Agile and SharePoint

My take on using Agile acceleration with SharePoint is pretty straight forward. SharePoint provides, for a price, to users and developers a massive set of code and function for reuse.

At the start of a project you can deploy a SharePonit virtual machine during requirements gathering. This will allow you to rapidly spike requirements in the first days of analysis. This is something that is a bit difficult to precisely describe.

A spike is when you take a discovered use case all the way to a proven implementation. You can start this rapidly in SharePoint. You can also get rapid feedback.

In most SharePoint projects I have worked on the business driver is generally to use SharePoint to meet as many business needs as possible at as low a cost as possible. Technically that is not much of a business driver I know, but the key base of development is that a client exists who wants something. If what they want is to use SharePoint for as much as possible than that is the requirement.

I generally start out a conversation with stakeholders by doing a mind map of communication uses in the company. I will move this to a set of gaps as quickly possible. These I will then spike out during the initial conversations, sometimes building things on a virtual machine with the users right there.

Then development will always be done in 2-3 week iterations. Iterations in SharePoint are short because its fairly easy to scope out BUT testing is critical. All code developed in SharePoint Object Model will have tonnes of dependencies on code you have no access to. You have to test constantly and developers are more researchers than creators much of the time.

Once you get your clients machines set up, which should be done in weeks and not months and should start with virtual machines when ever possible to start out. You can start moving work as a mixture of back ups and/or features and solutions.

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL04/

How Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server and a review of Team Foundation Server 2010.

If you need to produce custom code should you use TS over VSS? VSS is still good for teams of at most 5-10 team members. If you go over that you probably need to look at some other system, but Team Server comes with high user cost and frankly it is not the easiest software to learn and deploy, and it comes with some frustrating problem like no ability to link component to their use cases (without cheating).

I guess this question I can answer with this anser: if you need to ask you should not consider Team Server.

Taking a step back the great code version control community has been mostly abuze about going Open Source, which is probably what you should look in to. I have used CVS on a very large project back when I still cut code and it work very well, and the price is right.

SL_podium.jpg - Windows Live

SL_podium.jpg - Windows Live

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Photosynth in London

Gail working in 3-D

Photosynth in Camden Town London

Photosynth in Camden Town London

Social Marketing Stats

http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/smss09/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport.pdf


A little information about Social Marketing.

New Internet Democracy

Facebook users say yes to changes

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8016532.stm Source BBBC


Facebook users have voted to back changes which give them control over data and content they post on the site.

Early results suggest 75% of those who voted support the proposals.

The vote was triggered by changes Facebook made to its terms and conditions in February.

The move drew fire because it appeared to hand the social network site ownership of images, videos and data that users posted on profile pages.

(Comment: The key to social network is giving the keys to the inmates, after all people control the institutions they lived in all along. They and you just did not know it)

Computer just about as "needed" as a TV to American consumers

From the kitchen to the laundry room to the home entertainment center, Americans are paring down the list of familiar household appliances they say they can't live without, according to a new national survey by the Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends project.

Clissold Park Synth

Another synth from London. I love Photosynth and simply want to promote this amazing tool. In the past year I recall so called "experts" making fun of information from Facebook and Photosynth. I hope to help Photosynth take off. I hold to the principle that experts are generally the last to know much of anything.

So what is Photosynth? Photosynth is a framework that takes images and constructs a 3-D scene in which they are arranged. Behind this scene Photosynth works to create a Synth, a 3-D image created by identifying points of an image. The tool is probably the most amazing thing coming out of Microsoft Cloud and has amazing potential.

Star Trek the Movie is Coming: With Microsoft Photosynth

Star Trek the Movie is Coming: With Microsoft Photosynth

A synth from Gail Orenstein photos. A pretty amazing experiment. I am happy to say that Photosynth now can be viewed via an install for Linux, so I can go nuts with my favorite tool and not have to regret the fact Linux users can't see it.

Yahoo pulls the plug on GeoCities

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year.

In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping "customers build new relationships online".

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites.

Yahoo says that existing GeoCities accounts will remain live for now, although it stresses that users should start looking for alternative sites.

"You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service," the firm said in an online post.

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of Yahoo's free hosting, although other services - such as e-mail accounts - remain unaffected.

Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said the closure of GeoCities was the end of an era.

"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

Microsoft suffers first sales dip

Microsoft has said sales in the first three months of 2009 fell 6% from the previous year - its first quarterly drop in 23 years as a public company.

The world's largest software maker said profit dropped by 32% to $2.98bn (£2bn). Sales slipped to $13.65bn.

Microsoft makes most of its profit selling the Windows operating system and business software such as Office.

However demand has been hit by falling sales of personal computers as consumers and businesses trim spending.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told the BBC World Service that its results had been "impacted" by the downturn in the world economy.

He also admitted the company would have had less total sales "than we would have had before the downturn".
"We expect the weakness to continue through at least the next quarter," said the firm's chief financial officer, Chris Liddell.