Ben Skelton's Blog

Ten Reasons for Hosting Web Sites on SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites

On Wednesday Jas and I are presenting a webcast for Microsoft TechNet entitled "Ten Reasons for Hosting Web Sites on SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites".

Join us for an in-depth look at how your organization can benefit from SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites. In this webcast, we review ten areas in which SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites is delivering concrete value to organizations that have deployed the technology.

The deck is all finished and I think we are ready... If you are curious about using SharePoint for your website or extranet we hope you will join us!

Last night in Vegas — MIX 08

Tonight is my last night in Vegas before I fly to Orlando. Unfortunately I made a mistake and booked a flight that has a stop in Washington, DC. It is a Ted / United flight, which means it is 99% likely that I won’t have power at my seat. Looks like I will only be able to work for half the flight... I guess the non-removable battery in the MacBook Air is an issue after all :(

Anyway, back to why I was in Vegas — Microsoft’s MIX conference. MIX was really good this year and was a lot of fun as always.

A few thoughts about the past week:

• I came down a day early as Microsoft was hosting an event for influencers, which unfortunately turned out to be a little weak. It focused too much on the Expression tools and the presenters didn't answer a number of questions as they didn’t want to steal any of the thunder from the main keynote. Everyone received an 8GB Zune which was cool. I have already gifted mine to Steven at work as it won’t work on my Mac, too bad as I find the UI on it slick.
• The session on adaptive user interfaces was interesting. I am working on an intranet project right now and we might be able to make use of some of these techniques.
• There were too many panels! I hate panels! Down with panels!
• The Ballmer and Kawasaki keynote was the highlight of the conference for me. Before the conference I was somewhat lukewarm on Ballmer, but he really impressed me. I recommend checking the keynote out online!
• It was awesome to spend some time with both the Microsoft Canada team and Habañero’s Canadian peers. Microsoft Canada always puts on a good event and this year’s was no exception.
• There was very little mention of SharePoint at the conference. Unfortunately Microsoft scheduled the two events during the same week, which was a bit of a bummer. I would have liked to see more sessions around creating exceptional user interfaces in SharePoint.
• The Internet Explorer team had an awesome after party at the Kingpin Suite at the Palms. The suite had a bowling alley in it which allowed me to discover that I am not a very good bowler.
• I got to see the chicken – thanks Bryce! :)

Anyway, I think that's it. Looking forward to MIX 09!

Upcoming conferences

Clients often ask what conferences we are going to and/or are excited about. Here are some of the conferences that are on my radar in the next little while:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference 2008
March 2-6: Seattle, WA
We have eight people attending the SharePoint Conference this year from Habañero! I attended the SharePoint Conference in 2006 and it was excellent — an insane amount of information was provided by the SharePoint development team. From the Microsoft site: "The SharePoint conference is primarily intended for those in IT who use, deploy, and configure SharePoint. If you are focused on SharePoint deployment, or want to expand your skills in this area, you should attend..."

Microsoft MIX 08
March 5-7: Las Vegas, NV
I went to MIX 07 and had a blast! MIX is awesome if you want to understand Microsoft's Web / UX strategy, talk to folks on the various product teams and drink some of the Microsoft KOOL-AID (along with other stronger drinks). Both myself and Mark (User Experience Developer) are going this year.

Microsoft Convergence 2008
March 11-14: Orlando, FL
Convergence is focused on Microsoft's Dynamics product offerings including Dynamics NAV and Dynamics AX. Habañero will have a booth at the Expo and there will be seven of us going (including myself). If you are interested in Microsoft's ERP strategy or product offerings it should be a good conference. If you attending make sure you drop by our booth and say hello :)

Adaptive Path: MX San Francisco
March 11-14: San Francisco, CA
I attended Adaptive Path's UX Week conference for a couple of years in a row, but as my job shifted the conference became less relevant to me (it is very practitioner focused). MX is much more multi-disciplinary and is awesome for creative and / or experience managers. I can't wait to attend this year with Caterina (Director, User Experience) and Mallory (Senior Information Architect).

If there are any other conferences you think people should know about please feel free to put 'em in the comments!

Redesigned North Shore Credit Union Site Live

The new North Shore Credit Union site launched this morning! Although not a dramatic change from the last version there are a few things the team did that are new:

• Condensed the personal and business areas of the site. This gives NSCU the ability to better upsell / cross-sell to both personal and business members
• Included task-oriented features and navigation based on feedback and priorities heard from focus groups
• Improved the layout of section pages to better balance usability, readability, relevance and search engine optimization
• A wider 1024x768 pixel page layout

This is also one of the first sites that use the home page “content switcher” to deliver multiple messages in a condensed space.

What is a Practice Leader?

A couple of people have asked me what exactly a practice leader is (now that I am one). Here is the official description:

A Practice Leader drives business into Habañero by building a practice that is oriented around an industry vertical (e.g. financial services), a horizontal area of delivery (e.g. collaboration solutions) or potentially even a geographic region. This person will have a flair for building marketable offerings within their practice area and will have a true entrepreneurial spirit. They will have a focus on driving Habañero’s top line growth.

Areas that practice leaders are responsible for include:

• Evangelism of their practice area and the things Habañero can deliver in that context
• Marketing and business development
• Being the expert in the problem and solution domains associated with their practice
• Driving innovation within the area
• Input to resource manager (i.e. drive the resource needs)
• Driving excellence in delivery by evolving the processes that are specific to their practice
• Contribution to performance management
• Partner management (when partners are specific to their area)
• Financial accountability for both budget and performance of practice

Hope that helps!

A New Director, User Experience for Habañero

Note: This is also posted on the Habañero User Experience Blog.

For the last few years I have been doing two jobs at Habañero: leading the User Experience Group and also leading the User Experience Practice. I made a commitment to myself (and to Steven and Elliot) a year ago that I would figure out what I want to focus on and how I want to develop my career.

The group leadership part of my job is pretty self explanatory — it is the day-to-day management of the UE group. It includes performance management, coaching, creative direction, hiring new Habañeros, and working with each of the different practice leaders to ensure that UE is a core component of every solution we deliver. Group leadership consumed a lot of my time last year as our UE group grew from four to ten people!

A practice leader on the other hand is responsible for selling and marketing our various services and solutions. In order to be effective at this role the practice leader must be a subject matter expert and be able to educate our clients and partners on how we design and develop our solutions. The three groups (projects and planning, user experience and engineering) work closely with each practice leader to ensure everyone fully understands the capability of each group and how we can make our solutions better.

Over the last year I have become increasingly interested in practice development, although I was a bit stumped… User experience didn’t seem like a natural practice as it is a core component of every solution we deliver. It didn’t make sense to have a practice for something that is already a fundamental part of every practice. For example, portals and intranets fall under our collaboration practice, but good information architecture and user interface design are a fundamental part of every great intranet!

After looking at our service offerings, it became apparent that we have neglected one group of solutions — external websites and eCommerce. This may have been a result of us not wanting to be seen as a “web design studio”, thus we didn’t talk about our expertise in developing these types of solutions. Last year only 20% of our projects were designing and developing external websites and eCommerce. The majority of our business was creating corporate portals, intranets and line of business applications.

I truly believe that we can increase the percentage of external websites and eCommerce sites we build. As such, this is the area that I am going to focus the majority of my time as Habañero's Website and eCommerce Practice Leader. We are already showing a lot of progress — in the last little while we have created some amazing sites including PD Net (for CGA Canada), Terasen Gas, North Shore Credit Union, PH&N and even our own extranet (which I will blog about later).

As of today Caterina Sanders will be Habañero’s new Director, User Experience. I can’t think of a better person to lead the UE group. Cat has proven time and time again that she can successfully manage large projects and teams, while consistently improving the quality of the solutions we develop. She has a great team and is now leading the coolest people I have ever worked with!

I’m really excited about this change and can’t wait to up our game in the website and eCommerce space :)

Terasen Gas Launched

We launched the new Terasen Gas website late last week. The team did a great job and the site looks amazing. Check it out!

Habañero User Experience Blog is Live

Yay! We've just launched our User Experience Blog at Habañero. We were having a tough time creating official news releases and updating the portfolio site, and also wanted to do a better job of sharing ideas. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Habañero is not an Agency

I've probably been boring everyone with my technology ramblings, so I thought I would write something a little more relevant to my day-to-day job at Habañero...

Every now and then we get a potential client at Habañero who asks us to do a series of mockups, or propose a series of design concepts during the business development stage of our relationship. This request generally comes from potential clients that are used to working with marketing / advertising agencies and are used to being "pitched" to. I think this is one fundamental way Habañero (a consulting services company) is different from many interactive agencies.

At Habañero we believe it is essential to have a core understanding the objectives and strategies for the sites that we develop, discover the user and business requirements and follow a comprehensive information architecture and design visioning process before designing any mockups for our clients. If a potential client chooses a partner based on design concepts created for a meeting (which are generally thrown away) the project or client is probably not a good fit for us.

In general I try to persuade the potential client to come in and talk to us so we can take them through our process in more detail (specifically how it relates to their project) and show detailed samples of the tools and techniques we use to generate successful results for our clients. This is not only educational for the potential client, but gives them a sample of how we consult with them to bring their strategic and creative vision to life. In addition, I encourage them to contact as many of our clients as possible before the meeting.

By the end of the Habañero BD process all potential clients should have a greater appreciation for our understanding of addressing business, user, creative and usability requirements in every website (portal, web application, etc) our user experience team produces.

I think this is one of the key differences between a consulting services company (research, design, build and usability test) versus an agency (design and build).

Developers, Developers, Designers!

We are in desperate need of good developers and UI designers at Habañero. If you know of anyone, or are a kick-ass, smart, funny person who likes to help people solve challenging business issues through the use of technology check out the careers area of our website.