Just to let you know, this is my backup blog. It only has a subset of my blog posts. All these and the rest are on my main blog.
My main blog and web site is here: www.craigbailey.net
If you’ve landed here (eg via a search engine result) then you’ll probably want to go to my main blog here.
[This is a backup copy of the post – the original post is available here]
Deploying a Word document level VSTO add-in via SharePoint
Actually, more correctly, we are going to deploy via ClickOnce but deliver via SharePoint.
This the second demo on VSTO deployment, and follows on from my previous post about VSTO deployment via ClickOnce.
It covers building a very simple Word document level add-in, deploying to a network share, uploading this to SharePoint, and then focusing on the experience a user would have viewing it via a SharePoint Team Site.
TechEd 2008 – Session DEV320: Deploying VSTO v3 Applications
This is the second of the demos Andrew Coates and I will be giving in our TechEd session (next Wed 3 Sep at 4pm for those interested) – see my previous post for details.
Screencast
You can view it a few ways.
[UPDATE: I’ve updated this – the previous version had an extra trusted location check that wasn’t required – I’ve taken it out to avoid confusion]
Acknowledgements: As previously noted, Andrew came up with most of the examples, so if you find the demo helpful then chances are he’s the reason! And if there’s excessive woffle or mistakes, then that’d be my input :-)
Any comments?
I hope this helps.
I’m always keen to improve my demos and presentations. If you have any advice or feedback I’d love to hear it.
[This is a backup copy of the post – the original post is available here]
Deploying an Excel application level VSTO add-in via ClickOnce
If you are new to VSTO deployment then this simple little screencast (just under 14 mins) may help. It covers the scenario of deploying an application level add-in via ClickOnce to a network share, and then the experience a user would have installing it.
TechEd 2008 – Session DEV320: Deploying VSTO v3 Applications
This is one of the demos Andrew Coates and I will be giving in our TechEd session (next Wed 3 Sep at 4pm for those interested).
In our session we cover all the security and trust issues around VSTO deployment (you can download an earlier version of the PowerPoint from Andrew’s blog here). We cover ClickOnce, MSI and SharePoint scenarios. However, we only have time to demo the ClickOnce and SharePoint scenarios. I’m planning on doing a screencast of the MSI process at a later stage (leave a comment if this is of interest to you).
Andrew and I had a practice run through last week, and I recorded the demo parts. The first demo is available now (below).
Screencast
You can view it a few ways.
Acknowledgements: Andrew came up with most of the examples, so if you find the demo helpful then chances are he’s the reason! And if there’s excessive woffle or mistakes, then that’d be my input :-)
Any comments?
I hope this helps.
I’m always keen to improve my demos and presentations. If you have any advice or feedback I’d love to hear it. In fact I might try to organise a little prize for the best bit of feedback… please leave comment against this post.
(UPDATE: Here’s the Deployment via SharePoint screencast)
[This is a backup copy of the post – the original post is available here]
It’s going to be interesting to see the reactions of attendees to the RFID tag palava at this year’s TechEd in Sydney.
For those who missed it, the dudes at Breeze (Mick Badran and Scott Scovell amongst others) have been working hard for the last few months putting together a whole bunch of RFID infrastructure for TechEd (they even got some press).
RFID is a very convenient way of registering attendance of people (it sure beats having to wait for door staff to scan the bar code on your name tag) and it opens up a whole range of data mining options. Each delegate will have an RFID tag in their name badge which can be scanned at any of the 56 RFID readers around the event (and no, they aren’t putting scanners in the toilets!). The information is collected and can be linked to attributes (but nothing personally identifiable) about the delegate to allow some nice data patterns & trends.
Give privacy concerns the boot
But before we go any further, please note, this is not a big brother kind of thing. You can opt out. You can chuck away your RFID tag. In fact all you have to do is put your hand over the RFID tag and it won’t be picked up. So let’s give the boot to any silly privacy concerns that might rear their ignorant heads. You are in control folks! [UPDATE: Mick has an excellent update calming any concerns you may have]
I’m a fan… now
This might sound strange coming from someone who blogs about personal stuff from time to time, but I have to admit I was nervous when I first heard about the RFID tag plans. I’m actually pretty private and like to carefully control what is revealed about me (heh! and you thought I was totally open about everything on this blog – think again :-))
But now I’m a big fan. And here’s why… as a consumer your user experience is going to be better.
An improved Conference experience
The advantages of noting (in real time) the attributes of people who have turned up to a particular session are going to be immense. There’s plenty of benefits for organisers, but the main benefit I see is how presenters will be able to view stats on their audience and tailor the experience to suit.
I’m not sure what level of feedback will be provided at this year’s event, but you can see the potential. Imagine you are in a session and the presenter is able to know that most of you are experienced IT Pros. The coding might get reduced and the configuration increased (just an example).
Start thinking about all the possibilities…
(See also Shane’s post for details of the UX ideas)
[Note: This was originally posted on my main blog here]
After chatting with a few people about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) recently, it’s clear that the technology is not that well understood (even though, in my opinion, Microsoft have done a pretty good job of articulating it – much better than say OBA for example). So in this post I’m aiming to give a high level overview of VSTO and clear up some misconceptions.
As usual this is covered under my ‘well duh’ disclaimer, and I apologise in advance for ‘reworking’ some of my content from earlier in the year, including this one from January and my general VSTO page. For a comparison of VSTO to VSTA see this page.
VSTO is Microsoft's tool set for building applications that run on Microsoft Office (eg Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint).
I deliberately choose the word ‘on’ because part of understanding VSTO is to view Office as a platform.
Originally a replacement for VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) that was delivered in Excel and Word, VSTO was made available in its first version approximately around the start of 2004, targeting the Office 2003 platform. Development was performed in Visual Studio 2003 but was referred to as VSTO 2003 (or sometimes VSTO 1.0). It was an add-on to VS.NET 2003 and wasn't free (costing around $450).
The second version, referred to as V2 or VSTO 2005 was a big update that added numerous advances and enhancements (eg support for Outlook). It was delivered as a special SKU of VS 2005 (my understanding is it was not available as a separate download, but I could be wrong).
The third version, confusingly titled VSTO 2005 Second Edition (VSTO 2005 SE) was delivered in 2007 and focused on targeting the Office 2007 platform. It was a freely downloadable add-on for VS 2005.
This SE version was tweaked significantly and released in November 2007 as part of Visual Studio 2008 (Professional and above – it is not available in the Standard edition), and is referred to as VSTO V3 (even though it is the fourth version of the product). VSTO 2008 overcomes many of the deployment and security hurdles found in previous versions, and adds a number of design helpers (eg visual editing of Office 2007 toolbars, support for SharePoint 3.0 Workflow, etc). SP1 for VSTO V3 is to be released shortly and further improves deployment abilities (as well as bug fixes, enhancement, etc).
[The reason the version numbers are confusing is because in Vx terms they refer to the runtime used, not so much the tooling released. So, technically speaking VSTO 2005 and VSTO 2005 SE both use the same V2 runtime. VSTO in Visual Studio 2008 is using V3 of the runtime, even though it is the fourth release of the product. For more information Andrew Whitechapel has a excellent overview.]
The aim of VSTO is to provide tools for developers to build on top of Office as a platform. Using VB.NET and/or C#, developers can use Visual Studio to build add-ins for most of the Office 2003 and 2007 applications, including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Visio. SharePoint and Groove development is also possible, although not directly targeted.
So, how to get working with VSTO?
In a nutshell VSTO is a set of Visual Studio project templates that allow you to write add-ins for Microsoft Office applications (eg an add-in for Outlook, or Word, etc).
(Don’t worry) I’m not going into any code in this post, but I think screen shot from File –> New –> Project… in Visual Studio 2008 helps explain the scope:
As a developer you can build add-ins for most of the Office programs. Start by choosing a particular template (eg an Outlook 2007 Add-in) and Visual Studio will setup the skeleton and initial hooks.
Application level versus Document level
VSTO supports four types of add-in. The two main ones are:
VSTO also support two lesser known types:
There’s a few common misconceptions I’ve come across talking with people about VSTO. Here’s the clarifications:
Question: Why exactly would you want to consider VSTO?
Answer: so you can build on a platform.
And not just any platform. But a platform that is now in its twelfth version, covers almost every imaginable business and home user scenario, and is installed on more 500M PCs worldwide… The Office platform.
Now, to be fair, not all of those users are using Visual Studio 2003 or 2007, but the majority certainly are, and growing. (For example, in a recent OBA webcast I watched, around the 3:09 mark there were figures from Forester Research - dated 31 Mar 2008 - detailing that 62% of surveyed enterprises not yet on Office 2007 were moving to Office 2007 in the next 12 months.)
So then the question becomes – why build on a platform? I think Andrew Coates answered this beautifully in his Standing on the Shoulders of Giants post a year ago. If you haven’t already, read it. [Aside: Initially, you’ll wonder why he goes into such detailed history… but later, perhaps pondering it while stuck in line at the local supermarket, or caught in a boring meeting, it’ll suddenly fall into place, and you’ll understand the necessity of working with a platform.]
With VSTO, you get to build on top of the Office platform, using the vast functionality of the .NET framework.
VSTO isn’t without its problems. For one, you’ve got a whole lot of extra weight you need to ship with your app (including a bunch of extra DLLs called Primary Interop Assemblies – I’ll be explaining those things in a later post - plus the VSTO runtime, and of course the .NET Framework). But that isn’t the main thing…
Deployment has been the biggest hurdle to VSTO adoption. Getting your add-in out there and easy to install isn’t the simple task it should be. V3 has certainly improved the process, but there’s still work to be done. And as mentioned in an earlier post, a big focus of the upcoming VS2008 SP1 enhancements has been to make VSTO deployment even easier. Andrew Coates links to a number of good resources on VSTO deployment.
[Assuming those issues are resolved shortly, there is really only one further hurdle: mindset. I’ve mentioned this previously, and I think it still stands, but since it isn’t really to do with understanding VSTO itself I won’t go into details here.]
One of the frustrations I’ve found with VSTO is finding some good real-world examples. Sure, there’s plenty of code samples, and the odd Code Gallery post, but there’s nothing detailing commercial applications that I can find (I’m hoping someone corrects me on this). There’s nothing on the Microsoft case studies site (the closest I could find were some OBA case studies that mention VSTO), and there’s nothing in any blogs that I can find pointing to cool VSTO apps available for download.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of add-ins for Outlook, Word, Excel, etc out there, it’s just that I can’t be certain if they were built using VSTO or not. For example, Xobni is a nice little Outlook add-in, but doesn’t appear to use VSTO. Hopefully I can add some examples to this section soon.
I’ll be linking to a full list of VSTO resources in a future post, but for now start here: VSTO Portal on MSDN. Then go here for a Getting Started with VSTO guide. For hands on detail, take a look at this helpful forum post by the awesome Cindy Meister and these How Do I Videos on the Office Dev Center. For blogs and articles head over to OfficeZealot and of course the official VSTO blog. I’ve also listed some other resources on my VSTO page.
Also, if you’re interested I have a separate feed for my VSTO related posts: 
VSTO
Office Business Applications is a term getting bandied about a fair bit these days.
What is it exactly? Well, answers differ, and you’d be forgiven if you thought it was as simple as using Office to build Applications for use in Business.
The purpose of this post is to try to get some simple high level understanding of OBAs. In later posts I’ll be digging into resources and also covering VSTO. (As per usual this is covered under my ‘well duh’ disclaimer.)
The concept behind OBA is perhaps best summed up in the following quote from the OBA Central site where they state:
“Office Business Applications are a new breed of application that… turn document-based processes into real applications.”
This sums up the main aim of OBAs: they are document based.
But what about the delivery – the technology enabling it? This is where it can get overwhelming. OBAs can encompass a huge range of technologies. The Microsoft Office suite of course, but also (and perhaps predominantly) the Microsoft Servers with SharePoint Server being key, followed by Unified Communications (Office Communication Server), Exchange and Groove Servers. It also extends to non-Microsoft vendor products including SAP, PeopleSoft, even CAD programs.
Here’s how they fit together:
(Note: this is my own summary of OBA – based on an excellent Steve Fox webcast on OBA)
To really understand how OBA sits together we need to agree on what Line Of Business (LOB) applications are.
What are LOBs? Wikipedia is reasonably sparse on details but captures the main point: LOBs are related to business needs. SearchCIO has a more helpful description, highlighting that LOBs are vital to running an enterprise. That is, they are a set of processes/applications that run your business (or a division ie line of your business), and can be complex and deeply integrated with a number of systems. In terms of OBA they can be Microsoft provided (eg Dynamics) or other vendors (common examples are PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP).
It can get blurry though – for example, why would Microsoft Dynamics be a LOB app and Exchange not? The distinction comes down to how they are used. If you just install one of the Dynamics apps and use as is to enhance a few processes then it’s probably not a LOB tool. But if you use it as a fundamental aspect of your business, to the extent that part of your enterprise relies on it, then it is a LOB app. Similarly, if you dramatically enhanced Exchange and built crucial business processes on top of it, then yes, it moves from being just a Server, to a LOB app.
When we talk about Oracle, PeopleSoft etc as a LOB app, we are talking about them being crucial to everyday business. Just installing an Oracle server somewhere in the IT department does not make it LOB…
Thus, summarising again the delivery aspect of OBA, here’s what we’ve got:
OBA = Microsoft Office + Microsoft Servers + LOBs
This helpful diagram from the Office Business Applications Architecture Overview (well worth downloading – it’s a Word doc) helpfully puts it in context.
Looking through the diagram you’ll see that just about every facet of Microsoft’s Office, Server and Developer tool set offerings can be directed into an OBA scenario.
Admittedly this diagram is a little out of date (eg it refers to the previous version of VSTO, there’s no mention of Expression etc) but it does show the scope of OBA.
By the way, you’ll notice that most of the discussion around OBA is concentrated on Office 2007. What happened to Office 2003?
Whilst not specifically excluded (and in a later post I’ll be covering how Office 2003 is fully supported in VSTO) Microsoft’s push is definitely focused on Office 2007.To that end, just about every example, overview and case study features Office 2007.
Why is OBA so important?
The beauty of OBA (for me) is the way it brings together such a wide range of technologies, and aligns them for a common purpose. That purpose will be specific to each organisation of course, and by having a glance through the OBA cast studies site you’ll quickly appreciate how diverse and powerful they can be.
In terms of business benefit there’s plenty of compelling information about ROI and so forth on the OBA sites. But have your BS filters on, the figures that get bandied about are on the best case side at every turn, and sometimes are complete fantasy (marketing gets carried away for example when they try to make unrealistic licensing cost per person arguments). And whilst I agree that Office 2007 adoption is high (much higher than say Vista), we need to be careful when stating that OBAs provide significant training advantages because users are familiar with the Office interface. The fact is, to many enterprises the Office 2007 ribbon re-training is a hidden cost they can’t quantify.
But my intention here isn’t to nitpick, rather it’s to say that building OBAs isn’t an open and shut case when it comes to training cost.
To me the value of OBA development is in other key areas - surely the main benefit of OBA is the ability to:
Use what you know
There’s been cases where a new CIO joins an enterprise and successfully changes their entire infrastructure (eg comes in, chucks out Java and rolls out .NET, or vice versa). The reason these events happen is because the CIO knows they can get results simply because they have achieved success with those tools before, and they know how to manage the implementation.
This is extreme of course, but my point is that a particular technology choice is rarely right or wrong, rather its about whether you know how to make the technology choice work. The reason I mention this is because when it comes to OBA, many CIOs already know how to make two-thirds of the equation work (that is, they know Office, and they know Microsoft Servers). And this trickles down to all areas (users with Office, IT with SharePoint & Exchange, developers with .NET etc).
Summary: OBA may or may not be the best technology architecture – but it will often be the best choice – simply because your IT team know how to make it successful.
Use what you have
The second benefit of OBA is the ability to use what you have (ie minimise TCO). If you already have Office and Microsoft Servers in place, then building on top of them is a comfortable position to take. Notwithstanding the need to upgrade (eg Office 2003 to Office 2007, or SharePoint Server 2003 to MOSS) there is a considerable enterprise base in place that can be used. At this point the marketing collateral descends into ‘leverage’, ‘proven’, ‘scalable’ and other buzzword guff, but the point is valid.
Again, the actual technology may or may not be the best, but having it in place offsets costs required to develop functionality that might already exist in other offerings.
At this point you might be buying in to the whole OBA vision. But is it appropriate for your business? Does it apply for example, to companies with only 30 staff? Again the case study site provides good guidance here.
You’ll see for example that most examples are for large corporates (1000+ employees). But the good news is that OBA applies at all levels, and there are a few examples where companies with as few as 10 or 14 employees are using OBA to improve their business (the smaller company examples typically use Dynamics CRM as their LOB app).
In terms of where OBA is predominant, the top two industries are Finance (Banking, Insurance, etc) and Manufacturing and the top two processes are Financial processes and Sales processes.
Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is a small but vital part of the OBA discussion. It’s the main tool developers use to build the extensions to Office apps that allow interaction with LOBs. But that’s a whole topic on its own, and I’ll be covering that in a later post.
[If you found this useful you may be interested in other Clarity series posts]
This Wed at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we're lucky enough to have Bob McGilvray and Tatham Oddie presenting.
When: This Wed 25 June 2008
Plus:
Details of presentations
How to manage Outsourcing by Bob McGilvray
In this presentation Bob covers his experiences with outsourcing large software projects to overseas development teams. Bob will be covering the benefits, problems and techniques for managing an outsourced development.
Bob will present some basic facts about Outsourcing of development staff worldwide, and will give you some insight into the advantages and pitfalls of using overseas development staff, based on his own experiences to date.
About Bob
Bob left the British Army in 1986 and set up as a one man band developing database systems in the UK for HIV and Drug & Alcohol Treatment Clinics. Working in Clipper then Foxbase, Bob's very limited technical and programming experience resulted in an offer of help from Bulgarian IT firm JEI being readily accepted. 6 months later, JEI attempted to double its charging rates overnight and was was promptly fired - and Bob's firm then individually hired the developers from JEI, all of who work for Bob's firm Coomasis Ltd.
Coomasis has a support base in England, its development team based throughout Bulgaria, and is managed from Batemans Bay. It is on the UK's major suppliers of systems for Drug & Alcohol agencies with over 200 agencies using its products.
Overview of ASP.NET MVC by Tatham Oddie
MVC Framework In this session Tatham introduces the MVC design pattern and then explains Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation. The presentation will be high level, covering where MVC is beneficial, where it is inappropriate, and why you would consider it in your business.
Here's the full description: The release of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework is rapidly approaching, and now is the time for businesses to start evaluating how it can be applied in their organisations. Come along for an interactive discussion around the benefits that MVC brings to the table, the differences between MVC and Web Forms and the ongoing roadmap for each.
About Tatham
Based in Sydney, Australia, Tatham divides his time between his role as a Senior Consultant with Readify, and working on his own businesses.
Don’t forget, if you haven't already, you can join the SBTUG group on Facebook.
And please RSVP for Wed night’s event here. This helps us know how many people are coming (for catering).
Last but not least, you can always follow us on Twitter here.
One of the problems we often encounter is information overload. There's no shortage of great articles, examples, podcasts and webcasts on every conceivable technology. Microsoft's products are no different.
Thus, the following is comprised of numerous sources easy to find online - there's no special insight here. Rather, I've just simply tried to distill a product to its highest level overview. Hope it helps, and as usual it's covered by my 'well duh' disclaimer.
Anyway, on to today's topic: SQL Server 2008
History of SQL Server
SQL Server has been around for a while, with version 6 coming along in the early '90s.
Version 6.5 and 7.0 followed. SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 are the most common versions in use now.
SQL Server 2008 has just entered its Release Candidate cycle, which means it may be released in the next few months.
Editions
There's a number of editions, the main ones being:
SQL Server Standard, Enterprise & Developer
SQL Server Web & Workgroup
SQL Express (available Free)
SQL Compact Edition (available Free)
(These support a variety of operating systems and chip sets)
Components
You may have seen the following helpful diagram at some point - it is a good overview of the main components in SQL Server 2008:
Database Engine
The main storage and query engine, supporting security, tables, views, stored procedures, replication and general management of data. SQL Agent also hangs off the database engine, allowing jobs or tasks to be scheduled.
Analysis Services
As the name implies, Analysis services are about providing in depth functions for analysing data.
There's two main parts to Analysis Services. Multi-dimensional data is where structures are built that package up data, often from multiple sources, into a single aggregated model. Often referred to as 'cubes' due to their multi-dimensional format. These structures are then also used in other packages (eg PerformancePoint) and reporting tools.
Data Mining is about interrogating vast volumes of data, often to provide predictive models and trends.
Reporting Services
Reporting services provide presentation and programming tools for delivering reports. Various formats, scheduling and exporting options are provided.
Integration Services
Integration services provide a platform for efficiently moving data in and out of SQL Server. Numerous formats and conversions between them can be managed. The integration tasks are coded as 'packages', and GUI tools are provided to help build them.
Service Broker
Provides the database engine with the capability to build messaging and queuing applications. Allows distributed applications to be built easily (since it supports transactions).
Replication
Replication facilitates data being distributed between different databases, and synchronised at regular intervals (sometimes close to real time). Replication can function over LANs, WANS, and the internet.
What about Notification Services?
Notifications services was a component of SQL Server 2005 that allowed messages to be sent to subscribers. It was a way of deploying apps that could send notifications in huge volumes. However it was dropped from SQL Server 2008.
Tools
SQL Server Management Studio
Key function: Managing
This is the main application for managing and administering the servers & services, databases, stored procedures, security, replication, resource governor and more.
Business Intelligence Development Studio
Key function: Developing
This is where you build applications (ie think Solutions and Projects) for any of the main services, including Analysis, Reporting and Integration Services. For example, you'd use this for building Analysis cubes, or an Integration Services package (eg here's one I did earlier :-))
SQL Server Profiler
Key function: Debugging
This is used for capturing and analysing activity. The tool allows almost any communication item in SQL Server to be captured, everything from queries, stored procedures, result sets, handshaking, and more. This is usually the first port of call when debugging SQL performance for example.
Other tools
There's also various command line tools as well as configuration tools (although apparently not the Surface Area Configuration tool I mentioned recently).
Other important stuff
Microsoft has an overall vision for providing data everywhere, whether that's on the desktop, web, mobile device or in the data centre. Here's a nice little piccy that puts it in context ->
Microsoft Sync Framework
Part of the strategy for making data available anywhere, is having the means to synchronise it back with the main data store. This is where the Microsoft Sync Framework fits in. It's not yet released (currently CTP2) and handles more than just database synchronisation ( but we are only interested in the database part for now).
The diagrams below show two manifestations of this. The first uses the internet for connecting back to a main storage server. The second adds to this by allowing the devices to synchronise between themselves as well as the main server (again over the internet).
The main point is that this supports an 'occasionally connected' architecture.
SQL Server Data Services
Plus Microsoft has a SQL Server Data Services concept coming (it's currently in limited Beta), which provides on-demand data storage, all hosted by Microsoft.
Closing comment
Yet again Microsoft marketing has chosen to hit us with the 'actionable' adjective. I still smile every time I see it - here's why.
Last week we started seeing some of the TechEd Australia tracks being announced. Web is the first.
There was a little bit of Twitter backlash and the odd blog post noting that the track might be missing an important topic or two. (I've deliberately not linked to any of the blogs or Twitter feeds in case I misrepresent people, but they are easy to find).
Whether the track could be better (and how that might be achieved) is not my concern in this post.
Here's why its a good thing
My thinking is this: Microsoft has come so far in the last 12 months that there is just way too much stuff to adequately cover.
Surely this is a good thing!
Whereas in years gone by we've been forced to sit through sessions hyping up technology that is ages away from being released, this year we have so much new (and released!) stuff that it can't all be shown.
Conferences
Conferences are always a juggling act, with so many planning decisions to make, topics to choose from, and speakers to accommodate. You'll never get the mix exactly right. And with Australia only having capacity for 2,000 or so attendees (the US can service 14,000+) there's gonna be tough calls all along the way. Perhaps there should be 2 web tracks, or more sessions, or shorter sessions, or whatever... I'm sure there'll be some careful analysis post event. But don't let that get in the way of your attending...
See you there
For me , I reckon this year's TechEd is likely to be the best I've attended (it'll be my fourth). Microsoft, please don't disappoint me.
Will you be there?
Disclaimer
This post is covered under my 'well duh' disclaimer, and I fully realise I've had the odd whinge myself in the past (here and here for example).
We're launching a new product this week. This Thursday morning to be exact.
You may know that Elcom, where I work, is a web company that builds products for medium to large companies. We do intranets, extranets, portals, web sites, etc. Plus we do a fair bit of customisation.
Over the last few months we've been turning things around a little and 'productizing' our custom projects into products in their own right.
TrainingManager.NET is one such product.
Although it's already live in two reasonably large companies, we're only now doing the official launch. It's a breakfast this Thursday and I hear the food is going to be good!
There's a press release here if you're interested in the marketing spin :-)
Here's the details if you are interested in coming along (free to attend):
It's got a little bit of press (here, here and here), but the main thing I like is that it is running on .NET 3.5 - yay for that! Of course you shouldn't just consider a product based on the underlying technology - that'd be a feature not a benefit right?
So, what does TrainingManager do? Here's an description (complete with terms like 'cutting edge' ;-)). We'll have some nicer collateral coming in the next few weeks with cool screens shots, a micro site, etc.
Basically - as the name suggests - it allows a company to manage all the training for its staff and customers. It covers training pathways, competencies, face-to-face training, training events, testing & verification, plus a whole bunch of other goodies. If this is of interest let me know and I'll post a few more details (or contact me and we can chat).
BTW we're thinking of re-branding the product with a cool, hip, sexy name. Angus suggested 'Mustang'. Why? No particular reason - it just sounds cool. Elcom Mustang. Hmmmmm I think I like it.
I'm open to suggestions...
