MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services

MSDN is holding a series of webcasts next week focused on leveraging the Microsoft Application Platform in Financial Services. The topics and content look very interesting!

Date / Time	Presenters	Title	WWE ID	Registration Link	OnDemand
4/2/2007 11:00 AM	Asli Bilgin Brian Jackson	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Kickoff	1032334157	Register	OnDemand
4/2/2007 12:00 PM	Bill Zack	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: SOA Application Integration	1032334729	Register	OnDemand
4/2/2007 1:00 PM	Markellos Diorinos	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Building Trust with Internet Explorer 7.0	1032334161	Register	OnDemand
4/3/2007 09:00 AM	Allan Da Costa Pinto	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Integrate Heterogeneous Capital Market Messaging Systems with Windows Communication Foundation	1032331983	Register	OnDemand
4/3/2007 11:00 AM	Dan Woodman	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Software as a Service in the Insurance Industry	1032334166	Register	OnDemand
4/3/2007 12:00 PM	Jaime Rodriguez	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Designer/Developer Collaboration with Windows Presentation Foundation	1032334169	Register	OnDemand
4/4/2007 12:00 PM	Mohammad Akif	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Java Interoperability with .NET	1032331985	Register	OnDemand
4/5/2007 10:00 AM	Mohammad Akif	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Web 2.0 for Financial Services	1032334173	Register	OnDemand
4/6/2007 10:00 AM	Joe Rubino	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: Windows Workflow Foundation	1032334176	Register	OnDemand
4/6/2007 12:00 PM	Mike Walker	MSDN Unwrapped for Financial Services: the 2007 Office System Business Platform	1032334179	Register	OnDemand

Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server webcasts

Visual Studio 2005 has been available for awhile, but Team System and Team Foundation Server are still new to a lot of folks. Here are some webcasts that will shed some light on what VSTS and TFS can do for your development team:

-          Integrated Team Development with Visual Studio Team System   - Visual Studio Team System Overview·         Great overview of the new tools that Microsoft offers that extend Visual Studio 2005 IDE to help with architecting, testing, debugging for all the people on the development team.April 3^rd, April 17^th, May 1^st, May 15^th, June 5^th, June 19^th – all sessions start at 1 pm EST (duration 1 hr) 

-          Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – The What, Why and How        ·         Team foundation Server helps development teams improve communication and collaboration – a must have for anyone using Visual Studio or wanting improved development insight!April 3^rd, April 17^th, May 1^st, May 15^th, June 5^th, June 19^th – all sessions start at 2:30 pm EST (duration 1 hr) 

-          Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals – the What and Why!·         This offering is new and a great synergy with SQL Server and companies developing custom applications that target SQL Server database.April 10^th, April 24^th, May 8^th, May 22^nd, June 12^th, June 26^th – all sessions start at 1 pm EST (duration 1 hr) 

-          Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers – the What and Why!·         This offering is new!  Testing applications is key to ensuring better performance, higher security and more reliable solutions! Microsoft’s new integrated testing offerings are a great addition to your development environment.April 10^th, April 24^th, May 8^th, May 22^nd, June 12^th, June 26^th – all sessions start at 2:30 pm EST (duration 1 hr)

-          Visual Studio Team System and MSDN Licensing Demystified – Licensing Overview ·         Understanding what you need and how to license it can be confusing – this session will help you get the answers you needApril 3^rd, April 17^th, May 1^st, May 15^th, June 5^th, June 19^th  – all sessions start at 11 am EST (duration 1 hr)

What is the impact of virtualization on high volume websites?

I’ll admit right now that I struggle with the “virtualization everything” move that has taken place over the past few years, mainly because I like the predictability of raw hardware and the thought of “one big server” makes me a little nervous. I came across this http://www.webperformanceinc.com/library/reports/LoadTestingVirtualizationPerformance/index.html report which clearly shows the trade off you make between performance and manageability when you host even a simple web application in a virtualized environment. Definitely some food for thought!

Bad Bob, Bad!

The other day Ben mentioned that my blog feed had turned brown in his feed reader… talk about a wakeup call! It’s time to get back on the blogging wagon!

Habañero’s user experience team blog!

Habañero’s user experience team has launched a new blog to discuss their work, their processes and to give the rest of us some insight into the way they see the world. The UE blog was designed in house and features regular posts by the whole team! I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about the Habañero user experience team or design and information architecture in general!

What do you mean by results gap?

Defining the “results gap” is key to understanding how organizations can benefit from focusing on the needs of users and their view of business processes. Medium to large organizations can invest millions of dollars in ERP and other line of business systems and not see the benefits that drove those purchasing decisions: increased productivity, better business insight and improved compliance with corporate policies and procedures.

The first way of looking at the results gap is from a purely financial perspective, i.e. can an investment in a given system provide a positive return on investment (ROI)? That return on investment might represent reduced FTE requirements, business services that are no longer required or the replacement of a more costly system. Some of the difficulties with these financial metrics are that they may not capture the full organizational picture around a given system investment or they rely on future staff reassignments or downsizing that may never actually occur. In addition, ROI calculations that are based on cost to purchase versus cost to implement might be overstating the final return by a factor of two or more due to the cost of customizations and data migration.

The second aspect of the results gap is people oriented and is based on the fact that people and processes work and think differently than systems do, particularly monolithic line of business systems. Symptoms of this disconnect are data reentry from paper or other systems, relying on offline analysis or calculations and “workarounds” to move an item through a system driven process. These factors may not seem significant when taken alone, but across hundreds of users in an organization, they multiply into a huge drag on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Bridging the results gap is only going to occur by applying solutions that improve the “business usability” of line of business systems by being collaborative, easy to use, role based and easily customizable.

I’ll discuss some of the forms that these solutions can take in my next few postings!

Closing the results gap

The past six months have seen the introduction of some significant tools and platforms that will allow organizations to structure business solutions in new and amazing ways, including Duet Software for Microsoft Office and SAP, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and BizTalk Server 2006. The rich features and functionality that they encompass will enable capabilities to be built around the way people and business processes work and flow, not simply the way in which a system defines those activities. It’s with these tools that we will start to close the results gap that exists with current line of business systems and organizational systems such as ERP, CRM and SCM. Organizational systems definitely have their place and will not be going anywhere soon, but their inefficiencies and inflexibility can now be masked with nimble and user centric tools and solutions.

 Over the coming weeks I’ll be covering a number of ways that organizations can leverage these new aspects of the Microsoft platform in bringing their organizational systems closer to their users, so please come back to read more!

What does readiness really mean?

At Habañero we offer a .NET Readiness program that improves the way an organization's development team uses Microsoft development tools and languages. This could be through a migration to Visual Studio Team System 2005 or by moving to a patterns-based development environment using the Microsoft Enterprise Library and its supporting Application Blocks.

Each time we've worked with a development team through some sort of readiness exercise, there is a tendency to focus on the tools, or the .NET Framework, or the C# language itself. What I find interesting is that each team approaches readiness in their own way and from their own perspective. How does an organization measure success of this kind of effort? If you look at the definition of readiness – "the state of having been made ready or prepared for use or action" – it's not so much about results, but it would certainly help to create buy-in if some kind of measurable benefit could be attributed to this investment of time and money. I'm still searching, and will post more details when I find something useful.

How to sell without selling

Let's face it, as IT professionals, most of us end up selling our ideas or capabilities in one fashion or another, whether we are external consultants or part of an organization. Some people are equipped with natural sales skills due to their character, but for others it is a challenge to understand what works and why. One of the best resources I've ever come across, and required reading here at Habañero, is Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play by Mahan Khalsa. Mahan's approach is a powerful alternative to what I've seen and experienced both as a consultant and customer, and I think it would be an excellent model for developing support for initiatives inside organizations.

Both the book and audio CD are available online on FranklinCovey website here: http://www.franklincovey.com/letsgetreal/media.html

Who do you trust?

Managing your identity online has been frought with half-baked and abortive solutions for as long as I can remember, with anything beyond a username and password dialog box leading to usability and interoperability issues. It's exciting to see the amount of headway being made on this issue across the industry with initiatives such as OpenID, DIX, SAML, and InfoCard being formalized and implemented.

The question that remains for me is what or who makes a good identity provider? My public identity is an aggregration of my passport, driver's license, credit card and social insurance number, which are issued by the Canadian government, the province of BC, and a credit card company. Should they continue to be the issuers of the online elements of my identity, or should I be able to elect to use a third party identity provider? I've read some discussion about the potential role credit bureaus could play, but do I want my identity tied to an organization that I don't have a direct relationship with and is primarily focused on how well I pay my bills?

In my mind, there are some important criteria that any identity provider must meet:

• Their primary focus should be on the security of my identity;
• They need to operate in a transparent fashion with full disclosure of activities involving my identity;
• They must allow me to be an active participant in managing my identity; and
• They need to guarantee my indentity will be future-proof.

I'm not as concerned about whether there are charges involved or if they are a public or private organization, they just need to focus on building and maintaining my trust with them. Identity management is the ultimate trust game.