Steve’s blog

Thoughts on Launching Enterprise Applications

Stephen Kearns — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:45:04 GMT

There are many important questions that get asked before, during and after the launch of any major enterprise software system. Many of them will focus around performance of the system at a technical level. These are important questions, but sometimes they overshadow another set of questions that are essential for a successful launch.

Launch Readiness Considerations

It’s common to ask if the project team has resolved all serious issues. The difficulty is that for any complex system, the team often doesn’t know the answer to that question with 100% certainty. No system is perfect - expect issues to appear after launch - the question then shifts: Does your organization have the people, process and tools/technology in place to rapidly move through the issue lifecycle: capture user input, diagnose, fix, test, deploy and respond back to end user to close the loop.

People

Do you have the right # of people and skills in these areas:

Leadership – who is overseeing your team, responsible for launch and the support of the application after launch
Infrastructure – who is managing your servers? who is managing your databases? If you are deploying into the cloud, how will infrastructure support work? In our experience, having a relationship with your cloud/hosting partner can still be important
Customer Service (CS) – who will be responding to your end users and what strategies will be in place for listening and responding to their input? Is your CS team large enough to handle the possible volume of input through the various channels your users will be communicating to you with?
Development Support – how many people are needed post-launch to rapidly address issues coming through CS?
Quality Assurance – do you have enough people to adequately achieve coverage of the system in a short enough time frame if you are needing to do a rapid release

Tools and Technology

Ticketing system for CS to manage input from your user population
Defect Management Tool for Dev and QA – key question: is there a linkage between the Defect Management System and the Ticketing system to ensure that CS stays in synch with the rest of the team?
Application Diagnosis: for large, complex systems a distributed application logging mechanism is essential. For one of our large external .com customers, we extended an existing solution in the Microsoft Enterprise Library with MSMQ and SQL Server to provide a query-able database that consolidated logging information across the system
System Telemetry and Health Monitoring – we’ve seen Cactii used effectively but also consider Microsoft System Center which is a very powerful tool

Process

Documentation to support troubleshooting
Rapid deployment process – how automated is your deployment process – can it be repeated reliably or is each release a major undertaking?
Mechanism for following up with end users to communicate resolution and give them a sense of involvement with the improvement of the system

All of these things are easy to say, and hard to do when there are a million other things competing for a project team’s attending as it nears launch. But without wanting to sound ominous, keep in mind these things are 10 times easier and faster to address and implement prior to a launch, then after the launch when you discover you really need them. Use that to help weigh out the priorities leading up to a launch.

Create TFS Work Items directly from Outlook Emails

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:36:50 GMT

This is a great little productivity tool for teams actively using Work Items to track dev activities in TFS. Used it at a recent customer (thx Dilip!) and found it helpful.

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/srlteam/archive/2007/03/04/Team-System-Outlook-2007-Addin-_2D00_-v1.0.aspx

technical; TFS; work items

Office 2010 Technical Preview Announced Today

Stephen Kearns — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:14:10 GMT

Hi All – I was at the Microsoft Technical Preview Press Event this morning to participate in a panel discussion with members of the press. Session was hosted by Jason Brommet and the good folks at High Road communications.

ITWorld Canada picked up the event and some of the partner discussion:

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/Daily-News/f83346b9-5007-43c5-b3f0-cd10ccd5b45d.html

Here were a few quick hits on stuff that jumped out at me that I’m going to really enjoy in the new version.

Outlook
1. Convert voicemail to text (when hooked up to exchange)
2. You can mark a given conversation thread to ignore further updates
3. When you receive invites, body of message includes a calendar preview
4. Mouse-over emails/presence jelly-beans pops up a little contact-preview
5. New pane listing recent contacts you’ve interacted with (quick click to IM or email)
6. Quick-steps – kind of like a section on the ribbon where you can stick in some canned/customized macros – e.g. Reply with Invite – takes an email you’re on and creates invite with all the people on the email as invitees. Nice!
PowerPoint
- video as “first class citizen” – basic video editing and effects tools built right in
- more powerful image editing
- Record your PowerPoint presentation without having to go out to a 3rd party tool like Camtasia
- You can broadcast your presentation (pops up a provider list, including Windows Live for individual consumer audience)
Excel
1. Sparklines looks interesting – visualization/charting right inside a spreadsheet cell – may seem small, but when you’re pouring over volumes of data, the ability to visually highlight key points so person consuming the information can spot it quickly is really valuable
2. Slicers – ability to surface up your data filters on table or pivot tables as a little persistent dialog/window and see what filters have been applied, apply new ones, deselect.
Word
1. Backstage (across all apps) – surfaces lots of great doc properties/tools – e.g. integrates print dialog with print-preview
2. Ability to minimize the ribbon

You can see more screenshot info here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/2010office/imageGallery.aspx

Looking forward to seeing many of the other good stuff coming down the pipe including the web versions - “Office Anywhere” later this summer and the SharePoint side of Office 14 in the fall.

VSTS – Setting Permissions on Work Items?

Stephen Kearns — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:11:00 GMT

Is it possible? I was thinking the answer was no – but I poked around and ran across this forum entry which outlines how you do it – basically, the short version is TFS allows you to apply permission (or deny permissions) to a specific Node in the Area Path Tree.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/de-DE/tfsworkitemtracking/thread/280095b2-974e-469e-b879-9ec9f1bacfb0

Office 2007 Feature - “My SharePoint Sites” – Cool but Mysterious

Stephen Kearns — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:41:00 GMT

Hi All,

Not sure if you’ve noticed this or not, but starting with Office 2007, I noticed in my Office Save dialogs an option started to appear called “My SharePoint Sites”:

I’ve mentioned it to a few other people. I find the functionality pretty useful – the scenario I use the most is when I get attachments from folks via email and want to quickly dump the attachment on our SharePoint project portal (a.k.a. the imason client area). Big time saver.

But the part that has remained mysterious to me is how you add sites to the list. I’m trying to track the info down – the first useful hit that I got was this blog post [1] about where “My SharePoint Sites” comes from. Apparently you have to enable your SharePoint “My Site” (which I’ve done) to get things rolling. Then the first time any Office Client App runs each day, it updates the list of Sites automatically… Doesn’t totally answer my question though, b/c I have access to a whole bunch of SharePoint sites that I don’t see in the list so I’m still left wondering why some appear and some done. The post refers to “Member Groups” - I’m curious about what the technical definition of this is – does this mean the sites where I’m a Site Collection Admin? Sites where I have “Full control”?

[1] http://paulliebrand.com/2007/11/29/office-2007-and-my-sharepoint-sites/

I’m going to play around with it some more and try and find the answer – if anyone out there has already figured it out, LMK.

[UPDATE – MAY 2009]

So I think the mystery is resolved – and the answer isn’t what I expected… The list is comprised of any site where there is a security group with the word “Members” in it. So if your site doesn’t have a security group with the word “Members” you won’t see it in the list (for example, we have a lot of sites with the “All People” group). So your site admin needs to create a security group with the word “members” in it and add you to that group - then it will start to show up (see note above – may not appear for 24 hours). Not very intuitive, but works for now. (maybe something they’ll resolve in the next version?)