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!

The SharePoint 2009 / 2010 Conference

I'm spending the week down in Vegas at the SharePoint 2009 Conference, which should probably be called the SharePoint 2010 Conference — a lot of 2010 goodness. We have 11 people from Habañero at the event and have been blogging quite a bit. If you are using SharePoint today or want to know more about the product check out our blog at www.habaneros.com/blog.

After the conference I am going to make my way to Soquel (just outside of Santa Cruz) and visit family for the weekend. Will be a nice relaxing break after Vegas!

SharePoint 2010

We have formerly kicked-off our SharePoint 2010 learning program at Habañero and have started to play with the bits. Ten of us will be heading down to Vegas from October 18th to the 23rd for the SharePoint Conference where Microsoft will be doing the big reveal.

The last SharePoint Conference I attended was for the launch of MOSS 2007 and it was awesome... As such, I've got high expectations for this one. A number of our clients and partners will also be sending attendees so it should be a good chance to catch up and learn what everyone else is doing on the platform.

Are you going to the conference? If so drop me a line...

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!

My love/hate relationship with SharePoint

Mark Pawson alerted to me to an interesting thread on the IxDA.org site regarding SharePoint. The platform is not universally loved by interaction designers (a bit of an understatement). I thought I would post my response to the thread discussion below as a few of you might find it interesting.

... I have had a love/hate relationship with SharePoint for quite some time. At Habanero we have been working with the product since version 1 and have over 100 successful implementations under our belt. The product really started to gain some serious traction in the marketplace with SharePoint 2003 as a lot of companies already owned the product (via enterprise licensing agreements) and as such their IT departments wanted to use it.

As someone who has a background in information architecture, user interface design and usability engineering I despised SharePoint 2003. Website content management was a huge weakness of the product as it was primarily a document-centric (Word, Excel, etc) extension to Microsoft Office. You needed to hack the product and use a number of workarounds to create a classic HTML-based intranet, which never really worked that well or was that usable (not to mention the quality of the HTML produced) . As such, I preferred building intranets on Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) as it allowed us to create really great-looking, usable corporate portals that reflected the identity of the organization. The problem with using MCMS (other than the fact that it was obvious that MS was going to get rid of it) is that you couldn't create collaborative team sites on the platform to work together on documents -- something SharePoint has always been traditionally strong at.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 changed the landscape as Microsoft took MCMS and integrated the content management functionality into MOSS (along with a number of other features like document and records management, blogs and wikis) . This was a turning point for myself and the rest of our user experience team in the acceptance of SharePoint as MOSS allowed us to design a traditional corporate portal (that has an awesome IA and UI) , while also allowing our clients to create and use team sites, where the branding and design requirements are a lot lighter. I have been pretty blown away with the intranets (and even a couple of external websites) we have been able to create in MOSS.

I think MOSS is a huge improvement from SharePoint 2003 and is a really compelling product. There are a few gotchas though (and other miscellaneous things that drive me crazy):

• The HTML the product produces (when using team sites and out of the box Web Parts) is ugly. There are tables everywhere and the HTML is really inconsistent from one area of the product to another. You can tell that a large team worked on the product and the teams didn't collaborate as well as they should have on the code they produced. This is less of a concern when you are using the content management functionality in the product as you can customize the HTML heavily
• Microsoft really has to stop designing for Windows/IE first and treating other browsers and operating systems as an afterthought. Safari, Firefox and IE should provide end-users with the exact same experience! This is really important for education or any organization that has a lot of Macs. In addition it would be nice if Mac Office provided some integration with MOSS like Office 2007 does
• MOSS is often sold as an intranet in a box. IT departments often install the tool, lightly customize it, and expect users to love their new intranet. Companies that have successful implementations spend a lot of time and money investing in information architecture and user experience design
• Sometimes it is better to modify your IA or UI to be a little more SharePoint-centric. If you do things in a way that SharePoint really wasn't architected for you can run into all sorts of issues. You want to bend it to do what you want, but not break it!
• The blog and wiki functionality isn't as strong as it could be (these are both features that our clients have been very interested in)

The last thing that is probably worth mentioning is that MOSS is an enterprise-class product, and as such the learning curve is steep. The product can be difficult to customize, infrastructure requirements can be a challenge and developing on the platform is a lot harder than just developing a traditional .NET solution. That said, if you spend time doing it right you can create a pretty compelling experience for your users!

I cleaned up a few grammatical issues in this version

A little bit of Entourage news

The MacBU just updated the Mac Mojo blog with a sneak peak on Entourage 2008's calendaring functionality aptly called "It's about time." The changes look great, especially for those of us that are using the current version of Entourage with Exchange. No information is provided about how the new version handles browsing a coworker's calendar or trying to find availability when you have a number of different participants and resources... Hopefully more information will drop soon.

After reading this post I have a bit more faith that the new version of Entourage is going to be a big leap forward!

Microsoft Comes to Vancouver!

As you may have heard Microsoft is opening the “Microsoft Canada Development Centre” here in Vancouver. Notice the Canadian spelling of Centre — nice job guys! My initial thought was that this could make recruiting in Vancouver even more difficult. Finding really great people is always a challenge and there are already many companies in the city looking for candidates.

After discussing it over with a few folks and reading the Jobs Blog I believe that the opening of the development centre might just do the opposite. It sounds like the primary goal will be to bring in the best and the brightest from all over the world, not necessarily recruit talent from our local market. This will be a positive thing for all technology companies in Vancouver that are looking for high-quality candidates.

Welcome to Vancouver Microsoft!

MiX07 Roundup

I have finally caught up from my week away in Vegas and thought I would do a quick MIX07 recap. Vegas was a blast and the conference was great — Microsoft put on a good show. Here are some random thoughts from last week:

The fun:

• The Hard Rock Hotel is awesome! The next time I go to Vegas it will be my first choice. The staff were wonderful, the pool was amazing (although the drinks were a little steep) and the restaurants were good (Mr. Lucky's, Nobu and Pink Taco)
• I am not a great gambler — I ended up loosing about $100 (although it was probably more like $50 when you factor in all the free drinks I had) at the Hard Rock Casino
• The Facebook party at the Playboy club was definitely THE party of the week
• The MIX party at PURE paled in comparison to the Facebook party and I (along with most others) were a little disappointed that we didn't get to see the "real" Pussycat Dolls. That said, the upper deck that looked over the Strip was gorgeous
• It was great to reconnect with the Canadian UX folks that I met at the UX roundtable in Redmond

The free stuff:

• I couldn't figure out what the MySpace gift was in the attendee bag. I broke it open (to try to figure it out) and noticed that it had a razor blade inside. I met a few folks who cut themselves on the blade. Turns out that it was a little device for opening CDs. What a weird gift — I can't think of the last time I had to open a shrink-wrapped CD jewel case
• Each attendee received a special edition of Expression Studio that had really amazing packaging. It is a shame that Microsoft does not use this packaging on the actual product as it is MUCH better than the current Expression Studio packaging / branding
• The conference lanyard was the coolest I have ever seen — it was a zipper... Very cool!
• We received a copy of Vista Ultimate for attending... Once the new MacBook Pros come out I will pick one up and install Vista on it (the hard drive on my current Mac is almost full)

The technology (and the reason I actually went to Vegas):

• I think the RIA space is REALLY going to heat up in the next little while. It will be interesting to see how Flex and Silverlight compete. They are both compelling (for different reasons), but Microsoft has created a strong RIA development environment that leverages the strength and maturity of the .Net framework — a powerful combination
• With all the talk in the Keynotes about how well Silverlight will work on Safari and Firefox it would have been nice to have these browsers installed on the various demo PCs throughout the conference. In typical Microsoft fashion the only browser available was IE 7! This attitude has to change (throughout the organization) if Microsoft wants to be seen as credible when advocating cross-browser/platform solutions like Silverlight
• WPF is incredibly compelling for Line of Business (LoB) applications. I can only imagine what something like this would have looked like if we had built it using WPF! There were a few sessions that really illustrated the power of WPF including "XBD05 - Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE." I can't wait until we build our next large LoB application using WPF :)
• The BBC demo during Robbie Bach's keynote was amazing, but I have never seen a room clear out so quickly (in a non-emergency situation) than during the panel afterwards. This wasn't a marketing friendly crowd

Overall the conference was excellent and well worth the trip. I wish I got to see more sessions, but they are all available online.

MIX07 Keynote

I managed to make the MIX keynote with plenty of time to spare, even after a totally rushed morning (I didn't get my two wake-up calls). The keynote was good overall, although I thought that Ray Ozzie was mildly disappointing. Scott Guthrie really stole the show and did an excellent job of pimping Silverlight to the masses. The demos shown were excellent — much more applicable to real-world scenarios than the new technology demos we often see from Microsoft. The MLB.com demo which used Silverlight to provide an incredibly rich, sexy UI for video distribution and community networking was amazing.

Although there were a few little surprises at the keynote the most interesting announcement of the day for me was that Silverlight is going to be a true member of the .Net family. Bringing the .Net runtime to the browser in a cross-platform way opens up an enormous number of possibilities for our team. It will be interesting to see how far we will be able to push web applications to provide an equivalent user experience to rich desktop applications.