.NET technologies

The experience of my life: Startupweekend

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:59:00 GMT

StartupWeekend is a 1-weekend event in a city, where about one hundred random software developers, marketers, web designers, financial folks, etc come together undre one roof to turn an idea into a business/product starting on a friday night, thru sunday night. It's a great experience! Especially for folks with the entrepreneur bug.

I had a uber-awesome experience at Startupweekend Ann Arbor about 1 month ago. You can read more about Ann Arbor Startupweekend here: http://annarbor.startupweekend.com/

I project-managed a team that built a company: TagRoad in 52 hours (or so)....and launched a product: Vagabandoo. Check out more

The team is still together doing work on the product.

I actually would love to attend more startupweekends in other cities.

The Raleigh StartupWeekend was actually covered by NBC....and Columbus StartupWeekend I read, was a lot of fun.

Really hot

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:24:00 GMT

I'm very hot on Enterprise Social Media these days. Companies such as: Neighborhood America and Ning thrill me.

I spoke briefly at a small meeting about how Starbucks is using Social Media: http://www.mystarbucks.com/

Artemis helped Biggby Coffee, a national coffee franchise create a community of loyal customers on the web, check it out here

We are proud of our work - our first social media project. With integration with flickr and twitter.

Happenings at Enliven Software

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:21:00 GMT

I trust that you all are periodically checking out the latest at Enliven Software.

If you haven't, here are some of the things that has been going on in the past 3 months or so:

Enliven has a handful of great News stories that we’ve recently added to our website that we wanted to share. Check it out!

Enliven embarks upon a strategic partnership with Alliance Payment Technologies

Enliven has finally done it! We’ve grown so big so quickly that we’ve grown right out of our payment processing and invoicing facility! Rather than add another floor to the tower…

Magnolia Management, LLC signs on with Enliven Software’s ePayables Program

Enliven Software brought Magnolia Management on late last week, with its ePayables solution.

Healthcare System Connections Joins on as Enliven Software’s Newest Partner!!

Earlier this month, Healthcare System Connections signed on with Enliven Software to be a reseller of the Enliven Software Suite of Solutions.

Enliven Software blown away by new Payables client SkyVenture

SkyVenture, the world’s leading manufacturer of vertical wind tunnels, purchased Enliven’s ePayables and ePayments solutions, earlier this month.

Enliven Software thrilled to sign Crown Asset Management

Enliven Software brought Crown Asset Management, LLC onboard late last week, with its ePayables and ePayments solutions.

Welcome Friends of Adalin Farnum to the Enliven Software family!

Early this month, Friends of Adalin Farnum signed up with Enliven Software to have us help them with their payment gateway needs using Enliven Software’s ePay solution.

PEAK 10 Signs on with Enliven Software’s eInvoicing and ePay products!

We are pleased to announce a new member to the Enliven Family: Peak 10! Peak 10 has signed on with Enliven for eInvoicing and ePay, to be able to send their clients electronic versions of their invoices from Microsoft Dynamics GP, and then receive payments online.

Artemis wins a very significant deal with the City of Aspen, Colorado

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:15:00 GMT

We are extremely happy that we just landed the City of Aspen, Colorado as a client. This is what we have been waiting for; for a long time!

We were featured in their local newspaper as well. The City of Aspen is one of the “go-to” places in the United States...actually, in the world. Many of the millionaires and billionaires in the US call Aspen home. It's also the dream destination of skiiers, snowboarders and nature lovers.

Artemis rolls out another great website!

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Today Artemis and the Capital Region Airport Authority launched the new www.flylansing.com. The new site is an example of another great project helping to promote the Lansing region, and we’re really proud to be a part of it. The launch of this site is the focus of a new marketing effort by CRAA to promote traveling through the Capital City Airport rather than making the trip to Detroit Metro. Be on the lookout for TV, radio, print and billboard ads all promoting the new site!

The development of this site was the definition of team effort with nearly every member of both the Web and Custom Dev teams contributing enormously. Well done team, and thank you for all your hard work and passion in making this yet another project to be proud of!

Highlights:

Completely re-designed look and feel, both adhering to FlyLansing.com’s new brand image and best practices in web usability
Integration with real-time Arrival and Departures, Flight Radar, and online booking engines
Revised information architecture, promoting logical and intuitive navigation
Interactive Visitor’s Map based on Microsoft Live Earth

Custom EBusiness Shops / Web and Application Development Consulting companies

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Artemis is one of those types of companies that you would consider a boutique shop - we envision, develop and implement web based solutions to business problems, to drive revenue profit and improve business efficiency.

The challenge is that as we grow, it has been very tough to manage the shifts in roles and responsibilities, and to evolve our Project Management methodology we coined CADIUM. We went through a rigorous excercise to refine CADIUM, define clearer roles and responsibilities. Create a platform for defining and managing capacity.

I will plan on publishing our findings over time! What an exercise it was!!

Twitter integration with myPM, an extension of phpCollab

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:42:00 GMT

We use phpcollab for project management and task management at Artemis.

Now that I'm a big fan of twitter I think that Artemis should extend myPM to include a way to publish your status over to tweeter. Would this be cool or what? Twitter has a very rich API i heard anyway.

Technology Consulting - Application/web development

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:37:00 GMT

What you need to know to be a Technology Consultant, developing custom ebusiness solutions:

Always start your research from

1. Wikipedia

2. Vendor's product page

3. History of product (previous versions/origination) / Google search

4. Blogs (technorati)

You have to choose a camp. In my perspective choose the Microsoft camp - it keeps things under one roof and simpler, with vendor support. Benchmark others against it to get a breadth understanding.

1. Portals and collaboration

a. Sharepoint Portal (competition BEA Weblogic server, Vignette)

2. Processes and methodologies

a. Application Development processes (Software development life cycle - SDLC)

b. Usability

c. Accessibility

d. RUP, Extreme programming, SCRUM, CADIUM

3. Application Development languages

a. C#, VB.NET (competition J2EE, Java, PHP, Perl, Python)

4. Web technologies

a. ASP.NET (competition PHP, Python, J2EE)

b. Javascript, Jquery

c. CSS, XHTML (vs HTML)

d. Content management systems

i. Dotnetnuke

ii. Sharepoint (formerly MS CMS)

iii. Drupal

iv. Wordpress

v. BEA Weblogic

5. Reporting and Analytics and Datawarehouse

a. **Blue Ocean Strategy, Balanced scorecard strategy

b. PerformancePoint Server

c. Analysis Services (Oracle datawarehouse)

d. Proclarity

e. Business Scorecard

6. Database

a. SQL Server (versus Oracle, IBM DB2). MSDE (or SQL Express)

b. Access (lightweight)

c. Datawarehousing – Cube, KPI, dimensions

7. Virtualization

a. Microsoft Virtual Server (VMWare)

b. Understand Gartner maturity model as it relates to this

8. Server technologies

a. Windows Server

b. ISA (PIX Firewall)

c. Virtualization

d. Security

e. Disaster recovery

f. Workstation and Laptops

g. Email and Collaboration

9. New technologies

a. Web 2.0

b. Mobile programming

c. Wiki

On Google, and yet another disruptive and ground breaking product

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:57:00 GMT

Man, Google just doesn’t stop amazing me. I officially doff my hat to those guys.

You’d ask, what are they up to again…well, word on the street is they’ve released something that I think is revolutionary: http://gears.google.com/

Here is why this is extremely important to the future of computing. There was a big disruption when the web hit, and changed the way we viewed winforms applications (thick apps). Ajax came and caused another huge disruption. Silverlight/Apollo/WPF/Flex also is in the process of changing the game. Well, the question that people have been asking is which platform will win out? And the answer has been “it depends”…mainly on the target audience of your application/solution, and how much control YOU will have over their desktop (trust).

A lot of these discussions end up with the conclusion that, if you had to pick a winner, “Smart Clients” will be the winner. If you can’t define “smart clients” –find a generic and “newer” definition here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_client. Note that originally, RIAs and AJAX apps weren’t really considered smart applications – since a smart app needed to be able to run fully without being connected to a network/internet. The current definition has morphed a lot over the past year.

Anyhow, the original “smart clients” definition that I was familiar with when it first came out (especially in the MS world) was that aside from a rich experience similar to winforms, the app needed to be fully web aware, self-installing, and most importantly be able to run in disconnected mode. Apps like ITunes which are web aware, have a built in browser – have been promoted recently as the future of applications (since it can run both connected and disconnected).

Well, Google created gears to help move a lot of these web applications closer to being able to “play” in the smart client space. Think about the number of applications out there, e.g. a CRM app, which would experience an exponential adoption, if only the app would run fully…when not connected to the server.

Think about making your next application a “smart client” following the key tenets.

Google Gears could be the next industry server for disconnected data access for web applications (it’s a browser extension)…while winforms apps that are built to be smart apps may use a file system based xml file (with sync) or localized MSDE (SQL light with automatic 2-way replication).

What a time to have a job in technology! Way too much fun!!

User experience, usability and Microsoft...

Bunmi Akinyemiju — Sat, 26 May 2007 09:39:00 GMT

Please try and follow this blog at your spare time - at home.

http://chrisbernard.blogs.com/design_thinking_digest/

Chris Bernard is a very cool cat that just joined Microsoft recently, focusing on Microsoft’s new emphasis on User experience and Usability. This new strategy of Microsoft has given birth to a very exciting new line of products that Microsoft historically never had - Expression Web, Expression Media, Blend, Silverlight etc line of products. We need to jump on this bandwagon now!

Aside from these products which focus on user experience, Microsoft has also made the REAL jump into the world of advertising through the acquisition of one of the world’s largest Advertising agencies – eQuantive/Razorfish (http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/ourWork.htm ). They are making a promise and commitment that “design and user experience” is now first class citizen within Microsoft.

On his blog, Chris (he has formal education in Design) talks a lot about this strategy a lot, and he is passionate about taking the emphasis of User experience, Design and Usability across all forms of technology platforms – Mobile applications, the Web, Thick clients, Smart clients, etc. His title is Microsoft User Experience Evangelist. His counterpart’s name is Josh Holmes – a Microsoft Developer/Architect Evangelist.

What does this mean to Artemis? For the first time in the history of Software Development, application user experience is now as important as ever – user expectation is high. Secondly, Microsoft has created the tools for companies that are smart and innovative to take advantage of these tools in building applications that effectively solve the business problem in a very simple and user centric way.

Designers historically focused on look & feel for websites and sometimes, web applications. Today, through the use of the Expression line of tools, Designers and Usability experts MUST be involved in every software development project.

Specifically, our creative design group must now evolve into “Interaction Designers” – they will need to understand all the controls available for use when building applications for various platforms, using Silverlight, WPF, Winforms, Web+Ajax, Mobile, etc. That way, they can fully architect the user experience/front-end of the application – in an Adobe Photoshop/illustrator type application (Expression Blend). Once they are done – they send the produced artifacts over to the developer, and the developer wires it to the business logic and the database!

Our web development group should learn Expression Web and Blend in order to enhance their productivity while developing XHTML, XAML and CSS. The beauty of the process is that the Visual Studio IDE has essentially now evolved into: Visual Studio for Interaction Designers and Visual Studio for Developers…with tight integration across. Gone are the days that a designer will send a developer a PSD file to use to build an application!

Finally, the Design group, the Architecture group, the Development group would need to work hand-in-hand, and get integrated into a common workflow. This is really cool, because it feeds right into the “cross-pollination” theme that we already live by.

When Chris Bernard @ Microsoft learnt that we have dedicated designers and user interface architects, he indicated interest in Artemis and supporting us. He is willing to come over from Chicago to spend some time with our creative group, and to assist us with customer engagements that we have, in which we are trying to help the customer enhance their application’s user experience.

After seeing the Silverlight demos, I am quite impressed with what is coming up the pipe. We need to get ready. As Microsoft Developers, we can now develop truly Cross-platform applications that will run on Mac OS, Linux, etc.

Watch the Silverlight Airline demo (requires a download) here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/silverlight/bb419317.aspx

It will be quite interesting, if we can deliver an experience like this on the FlyLansing.COM website RFP that we are responding to, for the Capital Area Airport.

Guys, we have a lot of learning to do!

www.microsoft.com/expression

www.silverlight.net

www.visitmix.com

Creative design group, here is some training that we will get you scheduled for: http://www.msreadiness.com/IL_abstract.asp?eid=5015003

The second class is for user interaction designers that have advanced experience with Flash and Director.

· Expression Blend

· Expression Design

· NET Framework 3.0, Windows Presentation Foundation, XAML

· Visual Studio 2005

Web Group: http://www.msreadiness.com/IL_abstract.asp?eid=5015813

This course is for designers and developers with Web (but not necessarily Microsoft focused experience) you’ll play with:

· Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere and XAML

· ASP.NET 2.0 and ASP.NET AJAX

· Expression Web

· Expression Blend

· Visual Studio 2005

For developers, follow this blog: http://www.joshholmes.com/Default.aspx