Author: Mark

Google office in a box

Google already sells their "Yellow Box" search appliance which is essentially Google Search packaged up into a hardware solution that you simply drop onto your network. The software crawls your intranet and indexes your content using Google’s search, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Very cool.

When does this same offering happen for all the Microsoft Office web-based competitors that Google has bought or released in the past year?

I heard recently that Microsoft expects 25% of its revenue within the next 5 years to come from advertising. If you know how much money Microsoft pulls in per-year, plus the growth they are shooting for year-over-year, this number should be 6-8+ billion dollars just from advertising. I would actually expect it to be higher than that since this is probably all going to be new revenue with no reductions in sales goals for Office and Windows.

I wonder if the push for advertising revenue has to do with any competitive pressure or threat from Google’s rapid acquisition of web based office tools? It seems like Google is positioning itself to enter into Microsoft’s Office market and I wonder if part of the plan is a hardware solution similar to the Yellow Box. The scary part is that Google could offer this corporate solution for free and simply sell text ads.

Web based office competitors obviously have a long way to go before they would be a real threat. For example, Google’s web based spreadsheets are neat, but neat as in "wow this is cool" not "I’ll use this to manage a P&L or budget". Same with the document editor Google acquired (which by the way was an ASP.NET solution). Nevertheless, I think these tools will get there given Google’s current track record. I think they would get adopted more quickly if you didn’t have to trust Google with the data too.

Of course all of this is completely speculative (but I have been buying Google stock just in case <g>).

Vista, Leopard, or both?

I haven’t upgraded to Vista yet.

It’s not that I’m not eager to use Vista, I’m just not eager to have to go through the head-ache of updating my laptop. I will admit that I’ve been a bit slower since quite a few of my hard-core developer friends have re-installed XP recently.

Part of the problem is my Lenovo T60 laptop is nearing its end of life. I just upgraded the RAM only to find out that the Lenovo/ThinkPad chipset only will recognize 3GB of memory.

The other choice that’s holding me back is Apple. A lot of my friends/co-workers are buying Mac Books and well, I’m jealous. Scott bought a Mac Book Pro and runs Vista natively (and says it is the best computer he has ever bought). Jason has a Mac Book Pro and runs VM Ware, and also swears by it.

Here is why I’m jealous:

  1. Cleanliness. There are no stickers and random junk stuck all over the laptop. Have you gone to Best Buy or another electronics store and looked at all the crap that OEM’s stick on your laptop? My Lenovo has 3 stickers: Graphics by ATI; Intel Centrino; Microsoft Windows XP. The Microsoft one was the worst. After about 5 months I now just have a shiny silver spot on the keyboard (the image wore off).
  2. It’s a work of art, seriously. The Mac Book just looks awesome. It’s small, very well engineered, and is much thinner than other laptops I’ve looked at. I’ve got to admit a large part of the appeal is the hardware itself.
  3. Ready for something new. Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I’m ready to try something new. The Apple OS, Leopard, looks really clean. That and I just love my iPod and if the experience is in any way similar…
  4. Parallels. I really like the idea that I could run both a Windows OS and the Apple OS together. Not just together but literally integrated together. That just looks cool.
  5. Media. I’m finding myself doing more and more with media such as photos and videos. The tools on my PC feel clumsy whereas my Apple friends seem to manage media with ease.
  6. Just about everything I do is on the web. The only non-web applications I use and depend on are: Microsoft Office; QuickBooks; and all development tools. In other words, get me FireFox and there’s a 99% chance I’m happy.

Here is why I’m on the fence:

  1. Time. The time required to learn something new (right now) just seems like it would ultimately be unproductive considering everything else I want to do. Plus if I’m going to put the time into it I might as well just install Vista.
  2. Email client. My Apple friends complain vocally about using Entourage (Microsoft Outlook for Mac). I literally live day and night in email. A bad email client is a big negative – of course I would probably be running parallels or VM Ware anyhow.
  3. Presenting. I do a lot of presenting and I know a few friends have struggled with presenting on the Mac Books from Parallels. Maybe I’m wrong, but this one is a show-stopper for me.

I haven’t made up my mind yet. But everyday I’m pestering Jason with questions about his Mac Book. He even wrote up a post recently for "Mac Converts."

Want to meet-up in Barcelona?

I’m headed over to Barcelona, Spain next week. What’s not fun is how I get there:

Dallas,TX -> Las Vegas,NV -> San Francisco,CA -> Munich, Germany -> Barcelona

Yes, I’m going to go west before I go east. Please don’t ask why. It’s a long story 🙂

Yuck. The good news is I’ve got plenty to do on the plane flight over going through our new Reporting Server, Graffiti CMS, and of course Community Server 2008.

Meet up in Barcelona

I’m headed to Barcelona for Tech-Ed Europe. I’ll give a couple of sessions on ASP.NET Internals, which is always a fun topic and Europe is always a fun venue. I’m also looking for any social networking groups and/or meet-ups. If anyone is interested in connecting for coffee or possibly even dinner shoot me a note at rhoward@telligent.com

Recommendations for Barcelona

I’m also open for suggestions on things to do in Spain as I’m going to stay an extra 2 weeks.

Telligent Reporting Server

image

Last weekend at the Community Server Developer Conference we announced 2 new products that Telligent is building:

  • Graffiti CMS – a really simple, lightweight content management system that can also be used for single user blogging.
  • Reporting Server – a really simple reporting framework and server for building beautiful reports.

Community Server Reports

The Reporting Server was something we originally built to support Community Server, but after the Community Server Developer Conference it was evident that Reporting Server (with a few changes) was its own stand-alone solution.

We didn’t start with the intent of creating another reporting solution. We actually evaluated a number of reporting tools but finally came to the conclusion that they weren’t simple enough. We wanted something that enabled rich charting and graphs, but at the same time was really simple. The reporting solution we liked the best was Google’s Analytics package with its interactive Flash graphs and charts and simple tools for managing lists of data.

Reporting Server Beta

We planned to release a beta of Reporting Server in mid-October. We in-fact demoed the Reporting Server at the Community Server Developer Conference with the intent of releasing a beta the following week. After talking to quite a few people we went back to the office and took a hard look at the feedback and where the product was at. We decided that instead of releasing the beta, we would add some more time to the development schedule to make sure v1 was sufficiently abstracted from the original Community Server reports. This meant we also had to push back the beta, likely until mid-December.

We’re disappointed that we had to push the date back, but based on the feedback this will hopefully mean an even better reporting tool! We’re also doing the work to make it really, really simple to share and publish reports — and not just for Community Server!

www and search engine optimization

A common question we get from customers that use Community Server is:

When I make a request to my Community Server site the “www” is stripped off the domain…

While it’s easy to change this behavior in Community Server, it’s actually done on purpose to help ensure the site is optimized for search engines. A search engine actually sees www.example.com and example.com as 2 separate sites and content on these 2 sites are considered duplicates and the site will actually get a penalty in search rank (in some cases).

There are some more interesting tips, similar to this one, in this article.

Understanding ASP.NET Response.Redirect

ASP.NET has a wonderful carry over from Classic ASP that many developer still use:

Response.Redirect(string url);

When ASP.NET encounters a Redirect() request it will internally throw a thread abort exception and immediately send headers back to the client (typically a browser) to go to another URL.

There are a couple of things to be aware about when you use Response.Redirect():

1. Internally a ThreadAbort exception is thrown. This is normal and if you monitor your CLR exceptions and use Response.Redirect() – you will see exceptions in the event counters.

2. Response.Redirect sets an HTTP 302 header along with the URL to be redirected to.

The SEO tip has to do with the HTTP status code that ASP.NET sends back. The 302 status code essentially says, “this item has moved temporarily”. Search engines crawling your site are not guaranteed to follow 302 redirects, nor should they. By following a 302 the search engine could incorrectly index the location of content.

However, there are cases where you do want search engines to follow the redirect because it’s a permanent redirect. In these cases you want to set an HTTP 301 header. The 301 header essentially says, “this item has moved permanently”.

Here is how:

if (send301) {

Response.AddHeader(“Location”, url);

Response.StatusCode = 301;

} else {

Response.Redirect(url);

}

Related articles:

2007 Community Server Developer Conference

It’s finally here! We’ve been working all week preparing for our first ever Community Server Developer Conference and it starts tonight. We have just under 100 people attending – and honestly this is a lot more than we expected for our first developer conference.

We’re going to capture all the presentations and publish them as videos on www.communityserver.org after the conference so everyone can benefit from the content. Of course there is going to be a lot of special stuff we’re doing just for the attendees too.

I’m giving a brief keynote tomorrow morning and will talk a little about the social software market and where we see things heading (and more importantly Community Server’s role). I’ll also cover 2 of our new products Graffiti and Enterprise Reporting:

Graffiti is our new content management systems that was built from the ground-up after listening to customers ask for both a CMS and simpler single-user blogging tools. The Enterprise Reporting tools consist of a suite of reports to help customers understand how data in their Community Server site is being used and how they can then use that data to better help their customers.

Of course one of the big topics we’ll talk about is Community Server 2008. The team has done a lot of work already and while there are a number of really cool features I’m personally really excited about our new web services stack (built as a REST implementation). We’ve written a .NET wrapper (so it’s super-easy for .NET developers to start using) and it means that integrating with Sharepoint or any other web application (such as DotNetNuke) framework will be a breeze. But it also means that Community Server data can easily be integrated with an application written in Java, PHP, etc.

If you’re at the conference this week, please say hi!