How does cloud technology benefit marketing and service organizations?

Lots of folks have been asking about how Cloud Computing helps marketing or web development projects. Here’s a couple of the key benefits that have bubbled to the top of the conversations.

• Cost, cloud services are drastically less expensive than tradition hosting options, so the marketer can do more and innovate more with their money. Cloud services enable some basic things such as faster time to market, so faster results because we can build solutions in less time and not have to wait for an technology team to allocate servers and setup physical devices.

• Faster scalability to better keep up with the peaks and valleys of marketing campaigns and user traffic. In the old days we would have to prepare for an ad, email, keyword, or offline-online campaign and get servers ready on standby. With cloud services we can scale on demand with a lower cost and faster timeline. That’s because we aren’t limited by physical servers

• Strategically, social services are enabled through cloud computing, new offerings like Facebook connect, Twitter/delicious/reddit/digg/etc. apis, or even Youtube embed capabilities are all cloud services that enable you to drive traffic to your site without having to build your own social network. Facebook connect is a cloud service that enables the portable social graph bringing users to your property. One user post back to a user’s Facebook wall results in three more users accessing your site. So not only do you get exposure, but you save on Google keyword buysJ. In the old days, 3 years ago, we tried to build social networks on sites like flip.com and other properties, now we tie into the cloud service and get the same functionality in a fraction of time .

*lastly, there’s a word of caution around cloud services. Make sure you have some sort of redundancy, i.e. multiple services to achieve the same goal. We worked with Billboard on the latest release of their site which is a great example. See the red arrow as good example, if Facebook goes away, we are still sharing with other services. Other questions arise around redundancy for infrastructure cloud providers. The cloud computing manifesto is at least acknowledging the need for redundancy, but how to get the providers to do it.

Tags: Cloud computing, Technology

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Microsoft talking about a private cloud?

Just a couple of weeks after Amazon’s announcement of their private cloud offering it looks like Microsoft is starting to open discussions in that direction. What’s interesting about Microsoft’s discussion is that are coming at it from two directions. They are a provider to the data centers, hosting providers and enterprises building these offerings as well as a provider directly to the consumer.

Tags: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Cloud computing, Data center, Microsoft

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Google creates another new language - Noop

Google announced a new language called Noop today.  It looks pretty interesting, building on the power of spring and most notably for them, building dependency injection right into the laungage. Here’s some of the highlights. As we look across the projects we are working on it’s clear how important Spring has become to our architectures. It’s nice to see a more formal recognition. It’s always neat to see the impact of ’side projects’ at Google.

• Dependency injection built into the language
• Testability - a seam between every pair of classes
• Immutability
• Syntax geared entirely towards readable code
• Executable documentation that’s never out-of-date
• Properties, strong typing, and sensible modern standard library

Tags: Dependency injection, google, Spring

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.gov is saving money and time with cloud computing

Cnet reports today on how Vivek Kundra, the US Chief Information Officer (CIO), is pushing for more movement into the clould computing space to help save taxpayer dollars. There are definitely huge savings with clould computing and it’s getting harder and harder for enterprises to ignore. Especially with the recent announcement around Amazon’s Private Cloud, it seems like the enterprise barriers to adoption are slowly eroding away.

I did find Vivek’s assertion here, hard to believe,

“Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5 million a year. But by turning to a cloud computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.”

but not knowing all the details it might real. Six months down to one day, sounds too much like pixie dust to me!

Tags: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Scalability, Technology, Vivek Kundra

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Amazon Advances Cloud Computing with the Private Cloud

Amazon Advances Cloud Computing with the introduction of a private clould. The economics really are powerful enough to force business to take note. Anecdotally I’ve spoken to several highly functional startup web application using the clould succesfully. WIth the advent of more secure private clouds I don’t see how enterprise can stay away much longer.

Tags: Cloud computing, Web application

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Razorfish Technology Capabilities Differentiates

It’s great to get some market recognition for all our efforts. In this post Forrester recognizes that technology differentiates and our addition to Publicis will help strengthen their market position. This captured our attention

‘“What about Razorfish? The firm has much stronger design capabilities, both for user experience and what we call “brand image”. Plus – and this is just my opinion because we did not evaluate them on this – it has stronger technology capabilities as well. ‘

And validation of what we’ve been saying from the start

‘Because ultimately, a great design has to actually work in order to deliver a great customer experience.“‘ 

Tags: Avenue A/Razorfish, Microsoft, Publicis, Technology

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4th Annual State of Agile Survey

In true Agile style, the Agile community is doing their 4th annual survey. Last year it sounds like they had 3000 respondents in 82 countries, pretty wild. Kind of reminds me of a sprint retrospective;).

Tags: Agile, Agile management, Agile software development, Business, Conferences, Project management, Scrum, Social Sciences, Software development

Posted in Agile, Methodology, Technology | 1 Comment »

Flex 3 vs Silverlight 3: Enterprise Development

With the recent release of Silverlight 3 and Flash 10 / Flex 4, the Flash vs Silverlight debate has been stoked yet again.  The debate has been raging on twitter using the tags #flex #silverlight.  Links to articles are posted almost every day and retweeted endlessly.

The latest two most talked about articles fall squarely on each side.   On the Silverlight front, a blog post from a coder with a lot of experience in .NET and some Flex experience shares his insights on enterprise development.  His experience with C# colors his opinion of Flex development however, and his inexperience with Flex is evident through his omission of development tools such as FDT and Flex frameworks such as Mate.  His biggest arguments revolve around language features (C# is a more robust, full featured language), AS3’s lack of a native decimal type, and the Flex IDE.  In regards to Silverlight’s penetration, the author claims that since Enterprise apps work within a company, it’s easier to get Silverlight installed.   He finishes the blog post with a nod towards Flex: “this particular Flex application is the best looking application I’ve ever seen!”

On the Flex side, Tim Anderson writes about the release of Morgan Stanley’s Matrix application in his blog.  In it he highlights a few points made during the presentation on why Flash / Flex was chosen over Silverlight.  The main points of the article highlight Flash Player 9’s penetration and Silverlight’s lack-there-of, the application’s speed, and allowing the designers on the project to use products they wanted during development.   The most insightful quote of the presentation was regarding the design tools:

“You have to look at the people that use that technology. The design community. That’s the biggest problem that Microsoft has. The designers all carry around Apple laptops, they all use the Photosuite [sic] set of software tools. It’s like asking structural engineers to stop using CAD applications. That’s the tool that they use, and if you can’t convince them to switch away from your software suite you are going to get a limited number of designers that will use Microsoft’s toolset … if you can’t get the designers to switch, to learn a new language, then how can you possibly ever get some traction?”

So there you have it, one article by a seasoned .NET developer decrying Flex’s lack of language features and another decrying Silverlight’s inability to win over designers.

I have also straddled the fence between .NET and Flex developer for a number of years and have worked a little bit with Silverlight, so I tend to agree with both articles.  They are both right.  AS3 is an inferior language and it’s default IDE is definitely no match for VS.NET, however Flex/AS3’s speed isn’t as bad as is made out and it’s a platform that is ubiquitous and has a VERY low barrier of entry for designers and other non-developers.

So this debate boils down to form vs function.  It’s harder to write a large application with a lot of business logic in Flex, however it’s easier to make it look good.  The opposite is true for Silverlight.  So just like a with any other technology, you have to make a choice based on your audience, the design, and the lifetime of the application.

So I’d recommend Silverlight if:

• your audience is a small and you have control over the environment they are going to use the app in
• the design isn’t complex (like heavy use of blend modes, interactive 3d elements)
• you need tight integration with a .NET backend
• there is a lack of Presentation Layer Developers

I’d recommend Flash if:

• you are serving a large, diverse audience
• you have a complex design with animation (3D, webcam integration, etc)
• your application uses mainly webservices to communicate to a backend
• sufficient presentation layer development resources

You can duplicate most sites built in Flex in Silverlight and vice-versa (with a few exceptions).  It’s just a matter for the right tool or the right job.  I lean towards Flex because I feel it has the most flexibility (no pun intended), but I do like XAML / WPF / Silverlight and am excited to see it evolve and be a competitor to Adobe.

Everyone wins when there is competition.

Tags: as3, C#, enterprise development, flash, flex, pld, presentation layer, silverlight

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Taming IE6 and a “Drop IE6″ rebuke

During the development of any project that involves HTML, there’s always a nagging question in the back of your mind:  “How broken will this site be in IE6?”  Here’s an article that will reduce the amount of worrying you do when fixing your site to work in IE6.  It covers the majority of issues you’ll encounter when working with IE6.

Definitive Guide to Taming the IE6 Beast

The article covers:

• conditional comments
• target IE6 CSS Hacks
• Transparent PNG-fix
• double margin on float
• clearing floats
• fixing the box model
• min/max-width/height
• overflow issues
• magic-list-items appearing

It’s probably the last article on IE6 specific CSS techniques you’ll ever need to read.  Required reading for all PLD’s.

On the topic of IE6 and whether or not we should still be supporting it, here are some thoughts.

IE6 support seems to be waning, but we still have plenty of clients that are still running IE6 exclusively on their work machines, so until they upgrade to Windows Vista / 7 we’ll continue to have to support them.

In the past year there have been a few campaigns to get people to upgrade like hey-IT.com, www.bringdownie6.com, and www.end6.org.   Also, Google just announced that YouTube wouldn’t support IE6 anymore in the near future.

Sadly, the more I thought about just saying “no more IE6 support”, the more I realized that the people that were running IE6 at this point couldn’t upgrade.  They are usually either on older machines (Windows 2000 or earlier) or their IT won’t upgrade because of a legacy web-based application depends on it, like a CRM or ERP app.    These applications aren’t upgraded often, and they are definitely not upgraded during a recession.

Full IE6 support is vital for any site that caters to business users (IT issues / older computers), international users (older computers), or a large percentage of the public (lots of people don’t upgrade their computers/OS when all they do is browse the web with them).

Here’s a good chart that shows the trends for various browsers / versions from Oct-04 to May-09 based on data from NetApplications.com

It shows IE6 usage just below Firefox usage in May-09.

As much as I dislike “fixing” the sites I work on to work with IE6, I think we’re going to have to do it at an agency level for another year or so.

Tags: css, internet explorer 6, pld, presentation layer

Posted in General, Technology | 3 Comments »

Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0

AIIM (www.aiim.org) non-profit organization for enterprise content management (ECM) has released a report on how “Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0” is gaining importance among business.

According to this AIIM report, there has been a dramatic increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing, with over half of organizations now considering Enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success. Business take up of Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year.

Here are some key findings:

• Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers.
  
  
• Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments.
  
  
• 71% agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems.
  
  
• 40% feel it is important to have Enterprise 2.0 facilities within their ECM suite, with SharePoint Team Sites as the most likely collaboration platform.
  
  
• Only 29% of organizations are extending their collaboration tools and project sites beyond the firewall.
  
  
• As regards governance of usage and content, only 30% of companies have policies on blogs, forums and social networks, compared to 88% who have policies for email.
• Whereas almost all companies would not dream of sending out un-approved press releases or web pages, less than 1 in 5 have any sign-off procedures for blogs, forums and even the company’s Wikipedia entry.
  
  
• Planned spending on Enterprise 2.0 projects in the next 12 months is up in all product areas.

About 47% companies opted for SharePoint as a collaboration platform

SharePoint is leading the Enterprise 2.0 revolution by providing a comprehensive business productivity platform that combines traditional collaboration solutions with newer social-computing technologies in an enterprise-capable product. Using rich blog, wiki, RSS, mashup and social-networking solutions combined with the enterprise content management and search capabilities of SharePoint, SharePoint customers are well positioned to deliver real Enterprise 2.0 solutions today.

Companies can use social tool plug-ins like Socialtext, Atlassian Confluence, and Connectbeam (among with many others) to add more advanced SharePoint social features.

More information about SharePoint Server social-computing is available on Microsoft’s website

You can read more SharePoint articles and how-to’s on my SharePoint blog.

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