iCustomizations


While products like SalesForce and iMIS Public Views provide great functionality out of the box, there are a number of PV customizations that NimbleUser customers often request.

  • Calendar Location Maps with Get Directions. By tieing in with Google Maps, we can extend the standard iMIS calendar to provide a location map, and then pop-off to Google Maps for directions. A great, low-cost way to enhance the standard iMIS event calendar.

  • Custom Members Directory. The standard iMIS Public View Directory pulls from the members database, and it’s easy to configure, but PV Directories comes with several constraints. Everything has to fit on one row, there’s no detail view, and it’s public. With a custom directory, we can add a detail page, link email or website addresses, restrict access, and more.

  • Member Join. With standard Public Views, people can create free web accounts. We can extend the join process to include paying members, and collect whatever additional demographics your organization needs.

  • Join during event registration. Often, member pricing for an event is a great inducement to join some organizations. We can make applying for membership a seamless extension to event registration, so that your newest members can join without a second thought.

  • Bypass email confirmation during account create. The standard account create process includes an email confirmation step that confuses many new users and generates support calls. With a simple change, we can bypass the email confirmation, to reduce support costs and increase user satisfaction.

  • Support duplicate email address. Out of the box, Public Views has trouble coping with members who share an email address, especially when a password needs to be reset. We can extend the base workflow so that members can share email addresses, without resetting each other’s password.

  • Ajax login notification for event registration. When accessing an event, the standard iMIS login prompt is buried on the screen and often missed. With our Ajax notification solution, it becomes easy for users to login and complete registration, without confusion or support calls.

  • Limited number of complementary sponsor registrations. If your organization offers sponsors a set number of complementary registrations, we can extend Public Views to cap the number of free registrations per sponsor.

  • Readonly profile fields. If there are some profile fields that members should see but not touch, we can make selected fields read-only.

  • Extend profile with custom pages. iMIS has great demographics, but sometimes an organization needs a more comprehensive profile. We can extend the profile with custom pages, to make it easier for members to maintain their own configuration.

  • Downloadable documents (after purchase). In this virtual world, many digital publications have value to your members. With Download Documents, users can purchase the right to a copy of a document, spreadsheet, PDF, presentation, or image, and then download it from a personal portal page.

  • Flexible payments. We also have solutions for discount coupons and installment dues, to provide members more flexibility.

We often integate iMIS with Ektron websites, which creates some other great opportunities.

  • Ektron/iMIS provider. Our Ektron SSO solution authenticates web site users against iMIS and lets us create web site authentication groups based on iMIS critera.

  • Community Workgroups with your choice of Calendar, Forum, and/or Documents pages. Most organizations have working groups that need to collaborate. By combining Ektron communities with iMIS demographics, we can automate the creation and maintenance of collaborative groups, with access to their own Calendar, Forum, and Document library.

  • Dues Alerts at Login. Keeping up with dues is an easy thing for members to let slip. With a Dues Alerts, we post a dynamic reminder on the website that displays when members log in and have outstanding dues.

  • Ektron Blog Aggregator. If you’d like to post blogs on your website, but don’t have the internal staff to keep it up, consider gathering together (or aggregating) your member blogs. Other members can visit your site, take in all the summaries of peer blogs at a glance, and click through to view the detail on the original site. An aggregator is a great way to build synergy between your member’s and your organization’s web sites.

  • MyPage. With the Ektron/iMIS provider, we can create individual profile pages that combine the best of iMIS demographics and Ektron social media controls. Members can choose among a selection of widgets to create their own custom dashboard.

  • Conference Page. We have several approaches to creating microsites around your organizations conference, increasing usability and reducing maintenance.

  • Multiple Location Maps. If your organization has several locations, we can help you create a map of all your offices and allow users to drill down on any location for more detail and directions.

  • Flush web cache to show latest updates. High performance site are often aggressively cached. We can provide a simple for flushing the cache on demand, so that your members get the latest updates as soon as they are redy.

Even if we haven’t done your customization – yet – be sure to give us a call, and we can discuss doing iMIS or Ektron your way.

Coming Up 13 Sep 2010

Here’s a run down of three events coming up soon.

Rochester Java Users Group, Tue 14 Sep

A career focused meeting with a panel of three recruiters discussing how the job market has changed. People go about searching for new opportunities in a different way, hiring companies look for new talent differently, and the recruiter’s role has changed as well - compared to the 80-ies/90-ies way of browsing the local newspaper and sending letters.

This is an opportunity to update yourself on how the (job) world now works, to participate in an interactive evening featuring open discussion between developers and the panelists. The panelists are David Calus of E-R Associates, David Sable of TEKSystems and Eric Derby, The Software Scout.

Meetings start at 6:00 pm and end around 8:00 pm, and take place on the Second floor of the Golisano building, at RIT, room GOL-2400. Directions to RIT can be found at www.rjug.org

Digital Rochester “Get Connected!”, Tue 5 Oct

On Tuesday evening, October 5th, 2010, Digital Rochester is hosting its eighth annual Get Connected! networking event (http://digitalrochester.com/events/previous-events/networking/). The evening showcases select organizations in the Greater Rochester area that provide professional networking and service opportunities for their members.

The annual event is DR’s biggest networking gathering of the year, welcoming a remarkable mix of Rochester’s best. There will be tech groups, professional associations and service organizations – altogether a great way to find opportunities for you to plug into good things happening in the greater Rochester region!

Get Connected! will be in the very cool second floor atrium of Village Gate, right in the heart of Rochester’s Neighborhood of the Arts. Check out the sculptures, two story mobiles and artwork hanging from the ceiling! It’s an intriguing space and a one-of-a-kind opportunity to connect with all of these great organizations in one place at one time!

IIBA Rochester NY “User Stores”, Wed 6 Oct

IIBA Rochester NY will host a live webinar with Susan Burk on Wed Oct 6 at NimbleUser, 656 Kreag Road, Pittsford NY 14534. Susan will speak on the subject of user stories and use cases.

Use cases, user stories, and scenarios are key techniques for eliciting, analyzing and specifying behavioral requirements. In this pragmatic, experience-based presentation, Sue Burk, Sr. Associate at EBG Consulting, explains the differences between these techniques, and some of their challenges. Sue shares tips on how to “right-size” use cases and user stories and test them with scenarios. Whether you use agile or traditional requirements methods, you’ll find practical ideas to make sure the time you invest in behavioral requirements is good for your project.

Susan Burk, Sr. Associate with EBG Consulting, has over 25 years’ experience as an analyst, facilitator, mentor, coach and trainer at companies in the US and around the world. She helps technical and business teams become more effective in delivering business value. Her presentations on analysis, modeling, and facilitation topics have been featured for more than 17 years at diverse local, regional and national user group meetings.

Rochester Security Summit, 20-21 Oct

The Rochester Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), in association with ISACA® Western New York Chapter and Rochester Chapter of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), is pleased to announce that the 5th Annual Security Summit will be held Wednesday October 20 and Thursday October 21, 2010 at the Strathallan Hotel, Rochester NY. The conference will be held 8:00a to 5:00 each day.

For the presentation schedule, visit http://www.rochestersecurity.org/events/.

Workgroup project sites - Part 2 - Basecamp

Basecamp is easily the “gold standard” of workgroup sites – the yardstick by which competitors are measured. In fact, one site lists 45 Basecamp alternatives, from 24SevenOffice to Zoho Projects.

Launched in 2004, the proprietary, hosted web application is now available in 15 languages, and serves millions of teams worldwide. A free version is available that supports one project, though without the Time or Files features. Pricing for multi-project accounts range from $24 to $149 a month.

Basecamp is one of a suite of products offered by 37signals, including Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack, that can be used together or independently. For example, Basecamp offers a Chat feature that requires a Campfire account.

The full version offers a project-wide Dashboard view that rolls up work on all your projects across three core features: To-Dos, Milestones, and Time. On the individual project level, Basecamp adds Messages, Writeboards, Chat, and Files, for a total of 7 features, plus a project Overview.

To create a Basecamp project, the application prompts for a project name and offers the option to create an internal project or to share the project with another company or client. If you choose to share the project, Basecamp adds options to select an existing company or create a new company. The workflow then lets you choose which people within a company to add to the project.

“If you choose” is a Basecamp hallmark. The application makes full use of the interactive Ajax programming model. As you select options within the application, Basecamp updates the page, making for a slick user experience that “doesn’t make you think.” (Geek note: Basecamp is the progenitor of the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework.)

Once a project is created, participants can add Messages, To-Dos, Milestones, Writeboards, Time records, or Files to a project.

  • Messages. Over the course of a project, a great deal of information is exchanged by email, and then trapped in everyone’s individual inbox. When you post a message through Basecamp, the system sends a copy to project participants, while creating an archive of project-related messages. The result looks and feels much a Facebook wall, and provides a running record of decisions made via messages. Participants can reply to Basecamp message posts via email, saving a trip to the site.

  • To-Dos. I’m usually not a fan of casual To-Do lists, since tracking and checking off the items can be more trouble than they are worth. In the case of Basecamp, the To-Do list UI is so simple and effective, I actually enjoy using it. Any number of lists can be created, and To-Do’s can be assigned to any participant or just Anyone, and optionally given a due date and notify the responsible participant by email.

* Milestones. On their own Milestones seem to be little more than a high-level project “To-Do”. The system previews upcoming Milestones, and calls out late Milestones if the date passes without marking it complete. You can also reference Messages to Milestones, making them slightly more useful. Oddly, To-Dos, Time records, and Files cannot be related to Milestones (which would make the feature much more useful), just Messages. As it stands, Milestones are a weak tickler with a simple calendar grid index.

  • Writeboards. Not quite a wiki, Writeboards provide a handy place to create simple online documents. The document can be edited using a simple wiki-like syntaxes, but it doesn’t offer quick linking between pages. Writeboards do offer commenting, subscriptions, and a great version comparison tool, making them a good choice for (very) light documentation and requirements.

  • Time. The full Basecamp version offers a rudimentary time log, provide a quick and easy place to record time spent on a project. There no reporting, though you can export the log to CSV for use in Excel or other applications. Time looks like a throw-away feature that might have been a practice project for an intern, though it may become more useful as a bridge to a Time Tracking add-in.

  • Files. Most project generate a number of documents that are routinely updated, and the Basecamp Files area is an ideal place to keep them all together. You have an option of versioning a new upload, or just uploading it again. The files can be viewed by Category, Date, Name, or Uploader. While the 15GB limit will keep you from uploading a library of full length videos, Files is an excellent implementation of a much needed tool.

And if the core feature set is not enough, there are 85 extras and addin to Basecamp that work with mobile devices and other online applications.

Basecamp is an attractive application that people like to use. But some of the features fall short in odd ways. For example, Milestones leave you wanting a real calendar, and while the Files feature is great, there’s no obvious place to add URLs to online resources. Although people need to create an account with 37Signals to join the project, compared to using Google Accounts, we are having far fewer problems getting people logged in (fewer as in “zero”).

Next week, in part 3, we will look at OfficeLive workspaces, Microsoft’s ironically free alternative to Basecamp.

Workgroup project sites - Part 1 - Google Sites

It’s been said that an army marches on its stomach. Likewise, an IT project runs on communication. The best indicator of project success is team members that communicate with each other.


While attitude is always the first, best ingredient in team communications, an effective infrastructure greases the wheels. The rising star of team communications are workgroup project sites, hosted on platforms like SharePoint, Google Apps, BaseCamp, Office Online, and Open Atrium. A workgroup site acts as a digital binder for a project, keeping shared files and messages together in one place.

In part one of this series of blogs, we look at using Google Apps to host a workgroup project site.

Google Apps is a collection of workgroup tools, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites.

Google Sites is a simple, entry-level content management system, on par with 1999 “build it yourself” web site technology. When creating a site, you can select from a library of preformed templates, or start from scratch. Different types of pages can be created with the site, including web pages, announcements, file cabinets, lists, or a start page.

Once created, a site can be made public or shared with anyone in your Google Apps domain. You can also share the site on a one-by-one basis with any Google Account.

A very handy Google Sites feature is that existing sites can be copied to new sites. Copying sites makes it easy to create boilerplate sites that have both a design and starter content.

You can also subscribe to alerts for the entire site, or just for individual pages. Once you subscribe, the site sends you an email alert whenever there is a change. With alerts, people don’t have to post something to the site, and then turn around and tell everyone they posted it.

For workgroup project sites, I usually start with four core pages: Announcements, Calendar, Contact List, and File Cabinet, along with a Starter Page.

Announcements - I usually rename the Announcement page to “Messages” to encourage using it for project communications. You can create a “New Post” that is linked into the page, much like a simple forum or wall. The page can accept attachments, and participants can also comment on the page, or edit it directly.

Calendar - Linking a Google Calendar to the site is a great way to keep track of project milestones. If you are already using Google Calendar for other things, the site calendar can be linked in with your other calendars. Though, since you can’t change it directly from the site, new participants always have trouble editing the calendar the first time. You have to pull up your own Google Calendar and change it there.

Contact List - Google sites comes with a general purpose list applet. Each list item can have multiple fields of different types, like Text, Date, Dropdown, Checkbox, or URL. You can select a common layout or select your own column layout.

File Cabinet - The file upload/download feature is very handy. Any type of binary or text file can be uploaded. It versions each upload of the same name, and you can easily go back and grab a prior version. The cabinet also accepts URLs, making it easy to link out to Google Docs and other online resources.

For some projects, we might also add ToDo lists and such, but for most projects, Announcements, Calendar, Contact List, and File Cabinet, are the assets you need to keep communications flowing.

While useful, the Google Sites UI and feature set is lacking in several ways. A key problem is that participants need to Google Accounts to join the site. While that sounds simple, in practice we have a lot of trouble getting new participants from other companies logged into a site for the first time.

An alternative to Google Sites, BaseCamp, provides a fresh and friendly UI and a streamlined login process. Stay tuned for Part 2!

Nimble Analysis


The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) lays out great strategies for eliciting and documenting requirements. To keep our own software projects on track, at NimbleUser we work toward five core milestones: Charter, Survey, Plan, Specify, and Correct.

Charter

“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?”

Before beginning any project, the first step should be to pull together a proposed budget and adopt a project charter. The budget doesn’t have to be accurate, but it does need to indicate the magnitude of what we are setting out to do. What are the key objectives? How much might achieving each of those objectives cost? What is the total project investment, from requirements to implementation through deployment? The initial budget only needs to be a ballpark estimate that we can refine through analysis.

The project charter lays out the decision making process, and the overall analysis and implementation workflow. It calls out the participant roles and responsibilities, and clarifies expectations, so that we can keep the project on track and on budget.

Survey

“The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask”.

A simple stakeholder survey is a great way to kickoff a project. Depending on the circumstances, participants can work on the survey independently, or you can step through the questions at a meeting. Ideally, do we both. We provide the survey to participants in advance of a review meeting, and then we walk through the responses, to elicit any missing detail, and to discuss any “interesting” points. A survey document is also a great place to capture any unexpected material. If one question leads to another, we edit the survey (then and there) to capture new details.

If meeting remotely, we use a service like GotoMeeting to collaborate on the document in real time, or use a realtime sharing environment like Google Docs.

Plan

Sage advice is to never hold a meeting without an agenda, and to never kick-off a project without a plan.

Based on the preliminary proposal and detail elicited in the survey, a great next step is to outline the project, mapping business goals to the actual materials and services to be delivered. Then, using the preliminary proposal as a baseline, we separate the original items from any that were added or subtracted during the survey talks, or other discussions, so everyone can see how the scope is changing.

As with the survey, we like to present and review the outline using GotoMeeting or another collaboration environment, making realtime updates to the document during the review. The take away is to stay nimble by avoiding intermediary forms. To keep the outline clean, leave the gritty details in the survey document. It’s a good idea to reference the survey from the outline, so everyone knows it exists, but it’s not a good idea to dump minutia into the outline.

The outline should be a high-level treatment without implementation detail. A good analogy is a book proposal. Before chapter one is ever written, a publisher will want to see an outline of the entire book. Later, when the book is approved, and all the chapters in the outline are written, proofed, and typeset, then we know the book is done!

Following common practice, it’s a good idea to embed the outline in a high-level business plan document. (We call ours the “Discovery” document.) Since the plan lays out the key deliverables, we can use it to better estimate the size and cost of the project. Later, the items in the outline become tasks in a project plan, or stories in a scrum backlog.

Specify

Depending on the nature of the project, the next step is to develop a technical specification, or to work directly on the client’s system or development system.

If we are building a conventional web site, a low-level specification is needed to be sure we understand how all the pages work, and how they work together. A great way to keep a web site specification more interesting and collaborative is to use one of the new cloud-based wireframing tools, like ProtoShare or MockFlow.

If we are working with a turnkey system, like iMIS Public Views, we may walk through configuring the software interactively, rather than create a (mostly redundant) formal specification. Likewise, for a complete but customizable platform, like Salesforce, we may setup a project “jumpstart” and collaborate on the system configuration and customizations, live and direct.

Correct

It’s been said that “change is the only constant”. No matter how well we plan and specify a project, changes will occur during the implementation and even after the initial launch. When changes occur, we update the system specification. If we documented a feature in one way, but after testing, implemented it another way, then we correct the specification to reflect what happened. If a document is worth creating, we find it’s worth maintaining.

Collaborate

While not a milestone, a first, best practice is to setup an extranet site where stakeholders can collaborate on the project. Popular platforms for collaborative sites include ShareProint, Google Apps, BaseCamp, Office Online, and Open Atrium. All of these platforms make it easy to share and exchange documents and messages throughout the course of a project.

Regardless of what other BABOK techniques we use in a requirements project, we find that if we include these five milestones – Charter, Survey, Plan, Specify, and Correct – we’re well on the way to a successful launch.

-Ted.