Scott's musings : conference, TED

Bill Gates At TED

Scott Howlett — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 03:05:34 GMT

I've blogged before about TED - it's such an amazing site and an amazing conference. I really hope that I get to TED one of these years...

I've just listened to Gates talk this year at TED. He's not talking about technology but about global health and the work of his foundation. Very cool and surprisingly funny too. Little choppy in the shift from malaria to 'what makes a great teacher?'...

""I'm an optimist. Any tough problem I think can be solved.""

Strange to hear so much of the language from Microsoft applied to such a different domain - "tools", "roadmaps"...

Automated Deployment of SharePoint/MOSS Solutions

Scott Howlett — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:21:00 GMT

imason's Ivan Neganov recently presented at the Toronto SharePoint Camp. In his session, he talked about automated deployments of SharePoint/MOSS-based solutions. Deployment with SharePoint/MOSS is among the least-understood areas, and it is not trivial. Most people resort to the first option (the top of the diagram below) - a manual deployment.

Let's say you're on a project with 10 Iterations and therefore 10 deployments. Each deployment will take 8 hours to do (definitely not an unrealistic estimate). So, you'll spend 10*8 = 80 hours deploying.

Now, contrast this to the second option (the bottom of the diagram). You want to invest, upfront, in automated deployments (this is represented by A). But how much should you invest? Well, lets say each automated deployment (little 'a') takes one hour, and you have 8 deployments to do. So 8*1 = 8 hours spent deploying. If you compare this back to the first option (80 hours spent), this means you have about 72 hours to invest upfront on building the automated deployment (A). Considering all the benefits of automation (better quality, fewer errors, repeatable code....) this would seem to be a good investment.

I like how Ivan made the comparison numerical - gives a good sense for how much investment makes sense for automated deployments.

imason at the Toronto Sharepoint Camp

Scott Howlett — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:51:00 GMT

Some of imason's Sharepoint gurus presented this past weekend at the Toronto Sharepoint camp. Boyan, Jim, Bob and Ivan all presented. A good review of the day can be found here, including this high-praise for Jim & Boyan.

Jim Schwartz and Boyan Tsolov showed how they have managed to stretch InfoPath and SharePoint beyond the typical limits. I cannot describe how exciting it was to see Jim and Boyan actually reproduce many of the methods they used to implement a highly successful InfoPath project in front of us all, with full explanations and helpful suggestions. You can find the material here: http://www.imason.com/blogs/jim_schwartz/archive/2009/01/25/advanced-infopath-development-with-sharepoint.aspx and I highly recommend giving it a review. If everyone at imason is as friendly and intelligent as these two guys then I expect to see them be pretty darned successful and am rather envious.

Well done guys and a great job by the organizers!

Web 2.0: Use in unintended ways - Google is better than the CDC in monitoring the flu

Scott Howlett — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:12:05 GMT

A long long time ago (OK, it was February 2006) I wrote about Web 2.0 in a post called Thoughts on Ajax/Atlas - 9: My $0.02 on Web 2.0. What was fascinating to me -- and lots of others -- about Web 2.0 was the interesting ways that people were driving value out of their data. I spoke with a lot of customers in 2006 about Web 2.0; I emphasized that it was really important to figure out how and what unique data their proposed application would capture. I reminded them that the genius of Amazon wasn't just a great online retail experience (something other eventually copied), but how they mined their data to provide a differentiated experience (the Amazon ratings and recommendations still can't be beat to this day). And Google wasn't just a great search algorithm (which it was and still is) but it was also about how they mined their search data.

Even with that though, I was totally blown away by GoogleFlu. Basically, they've taken their search data and used it to monitor the progression of the flu through the United States. You can read about how it works here including a great animated graph that shows how their monitoring is about 2 weeks ahead of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). It's really amazing that there's such a strong correlation between people search for 'flu' on the web, and the actual rates of flu infection in the community [note, the algorithm to make the correlation is likely much more sophisticated].

Wow! Now that's Web 2.0. And it's a little bit scary... :) What else are they watching????

By the way, this little tidbit was brought to me by TED (see TED - One of my favorite sites out there). Google.org is headed by Larry Brilliant who was a 2006 TED Prize winner...

Influencers: www.TED.com - One of my favorite sites out there

Scott Howlett — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:12:00 GMT

Do you ever visit TED?

If you don't, you should. It has one of the best collections of short talks by some of the most recognized names in science, business and politics.

I recently watched Michael Shermer's talk "Why people believe strange things". The whole 13 minute talk is entertaining but the last 5 minutes or so is pure genius, including a dissection of the Zepplin lyrics played backwards...

It's so relevant to me and the business of imason - when it comes to technology, there is so much misinformation and preconceptions; our job is to untangle this web and move forward based on science and to keep the notions of business value front and center... this is what imason is all about.