SAF06 - Dynamics

Satya Nadella

The Last Mile of Productivity

• Connecting people to process

Microsoft have 30 CRM instances deployed across different areas

Dynamics Investments

• Role based experiences - Office
• Collaboration - Sharepoint
• Contextual intelligence - SQL Server
• Services - Visual Studio
• Live enabled - Windows Live

Dynamics architectural tenants

• Composable role based experience
• Model driven
• SOA deployment

Demonstrations

• Dynamics CRM v3c
• Lead management gadget for Vista sidebar - hooks into CRM web services
• Relationship mapping with images on each member of the relationship
• 3D home design and layout
• Exception management demonstration
• Exception notifications go into sidebar via a gadget
• Click on the notification and a sharepoint site comes up with exception problem identified (in this case an order problem)
• Drills down onto order details
• Combines it with mapping from virtual earth
• Order origination and delivery points identified
• Where the order is now
• Collaboration with the truck driver via a wireless device
• Messenger used - hopefully not while driving
• Sharepoint search used to identify missing customs document required for shipping
• Business Intelligence
• Sharepoint dashboard
• Mapping
• Tabular business score card from Performance Point Manager with traffic lights
• Opening detail data with Excel Analysis Services
• Another dashboard with more detail
• More detailed mapping
• Pie charts and graphs
• Drill down with ProClarity
• Performance map
• Size of box shows size of sales
• Colour shows margin a la heat map
• Drill down into geographic areas
• Dynamics Live CRM
• Hosted on the Live site a la SalesForce.com
• Dashboard
• Charts
• Scorecards
• Drilldown
• Outlook style interface for activities, calendar, queued items
• Customer data
• Collaboration tools
• Workspace creation for working with partners
• Collaborator uploads documents rather than emailing
• Marketing campaign creation and management
• Internet ads
• MSN ad centre
• Choose regions and target pages
• Performance tracking
• Email

Model Driven Development

• Research derived customer model
• Workflow driven
• Role specific tools

SAF06 - How I learned to stop worrying and love the imminent internet singularity...

Garry Flake

Microsoft Live labs

Live Labs is a partnership between MSR and Windows/Windows Live.

Singularity - introduced by Vernor Vinge in 1993 - the idea that the exponential speed of technological improvements will produce super-human capabilities, making the future completely unknowable.

Hmmm.

Is it the end of humanity??

Making a case for the internet singularity

• Democratization
• Greater and greater power in devices
• Lower and lower entry barriers
• Content
• documents
• office, html
• images
• movies
• audio
• publishing
• blogs
• software
• opensource
• research
• wikipedia, search
• metadata
• tags, play lists
• Power law distributions and long tails
• The weight of the tail is greater than the head
• Coined by Chris Anderson an a Wired article
• Implications
• Consumers start to become producers
• Playlists
• Remixes and mashups
• Aggregations...
• The small producers may outweigh the large producers
• But is it all worth reading/listening/watching? I'm doubtful...but the important thing is that the good stuff bubbles to the top.
• Internet ecosystems and network effects
• The value of a network increases as a function of the number of participants
• The Innovators Dilemma
• Cray killed by SGI
• SGI killed by Sun
• Sun killed by PC
• PC killed by cellphone?
• The first companies must destroy themselves to survive - innovations come in from the bottom
• Companies often fail to look downward - they only look upward
• Online world causes the innovators dilemma to run much faster - months versus years

The internet as a mirror

• We are putting more and more information on the internet
• The internet becomes more and more a reflection of the physical world
• Because it is on the internet it is accessible
• Analysis occurs across the internet
• For example, data mining of natural language based upon internet hosted information (text)
• For example, genome data
• For example genome research papers on the internet so that data miners could access both the research and the data - programmatic data miners can access both the papers and the data and result in new discoveries.
• This is a circular process
• The body of knowledge increases

Live Labs

• A little under a year old, reports to Ray Ozzie
• A virtual organisation that aspires to hit a suite spot between
• Users and businesses
• Short versus long term
• Problems and solutions
• Science and engineering
• (This sounds dubious to me...)
• Garry then gave a demonstration of Microsoft Live Labs- Photosynth which is worth viewing if you haven't yet tried it.

My thoughts - lots of opportunity if you know how to mine it. Analytical techniques and tools become so important in this.

SAF06 - The Architectural Last Mile

These are my notes from Norm Judah's keynote this Thursday morning at SAF06. Norm is CTO of Microsoft Worldwide Services and IT. These notes are taken during the talk and published straight away - wifi is great.

Norm firstly asks what is architecture?... the art of simplicity.

Norm highlights a number of recent architectural changes:

• The power at the edge of the network
• Traditionally big in the middle, dumb on the outside
• Boundary changes
• Boundaries between companies
• Management impacts

Success of failure occurs in the last mile

• People
• Human processes are not often re-engineered

Build systems not for the people of today - but the people of tomorrow. Look at how your teenage kids behave: instant messenging, youtube - living online behaviours in a manner that does not make sense to those of us that are in midlife or older. So don't automatically assume that because you can't imagine using this system, that your views will apply for the future.

Processes and human behaviour is important. IT spend does not automatically increase productivity. MIT study by Erik Brynjolfsson (http://web.mit.edu/sloan-msa/Papers/2.3.pdf)shows that process is more important, but also that process + IT investment achieves much greater productivity.

Demonstrated Community Campus - Microsoft only site. Remarked that it's easy to create the site but hard to get people to use it which highlights the importance of managing human behaviour, of process.

A lesson from this is that you need to measure in detail. People will register but not use a system. So a count of registrations has no value. Look instead for how parts of the site are being used.

They prepared an adoption maturity model based on CMMi. Don't build an immaturity model

• Negligent
• Obstructive
• Contemptuous
• Underming

Refer to Capt. Tom Schorsch, http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/1996/11/xt96d11h.asp, and the original notes on CMM from Finkelstein, "A Software Process Immaturity Model," ACM SIGSOFT, Software Engineering Notes, Vol. 17, No. 4, October 1992, pp. 22-23.

Make heros! Publish and market the subject matter experts. Give awards for most posts, most effort. Create individual importance.

Another lesson: operational architecture crucial to project success. Since most things go wrong due to operational errors you need to explicitly design for the operation. You can not manage it if you don't measure it.

Norm gave a great example of using the Business Scorecard Manager to report on Exchange availability in Microsoft. This forms the mail SLA reporting. The report showed 33,000 connection attempts blocked for the day - hacking attempts!

The scorecard contained a section called Major Problem Reviews (MPR). These were categorisations of the types of problems.

Desired Configuration Management

• Reduce configuration changes
• Proactively manage upcoming change

SAF06 - ESB Microsoft Implementation

This presentation at SAF described an ESB implementation based upon Biztalk, Sharepoint and the .net environment.

I've picked up a few things from this.

1. The use of XMS rather than JMS over MQ
   
2. The use of Amberpoint and MOM for service management
   
3. Very high performance message transformation by not using message boxing.
   
4. Implementation of a customer ESB management portal in Sharepoint with an exception handler created to provide an easy to see view of current activity and errors.
   
5. Use of BAM to track information as it's being written into Sharepoint with the graphs output into Sharepoint.
   
6. Use of SOAP headers to contain message context that is later written into the MQ message headers.
7. Monitoring at different levels
1. Infrastructure
2. Operation
3. Biztalk Server
8. Good description of how they marketed the solution through Kaiser-Permanente
1. Developers Guide
2. VM with ESB core engine installed
3. Sample applications create
4. Sample unit tests (nUnit and BizUnit)
5. Sample automated build process

Apparently there will be a Microsoft ESB guidance package. A prelim version will be available - perhaps via Brian Loesgen's blog at www.geekswithblogs.com/bloesgen

Seattle and the SAF06

I'm in Seattle now, listening to an ESB presentation at Microsoft with snow outside and the feel of winter in the air. It's absolutely gorgeous and a nice change from the spring winds of Wellington. But what a journey to get here!

My arrival into Seattle coincided with a "interesting meterological phenonomen" according the pilot: lightening and snow at the same time. Great but as a result we had to stop by Portland for an hour before heading back to land at 10pm in the tailend of the snow storm. Now the roads aren't geared up for snow and ice here so the city was shut down for that night. I didn't get to the hotel till almost 6am in the morning. It was long wait at the airport for a shuttle bus. Fortunately the people sitting near me were wonderful and the seat was heated with blankets. The joys of travel...

Now I'm here because of an invitation from Microsoft to attend the Strategic Architects Forum 06 and my employer has paid my way here (note: very thankful). The conference has 250 attendees and another 100 Microsoft staff. I'm in the financial sector and there are people here from across the world, especially europe it seems to me. The size of their organisations is rather greater than my own but we all share similar problems.

I'm struck by a few points in particular.

• The difficulty to make change in a bank
  
• The lack of standards outside of payment instructions
• The cost of testing
• The importance of identifying the commercial value.
  

I'll have to see how the conference progresses to see if there are any significant lessons I can take away.

Movember Sponsorship

It's an off chance - hardly anyone views these posts.... but if anyone does, and it's still the month of November in the year 2006 then please feel free to sponsor me for my November Mo!

You can find all the details here: http://www.movember.com.au/nz/home/

It's open to Mo Bro's and Mo Sista's (I'm a Mo Bro of course...). And the idea is we try and get a bit of sponship for ourselves and our teams. To sponsor you just need a creditcard, the link to the sponsor page - http://www.movember.com/nz/sponsor/, and my rego: 52272.

I promise to post a picture tomorrow, all the team have had pictures taken by the team captain.

Also, keep your eye out for the mo gala festivals - I'll be missing Wellington's (I'll be in Seattle visiting Microsoft and the Strategic Architects Forum 06 thanks to current employer!)

On an off chance...

Banh Xeo

I've had these fantastic filled rice pancakes at restaurants and my wife has enjoyed them in Vietnam - but I've never had success making them.

Whenever I follow the recipes on the net - invariably made with rice flour, coconut milk, tumeric and a touch of salt and sugar - I get a dismal mess. Now, I thought I was alone in this failing, but in fact I'm not. There is a brilliant article on this very sticky problem at Viet World Kitchen (http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/bookshelf/articles/banhxeolat.htm) authored by Andrea Q. Nguyen writing for the Los Angeles Times.

Now Andrea appears to have nutted out the core problem: by adding cooked rice and mung beans to the (uncooked) rice flour batter the extra starch should crisp up the pancake.

Andrea's research in her kitchen showed a couple of tablespoons of cooked rice and a tablespoon of steamed mung beans would do the trick for a rice pancake batter normally made with 1 cup of long grain rice. Just in case the original article is ever lost the essential part of the recipe was:

1 cup long-grain or jasmine rice
2 tablespoons cooked rice, firmly packed
1 tablespoon steamed, ground mung beans, firmly packed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons water
1 green onion, sliced into thin rings ( 1/4 cup)

1. Place the raw rice in a bowl and add enough water to cover by 1 inch. Let soak for 3 to 4 hours. Drain.
2. Place the soaked rice in a blender with the cooked rice, mung beans, salt, turmeric, coconut milk and water. Blend until very smooth and lemony yellow, about 3 minutes.
3. Pour the batter through a fine mesh strainer into a bowl and discard the solids. Stir in the green onion. Set aside. As the batter sits, it will thicken to a consistency like that of heavy cream. Makes 3 cups of batter.

Refer to the link for instructions on soaking and steaming mung beans (basically 2 hours soaking and steam for 8 minutes); and on frying the pancake (basically fry onion, shrimps, pork and mushrooms then add pancake mix then cook about 3 mins covered and then another 3 uncovered to crisp up) .

I've gotta try this!

Report back later...

What's going on here?

I'm constantly asking myself this.

I've walked backwards and forwards past a building site for 3 days. Never seen a level. Never seen a string line.

This morning they'd poured a concrete floor - the women do all the labouring work by the way. (The men seem to stand and watch or handle the power tools.) Everything seems bodged. Concrete block walls are better described as breeze block; there's so many holes in the mortar. I can't figure out if there's a building code or if it's just ignored. I suspect there is but it's just ignored.

Why does the road up to our resort have intermittant footpath? Some of the properties appear to go to the edge of the road surface, and in other sections there's a nice footpath at the side. What sort of legislation and compliance regime operates here? Is there a building inspector?

Where does the sewerage go from the apparently uncontrolled development on Rei Lei? How is storm water managed?

I find myself very doubtful of the integrity and transparency of the governance systems deployed across Thailand. What I'm wondering is how this has occured and what will happen in the future. Hopefully a progressive transition to a better operating model but I'm sure that a lot will be lost along the way.

Broad Beans

Gotta love em... not!

At least not usually, not until yesterday. At lunch yesterday, prior to the usual serving of fried flat rice noodle with topping of vegetables, shrimps and thickened sauce (my staple diet), the restaurant served up a bowl of crispy, deep fried, salted broad beans. These things are good!

A quick check on google shows the recipe to be the fairly obvious one... (repeated from http://www.uktvfood.co.uk/index.cfm?uktv=recipes.recipe&iID=513320):

Ingredients
Vegetable oil for deep-frying
500g freshly podded broad beans
Salt

Method
1. Heat the vegetable oil in a wok or deep saucepan.
2. Add the broad beans to the hot oil and fry until lightly coloured.
3. Remove the fried beans using a slotted spoon. Drain on kitchen paper. Season with salt.

Gotta to give it a go when I get back home.

Thailand - Incredulous

What an odd place. We've been on holiday for two weeks and I'm confused and amazed.

I'm staying in a 5 star resort with oompa loompas carrying luggage up and down 3 flights of stairs. Shiny purple outfits, long white socks, and black shoes. No lifts but just the sight of these characters hauling 30+kg luggage up and down stairs. Cheers to you oompas!

I walk down the pavement with the trend being people on the right, and yet the cars drive on the left!? This doesn't conform with the way it works in NZ, AU, US.

They drive like complete lunatics and yet whenever parking on a slope they carefully put a brick under the front tyre - even for the numerous brand spanking new Hilux 4wd utes. And just why are so many of the vehicles so new? I couldn't afford one of these back home.

We're walking through Krabi township and an Islamic girl walks by in headress and long sleeve shirt - imprinted with the Playboy motif...

Across the country comes the sound of Hotel California - why, why, why!???

We eat lunch at a small white walled joint with the usual cooking stations out the front. It costs between 25 and 50 baht for lunch, about 1/5th the daily income of many of these people in the room. It's almost nothing to me and yet back home we'd squirm if we had to pay 3x as much on lunch.

Five drinks at a bar with a pool table cost us more than a candlelite, waitered meal by the sea with a 1kg crab selected from the tank and freshly cooked on the spot for us. How on earth does that work?

We go to Rei Lei and visit the Diamond cave. We're the only visitors during our stay - and yet Rei Lei is full of people, bars, guest houses, resorts, posing climbers, mad uncontrolled development, crap stuck in the mangroves, and the general detritus of short term exploitation. The cave was worth the visit.

And Hotel California plays where ever we go...

Artisan Bread Makers Guide

After spending the last 15 mins searching yet again in Google for my favourite pizza dough site, I've got the time and the smarts (for once) to load it on this blog. From now on I will know the link - and maybe you can get some use as well.

http://www.theartisan.net/bredfrm.htm

And just in case the site ever goes down the essential recipe (as originally adapted from Vincenzo Buonassisi's PIZZA Plus, English Edition, William Collins & Sons Ltd. 1985, who adapted it from the original Italian Edition by Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, S.p.A., Milan, 1982. ISB 0-00-411202-4... ya da ya da ya da...):

Starter
2 tsp dry yeast (14g)
1/4 cup water (59g)
3/4 cup flour (100g)

Let starter work for 1 hour.

Dough
7/8th to 1/4 cups water (207 to 296ml) (depending upon desired wetness of dough - refer to site for details)
2 1/4 cups flour (300g)
1 tsp salt (5g)

After kneading leave to double in bulk on floured cotton (100%) canvas.

Cook at high heat on pizza stone or in pizza oven - should be complete in less than 5 mins.

Also, note that the home page is a good jumping off point into other sections as well... http://www.theartisan.net/

Another dark and (slightly) stormy night

But what a great adventure...spotting eels and fish by torch light.

 I've never seen so many fish in a small river before. They were spell bound by the light. With my hand in the water I could attempt to grab them - but the wriggly eels would slip straight out - so very slippery and velvety smooth, but not far. They just hunker down again and hope you've gone away.

What had in the past seemed so ugly and returned such childhood fears, seemed instead quite pretty and so very well set in the background of the dark bush and running river. 

And the little native fish - again we could spot them out: splotchy black and stunned at our arrival. Silly buggers, but smart enough to know to run when I tried to bend down and touch them. They very would very quickly depart.

Back on the 4 wheel bike up and over the boulders on the river bank, through the water then racing past the trees looking out for possums. None seen - lucky for them because the rifle was only a short return trip.

Mental note - fish, leeks, silverbeet

Before I forget, forever here I document.

Warehou/Orange Roughy/Snapper - white, full bodied fish
Marinate in lemon juice

Gently fry in lots of olive the sliced white part of a leek.
Lightly caramalise.
Add bayleaf, maybe thyme and a little (remember little!) bit of chopped basil.
Add white wine and reduce.
Add chopped silverbeet and caper berries.
The chopped up stems are important!
Also - salt - you need this get the right flavour from the silverbeet.
Soften the silverbeet - remember the stems so not too short on the heat.
Add parsley and a small amount of cream and butter.

Add the fish and the remaining lemon juice.
Put a lid on the frying pan.

Just tooooo good...

Robinson Crusoe

It takes me a long time to read anything these days - never enough time. However, I have managed to complete Daniel Defoe's classic Robinson Crusoe. It's pivotal.

Anyhow, I have to share Robinson Crusoe's (Daniel Defoe's) tirade against the spanish. Not that I have anything to say against them - I'm sure you're all a lovely lot. But this certainly says something about the English-Spanish relationship in the early 1600's.

"That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, and where they destroyed millions of these people; who, however they were in their customs, such as sacrificing human bodies to their idols, were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people; and that the abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves at this time, and by all other Christian nations of Europe, as a mere butchery, a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man; and such, as for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible to all people of humanity, or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the product of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind."

Well...

Hans Rosling

I strongly recommend this presentation at TedTalks - http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling. The world is changing and this guys shows how.