Tag: Technology

The Wave of Consistent Technology Development

June 20, 2016 Did You Catch the Wave?Do you even remember it? Six years ago, Google gave WAVE a proper goodbye. I never did ride the Google Wave; I think I tried it once, but it held no appeal. I could see that in order for it to truly work and work well, practically everyone had to use it, and often. This type of participation early on is impossible today. Not everyone is an early adopter and, apparently not even being a Google product could save the Wave.Technology TodayTechnology, on the back-end, becomes complicated by the hour, by the minute. And this is all in an effort to present to you and I - the users of technology - an opportunity to actually use it with ease. The more intuitive and easy it is to use, the more complicated the technology, typically.And while I love technology and…

Which Front End technology for Clarify?

May 10, 2010 Yuval over at NextGen Consulting has recently started blogging about Clarify/Amdocs. Good stuff. He recently posted a quick survey regarding preferences for a front-end for Clarify. It’s only 2 questions, so it’ll only take a few seconds. So jump over there and fill out the survey. It’s cool to see other bloggers discussing Clarify/Amdocs – I wish there were more. Rock on.

WebHooks in Clarify/Dovetail

February 9, 2010 What is a WebHook? From the WebHooks wiki: The concept of a WebHook is simple. A WebHook is an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when something happens; a simple event-notification via HTTP POST. A web application implementing WebHooks will POST a message to a URL when certain things happen. When a web application enables users to register their own URLs, the users can then extend, customize, and integrate that application with their own custom extensions or even with other applications around the web. For the user, WebHooks are a way to receive valuable information when it happens, rather than continually polling for that data and receiving nothing valuable most of the time. WebHooks have enormous potential and are limited only by your imagination! (No, it can't wash the dishes. Yet.) That sounds like a business rule (in Clarify…

Syntax Highligher

April 24, 2009 This is a sample post using Alex’s very nice looking Syntax Highlighter for code snippets. Let’s see if I can get Community Server to behave. Teaser Code public class SolutionMap : DovetailMap { protected override void MapDefinition() { FromTable("probdesc") .Assign(d => d.SolutionID).FromIdentifyingField("id_number") .MapMany().To(d => d.Resolutions).ViaRelation("probdesc2workaround", workaround => workaround .Assign(d => d.DatabaseIdentifier).FromField("objid") ); } } Update: Looks like I got it working. Sorry about the guinea pig post. The code above is actually something I have been wanting to post about for some time. Maybe now with these super sweet code blocks I’ll get’er done.

Installing ShoZu on a T-Mobile Dash with Windows Mobile 6

December 3, 2007 If you have a smart phone and like to use Flickr to share your photos look into ShoZu. ShoZu is a great way to move the pictures taken on your phone to the Flickr. You take a picture and it asks, Send To Flickr? If you have a data plan or the next time you are online the image is uploaded directly to Flickr. Very cool. What happens when you assume? I ran into problems using ShoZu with my T-Mobile Dash that has been upgraded to Windows Mobile 6. It was crashing and causing all kinds of stability issues with my phone. This morning I decided to reinstall ShoZu and figured out a simple fix and had to share. When you install ShoZu they ask for your phone number and what model phone you have. A text message is sent…

Technology will not create a customer-centric organization

September 11, 2007 In a recent destinationCRM article, a couple of Oracle execs say: Transforming your business to a customer-centric organization starts with a CRM-focused services-oriented architecture. I have to disagree. While I concur that well-architected solutions will make it much easier to integrate multiple systems, software architecture will not create a customer-centric organization.A customer-centric organization starts with people and culture. It empowers people to make the right decisions. The culture shifts from a break-fix reactive mode to that of a proactive mindset. It aligns the goals of service, sales, and marketing around the customer.Technology can help achieve these goals. But by itself, it does nothing. There are plenty of technology solutions out there that abide by good SOA practices. Just because a corporation adopts one of these technology solutions, it does not make them customer-centric.There are plenty of organizations that are customer-centric, and they…

Get out of my way and let me do my work!

August 1, 2007 While working last night, I needed to view a video demo, and I was presented with this message from Windows Media Player: I hadn't done any updates, or installs, so I have no idea why Media Player decided that I needed to log off and back on. Notice that it's not saying I have to reboot - just log off and back on. All I know is that it completely interrupted my flow. I feel the same way when clicking on a link on a web page and all of a sudden a PDF file starts loading. PDF? WTF? What's wrong with HTML? I'm on a web page! Again, it completely interrupts my flow. As builders of software, we need to be cognizant of this. Are we enabling? Or are we throwing up roadblocks that impede the user's workflow?…

Four Letter Words in Software Development

May 31, 2007 37signals warns about four letter words. We've run into this here in our development in the past. "We can just do ..." This tends to result in redesign later on down the road. I'm guilty of it myself at times. Once you acknowledge it, recognizing when it happens becomes easier.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier

May 25, 2007 The New Yorker has a good article on feature creep vs. simplicity. "And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to lure customers. Often, the result is a product like Microsoft Word 2003, which has thirty-one toolbars and more than fifteen hundred commands."

A free wiki has become another tool in my consulting toolbox

May 24, 2007 I've been working on a web services project for a customer over the last few months. I'm in Austin, the customer is in Atlanta, and the developer on the project is also in Austin (but not in the same physical office as myself). I needed a way to work with the developer and the customer on defining the web services, the interfaces, and the logic within. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was drowning in the customer's waterfall documentation. I needed a better communication vehicle than emailing Word documents back and forth. I created a free wiki at pbwiki, which was super easy to do. Then, I started writing. From the office. From home. It was great. I created just a couple of pages at first. Defined the work to do for the first iteration. Marked it as…