We have recently developed an all new Social CMS software called Connexions - this will form the core of two significant client web developments that we are about to roll out as well as our own re-branded web presence - due to be launched in the next few days.

Part of the web site re-launch will entail splitting the Web side of our business from the ‘Business Intelligence’ side.

Unfortunately, the success of the Island Web Works brand is stymieing the Business Intelligence side of our business as many people associate this with ‘Web Marketing’ and ‘Google Analytics’ etc., and not the wider aspects of business automation and customer relationship management that help re-enable efficient business processes through effective use of workflow and IT. Where appropriate, we can provide bespoke software development as well as our own award winning CRM software.

As a team we have been together for nearly a decade. At the outset we were almost exclusively focused on web site design; however, over the past few years the ‘Business Intelligence’ side of our business has developed so significantly, we recognised a separate brand was necessary to reflect this part of our business.

Specifically to:

1. Be an inclusive and accessible association attracting the membership of the majority of organisations in the Manx ICT Industry
2. Represent and promote the Manx ICT Industry to: Isle of Man Government, Isle of Man Commerce and Export Markets
3. Arrange ICT Industry networking events
4. Organise ICT Industry exhibitions
5. Foster and nurture appropriate collaboration and cooperation within the industry
6. Increase on-island ICT business retention
7. Increase off-island business (exports)

NEXT WEDNESDAY 28th JULY at 6pm, there is a formative meeting being held at the Claremont Hotel - Sanderson Suite. Light refreshments will be provided. There will be a small £6 admission fee to cover the cost of room hire and refreshments.

Sometimes someone has an idea that should be supported - hopefully if you are involved in the IT industry on the island, provide services that include IT products and or services, software or hardware, then you will be there.

Initial support appears to be very strong, the more attendees the better.

Further information is on www.micta.im

We all have access to this Island Web Works blog, which allows us to represent ourselves and the company professionally, giving users an insight into what we can tell people about the exciting projects we are working on. We have an internal policy which promotes openness and inclusion. If someone wants to blog, they are welcome - so long as it is at least vaguely related to our work!

We all tweet using the Island Web Works @iww_iom ID.

For the content that isn’t work-related, we now all have our own blogs and I’m going to take this opportunity to publicise them a little more.

Andreas - The Greatest Show on Earth

Andreas is a biologist at heart and we have some fascinating discussions in the office about nature, evolution and humanity. His blog develops on some of these discussions and adds his own views and questions on the reasons behind life, the universe and everything.

Andreas is also tweeting as @heinakroon.

Charles - WalkingMann

Charles is a keen walker and we regularly chat about his latest adventures on this lovely island. There are hundreds of footpaths criss-crossing the island and Charles seems enthusiastic about treading each one. His blog covers these walks, his experiences and impressions. He also includes some great photographs of landmarks along the routes and a very useful series of route maps.

Nathan - Live to Work

My “main” blog is my view on politics, work/life balance and gadgetry. I attend a few events a year which excite me enough to blog about them and I also try to include my recommendations on gadgets which I have found useful. This blog was started in 2007 in conjunction with a previous project I was involved with and has covered a variety of issues including Police accountability, voting reform, the BCS and public transport - fascinating!

Nathan - Blogging About .NET

This blog is quite a lot quieter but is focussed more on my professional coding side of my work. If I have been working on something sufficiently challenging that I feel others can benefit, it’ll probably end up here. My blog is but one of many on this site, and is indeed a site full of .NET coding geniuses.

I am also tweeting as @programx.

Of course, the posts and comments on these blogs and Twitter streams are personal to the respective authors and are therefore entirely unrelated with this blog.

We have some exciting plans for expanding blogging on the island which we hope to announce in the next few months.

For an ageing demographic with money to spend and a desire to connect with the world at large - modern technology aka the P.C. is simply too complex.

When I started in IT in 1988 we had DOS, followed by Windows 2, 3, 3.1, 3x,  95, 98, millenium edition, 2000, XP, Vista and now Windows 7 (which I love), roughly 14+ Microsoft versions of OS not to mention the plethora of alternatives from IBM and the like. Add to that the various versions of word processing software etc.,  from Lotus, Microsoft, and the rest -  and you can see a very worrying trend. The software - or rather the seemingly infinite choice of software is overwhelming - even for “IT professionals”.

I had to test a client’s web site security recently - with their approval of course, however, in my search for a suitable program I found myself downloading software from an unknown/un-trusted source. The amount of time I spent following this exercise - just to ensure my PC was ‘clean’ was significant… and I am supposed to know what I am doing. The threats I was checking for are everyday threats faced by the masses. WHY? - because the modern PC allows you to download and install whatever you want to! Which is why (I think) Apple are ahead of the curve.

Think about it - the average user just wants to do whatever they want to do - surf the web, email friends, share photo’s etc. Wouldn’t it be great to know that no matter what you download - it cannot harm your ‘device’.  By building devices that are restrictive - i.e. you cannot install any old software on them, also means they are secure – e.g. neither can anyone else.

Prescribing software you have access to may limit choice, however, would the demographic these devices target really care? I think not, all many of us want is simplicity and peace of mind. Would they pay ‘over the odds’ for this – apparently so, and indeed they are doing, American sales in May for the iPad exceeded the 2 million mark – and demand in Europe is expected to reach similar proportions. This I think mark’s the start of a massive shift in the way we buy technology; little black boxes that do fewer things but provide peace of mind! It is starting to sound good to me.

To settle these arguments once and for all we got the idea to publish our predictions for the technological future in a blog post, allowing you to comment and perhaps ultimately decide which version is the most plausible.

	Nathan’s predictions	Charles’ predictions	Andreas’ predictions
	Battery powered electric cars competing with regular cars with similar price/performance. (Con/Lib Transport policy will implement national charging network, Jet engine for Electric cars) Microsoft buys Yahoo outright after share price slump Apple lose market shares in mobile market to Google who will have bought HTC and terminated their Windows Mobile development	Price and performance of battery powered electric cars will be similar to regular cars Governments will legislate to limit performance of petrol cars.	Fuel cell electric cars competing with regular cars with similar price/performance Microsoft Bing disappears as a search engine Satellite phone functionality integrated into most mobile phones Electronic glasses available for mobile phones and netbooks which will project a 3D virtual screen
	Fuel cell electric cars competing with regular cars with similar price/performance Self-modifying line of business applications that adapt to usage in real-time	Holographic television becomes available There will be another World War probably over oil and gas resources	Petrol stations no longer allowed to sell petrol or diesel fuels Battery powered electric cars cease to exist Auto-piloted cars available NASA’s space program terminated permanently Batteries replaced by nano-engines
	Organic chips replace silicon computing chips “Table-top” fusion personal power plants available	Depends who wins!	Illegal to drive cars manually without a (very expensive) professional licence Hot fusion replace fission nuclear plants Quantum/light computer chips appears on the market

So there you have it.  The future according to Island Web Works.  Which version do you think is most likely to be correct?  Or perhaps you have your own predictions?  Let us know!

There are a number of web browsers available at the moment, such as the incumbent market leader Microsoft Internet Explorer and the “new kid on the block”, Google Chrome. Other browsers exist, each targeting specific features such as speed, platform (mobile phones, etc.) or privacy. The chart below from MarketShare illustrates the performance of each browser in the last 2 years or so. (Download the PDF)

Browser version market share since July 2008 (click to zoom)

As various versions of the web browsers are released and market-affecting court action is announced, it is clear how browser share is affected, particularly with the decline of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 and 7 (towards version 8 ) and the increase in adoption of alternative browsers. The recent European Court ruling that users should be given a choice has resulted in Windows 7 users being presented with a browser election screen will be more forceful in that choice, giving users who wouldn’t otherwise be aware of alternatives the opportunity to move away from the “operating system browser”, Internet Explorer.

This choice is good for the user, but presents us with challenges. We need to embrace the latest technologies such as those offered by HTML5, but this needs to be tempered by implementation of those technologies by browsers and ability for older browsers to be able to provide an equivalent experience for users. A challenge any web developer [should] have is being able to facilitate users of Internet Explorer 6 (”IE6″). IE6 has been around for years. Shipped as part of Microsoft Windows XP, it is “stuck” in that users of Windows 2000 who upgraded to IE6 cannot upgrade to IE7 and corporate/enterprise users can’t perform upgrades themselves and as such are restricted to whatever the IT department dictate. Therefore, there will be a “hardcore” contingent of IE6 users for years to come yet, particularly as official support for Windows XP (and therefore IE6) only ends in July. These users need to be catered for, regardless of your market persuasion.

This morning, Scott Hanselman drew attention to a CNN article claiming that Internet Explorer 6 was about to die for good, having decreased to 4.7% of browser market share in the US. This seemed to be very optimistic, based on the figures we have seen.  Our understanding, provided by MarketShare and being a global metric, is that IE6 continues to retain 17.13% of the browser market share. (Which also illustrates the disparities in statistics collection) So while its death is surely coming, it’s too early to arrange the wake and we will continue to support IE6 in the meantime for the sites we develop.

Everytime you complete a web-form on a web site, you are placing a lot of trust in the various parties involved in that connection to the internet, and you won’t know about all of them. Consider the following parties involved in your web-form submission:

Your own computer: When was the last time you did a virus/mal-ware check, and with up-to-date definitions? Viruses are no longer bits of code that produce cutesy messages and graphical effects, they are silent, subversive and distributed. If you have a virus that logs your keystrokes, it could be sending every keystroke to computers all over the world. Your secure connection and password is now useless as basic pattern matching can reveal you just entered your email address and password on a particular web-site.

Between you and the web-site: When a relative reacted with surprise that her emails were not secure, I realised that if you are not internet-savvy, users will approximate their interaction with services and users on the ‘net as the closest thing they have experience to - a telephone call, or a letter. Between your email client or web browser and the recipient or web site is an essentially infinite number of connections consisting of cables, routers, switches, servers and firewalls  none of which can be trusted. Each and everyone of these can look at your submission and store it for later use. Of course, no ISP or internet routing agent would do this - knowingly - would they?. That’s why HTTPS was developed, which creates a secure, encrypted and certificated connection between parties. But HTTPS only works if you have sufficient trust in the issuer of the certificate, the certificate is itself valid, the submission of data is also encrypted (your URL may say “https”, but your submission may go in “plain-text”, using “http”). Which one of us checks all this before sending our data?

The web site: While you may like to think we only go to reputable web-sites, there are times when we stray off the well-trodden path to buy that unique gift, sign up for that cool service, etc. When you submit details to a web-site, you are placing trust in that site to capture that information and securely store it. We like to think that our submission goes straight into the database, never to be seen again except electronically when we need it - but what guarantee have you? Without looking at the source-code of the web-site, which would challenge even the most technical of users, you would never know if they were harvesting passwords, credit card numbers, selling email addresses, etc. And what if some malicious software has infected the site itself?

The authorities: The digital revolution is occurring very fast, and faster than the authorities can keep up. Public authorities, whether executive, law-enforcing or intelligence-gathering all have a degree of inertia as they are always playing “catch up”. This results in rapidly developed legislation, which is not always well thought through. Consider the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act 2000, or the Digital Economy Bill currently rushing at light speed through parliament as I type so it completes before the General Election. Such legislation is often rushed at the cost of adequate and fair consultation and implementation. Your data is subject to searching, retrieval and submission by your ISP and nominated public authorities.

As a company specialising in quality web-sites, we are aware of issues such as security and trust when users enter data in web-forms. While it isn’t possible to manage the entire communication (for example, we could never check your own computer remotely!) we will do what we can by adopting best practices in capturing your data and storing it securely. Recent projects we have worked on require highly sensitive information, which are central to the user’s identity and the viability of a business as an agent of trust. Therefore, it is essential that we implement everything we can to manage the risk of compromising of data.

Our approach starts with recommending clients who have a web-form which requests sensitive data (including username and password) purchase an HTTP/SSL certificate. This encrypts and signs the communication and acts as one layer of trust. When we store passwords, we store them in a hash, so they cannot be restored. So your password cannot be recovered even if the database was compromised. (This is why it can often be a pain to retrieve a forgotten password from some sites - they don’t know your password either, so need to prove your identity first before resetting it for you.) We employ best practices in anti-cracking to prevent or restrict the opportunity and effectiveness of techniques such as buffer overflow, cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery. Finally, we recommend how the hosting infrastructure is implemented, so security is reflected physically. This involves splitting servers across firewalls to limit the possibility of a compromise and the extent of damage should it occur.

No web-site can be 100% secure. Working with user-submitted data is about managing risk, rather than preventing it. There are many techniques that can be adopted ranging from technical to the social. You might not realise it, but these tools are already in use at sites you regularly visit. Online banks use subtle techniques when asking for your memorable word to defeat key-loggers, web-sites use CAPTCHAs to prevent automated attacks and login forms don’t differentiate between “unknown username” and “unknown username and/or password” to avoid publicising that an account exists to try and crack. There is a toolkit of anti-cracking techniques, the strength of the professional is employing them tactically and effectively for the application.

The party I favoured was highlighted as the worse match, the party I regarded as the least relevant was the best match, and the party I hold in the upmost contempt was only very slightly less compatible - achieving 2nd place.

What was gained from this experience? Well as I don’t have a vote in the UK, the favoured party will not receive any benefit of my new wisdom, however, it did make me realise that no matter how open minded we think we are, no matter how receptive to new ideas, at some point we can find ourselves taking a stand on something that proves to be of little relevance or purely a subjective point of view.

Sometimes, what we think we want turns out to be the opposite of what we actually need. Take the test, I am sure it will surprise a few of you.

Early on in the MIGTurbo CRM 2 development we asked ourselves if the current graphical user interface (GUI) was in fact the best one, or if we should consider taking another approach.  We had numerous discussions where we batted around different ideas, and ended up trying out several prototypes before committing to the final GUI.

Taskbar interface

In our first approach, we wanted to link back to the familiarity of Windows by making the interface taskbar-centric.

A main menu button would trigger a start menu, from where you could select different modules to be displayed in separate windows.  Each module window would have a button in the taskbar, from where it could be restored if it had been minimized or obscured by other windows.

Whilst it had obvious benefits in being very flexible and working a lot like the Windows GUI, several problems soon arose.  The main one was the confusion of having a second taskbar in addition to the Windows taskbar.  Another problem was clarity - with multiple windows active at any one time, potentially overlapping or obscuring each other, it would be difficult to get a quick overview of what information you have available.

Accordion interface

To address the problems with the taskbar interface we came up with a GUI with expandable/collapsible panels in the style of an accordion interface. 

Vertical lists of panels could be expanded by collapsing other panels in the same vertical ‘lane’.  Multiple tabs could also be combined to form tabbed panel areas.  This way we could utilise as much of the screen real estate as possible without making the interface too cluttered.

This approach worked to a degree, but turned out to offer less flexibility than we’d anticipated.  It was, after all, just a fixed layout of panels.  Also, the idea of having to constantly hide panels to display others felt counter-intuitive and cumbersome.

Docking interface

Our third approach was a docking interface, where panels could be docked to form tabbed panel areas, tucked away as pop-out tabs or left as floating window panels.  This gave us a high degree of flexibility - recreating the classic layout of MIGTurbo 1 series was a piece of cake, for instance.  At the same time, this approach really maximised the use of available space.  Different layouts could also be saved for instant recall, allowing the operator to open an ‘end-of-month’ view for the monthly summary, or a marketing view when sending out email shots.

From prototype to final GUI

Once we tested the third prototype, it was quite clear we had a winner.  Ease-of-use combined with flexibility and clarity put the docking interface way ahead of the others.  That it could be made to look like the MIGTurbo 1 series GUI was a nice bonus, as it would reduce the learning curve for our existing user base.  So, as it turned out, we did have a good interface in the older versions of MIGTurbo, but the new docking functionality will bring it to a whole new level of usability.  Exciting times indeed!

This post is part of a MIGTurbo CRM 2 series that will highlight the key improvements and features in the new product that we’ll be running over the next few months. You can also follow our Twitter account @migturbo for regular updates on progress.

What struck me was the inference (intentionally or otherwise) that CRM for a big company was different to CRM for smaller companies. The talk was very informative, however, whilst the case study being presented had undoubtedly achieved the business objectives, it struck me as odd that you might approach a small business implementation differently.

In the enterprise space, a lot is made of a product’s scalability and the level of integration that can be achieved. Whilst sometimes relevant - far more important is a thorough understanding of the problems you are trying to address.

Statistics show that more than 80% of CRM projects fail. I personally believe this is due more to insufficient knowledge (of the business processes) than a poor choice of software.

The concept that an Enterprise Class CRM solution is somehow different to a small business CRM solution conveniently ignores the simple reality that; the most scalable, expensive and complex software package will deliver little business benefit if you don’t have a clear understanding of what you need it to do. Conversely, if you have a thorough and detailed understanding of how your business works and what you need to do to make it more efficient, the simplest and least expensive of solutions MAY be all you require.

The magic ingredient is KNOWLEDGE, knowledge of your business; how it works; how to make it work better; faster; more profitably and effectively. Ironically, CRM systems were originally sold as Knowledge Management systems, maybe that drew too much attention to the fact you actually need KNOWLEDGE in order to achieve success.