MIGTurbo plug-ins we have developed. I guess I better send him this Webinar on Blogging for Business when he’s less busy. It’s a really good presentation (if a little on the quiet side) that shows how to write your own business blog which we have found really useful in making sure that we’re doing things right. Of course, we’ve been monitoring the social media space for some time and its key players both on and off island so we’re confident we’re following best practice. (But do tell us if you think differently!)

Meanwhile Stephen has been busy maintaining some of our clients’ web sites while also testing Microsoft’s latest browser, Internet Explorer 8. Now nearing its final release with Release Candidate 1, it’s important to make sure your own web site isn’t causing any headaches. Cross-browser compatibility is a constant thorn in a web designers side, having to make sure your shiny new web site works across all browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari & Opera) is made even more difficult when you have to consider that there is a still a large proportion of surfers using older versions of IE and Firefox, and with some exciting new style sheet techniques coming up in CSS3 that will only be able to work in the very latest of browsers, it may be a good time to update your browser and take some time to think of your poor web designer.

I [Nathan] have been getting my teeth into the new version of our successful CRM application MIGTurbo, which probably explains the ever-increasing library of thick textbooks on my desk. A messy desk is a sign of a busy mind, I’m sure. With frameworks and ideas floating around my head, it’s difficult to really pick one out that really stands out and without getting a little too nerdy about it all. We’re all very excited about the new version, one reason for which is the opportunities it gives us in revisiting an existing successful user interface which people are familiar with while introducing new “Web 2.0″ features such as slidy things, AJAXy things and other snazziness that will hopefully give users that “ahhh” feeling when they log in. We’ve decided to use a set of components from Telerik that allow us to create rich interfaces quickly. One of the side benefits of this is it comes with a build of jQuery, a client-side Javascript framework that helped me reduce 40 lines of Javascript to just 9.

We have a lot of plans in keeping this blog up to date and interactive, combining it with other publishing channels we use. We’re looking forward to publishing some of the more interesting things that occur here at Island Web Works, hope you can join us on our journey. Have a great weekend!

Nathan Friday Feeling jQuery, MIGTurbo, Telerik