Anyone going to the Advisor Media conference at the JW Marriot in Vegas (April 9 - 13th)?
My teammate and Notes guy extroardinaire, Gary Devendorf, has invited me to participate in a number of sessions in the Notes2.NET track. I'll be bringing with me some interesting demos and presentations on how to utilize two of the great technologies inside of WinFX - WCF and WF - with Lotus Notes and Domino.
I'll be involed in the following sessions -
Schedule: 04/10/2006 11:15 AM
What is .NET?
Marc Mercuri & Gary Devendorf
Explore the parallels and similarities between .NET technology and Lotus Notes/Domino -- you may be surprised. In this session, you'll learn the fundamentals of .NET, presented in Notes/Domino terms. You'll look at .NET's vocabulary and workings. Finally, a .NET session aimed at the Notes/Domino developer. You don't want to miss this one.
Schedule: 04/10/2006 04:45 PM
Integrating Lotus Domino and Visual Studio .NET Web Services
Gary Devendorf & Marc Mercuri
You can host Web services on a Domino 7 server. But did you know you can also host them on Domino 6 or 5? Also, hosting Web services is only half the story. You must have a Web service client to make a Web service useful. In this session, you'll see how to create and host a Domino Web service. And you'll learn how to create a VS.NET Web service client to use your Web service. You won't believe how easy this is!
Schedule: 04/11/2006 11:15 AM
Integrate Domino Objects and Managed .NET Code Using COM
Gary Devendorf & Marc Mercuri
The Domino objects expose functionality of Lotus Notes/Domino applications to LotusScript, Java, COM, and more. In this session you'll see how you can call the Domino objects from .NET applications using Visual Studio.NET. Also, you'll see examples of LotusScript calling Managed code
Schedule: 04/12/2006 08:00 AM
Microsoft Workflow Linked to Lotus Notes
Marc Mercuri
You know about Lotus Notes workflow, but did you know that Microsoft has a new technology for workflow called Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)? See how WF works and how you can use it from Lotus Notes. You'll even see how to link a Notes workflow to a Windows workflow -- this is all new! You'll see VB.NET and LotusScript in the examples.
For those that know me, I come from an Enterprise background, and know there's a big need out there for info on how to do interop. With Notes and Domino in particular there are some great opportunities to leverage .NET, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Workflow Foundation to provide great functionality and new opportunities to your existing applications.
I'll be in town the whole week, if you want to talk about how to leverage WCF, WF, or InfoCard in your projects, I'm happy to chat with folks 1:1 - just contact me via email to set something up (mmercuri@microsoft.com)
Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Identity in Financial Services (Level 200)
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
11:00 AM - 12:00 pm Pacific Time
Presenters: Marc Mercuri & Vittorio Bertocci
Financial service companies face market pressures to lower information technology (IT) costs and retain existing customers while growing their businesses. Complicating these business goals are complex IT challenges that result in costly system maintenance and integration. As a result, companies are looking to service-oriented design as a means to leverage their IT assets to meet their business goals, focusing on lowering integration costs within and beyond their corporate boundaries. Microsoft is providing the tools to build connected systems based on service-oriented design principles. In this webcast, we specifically discuss Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and the Microsoft WinFX application programming interface (API) component code named “InfoCard.”
Have you checked out the Advanced Workflow Blog yet? I've run across this a couple of times while on the road, and wanted to make sure you had visibility of it.
I know parallelism in WF is something people are a bit fuzzy on, here's a link to an entry that I think provides a very accessible overview of how parallelism works in the technology.
http://blogs.msdn.com/advancedworkflow/archive/2006/02/23/538160.aspx
I've been on the road for most of the last month, enjoying the opportunity to work with a number of our Fortune 100 customers on real world implementations of WCF and WF.
I've got a number of blog posts in queue, so expect a number of posts of the next couple of days. Expect good stuff, demos, and samples.
Marc
You may have noticed some interesting behavior when using intellisense with the Feb CTP.
One of the Microsoft Regional Directors, Juval Lowy, has put together an updated XSD that can resolve said weirdness, resulting in Feb Syntax Intellisense for the CTP.
Here's where to get it and how to install it.
(1)Download xsd file from here http://www.idesign.net/idesign/temp/dotNetConfig.zip
(2)rename current dotnet config file
(3)copy the file to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas
You probably know you can change the name of a variable exposed on a data contract with [DataMember(name=”NewName”)], but you've not been able do something similair with Enums.
This changed in the Feb CTP, Kenny Wolf has a good example here
We had a training last week in Redmond, and with the release of Feb CTP bits this week my inbox is being flooded with the question “Should I use the Jan bits or the Feb bits?”
You can tell I used to be a consultant when I say 'Depends'.
Omri Gazitt puts it best when he discusses the trade-off. If you want something closer to the object model that will be released, go Feb CTP. If you want bits that have gone through more quality testing, go with Jan CTP.
Ed Pinto put together a collection of the changes and posted them on WindowsCommication.Net, I'd recommend checking it out and making the right choice based on your specific instance. As the OM is different, existing labs or materials you might be using for training would also need to be updated to work.
Find the list of WCF changes here:
http://windowscommunication.net/collateral/pages/BreakingChangesJanCTPToFebCTP.htm
On the workflow side, Mark Schmidt has a link to the Hands on Labs released with the JanCTP listed with the links to the Feb CTP bits, this meshes with what I'd been told that the Feb CTP would not see big OM changes for WF.
If you're looking for the WF labs, find them here
Sorry folks - have been tied up with customer meetings and delivering a training from morn 'til night this week, training session completes today, so will post these on Friday (17th).
I had a customer visiting the other week and he asked where the link was to the actual RSS feed for this site. I thought it was obvious, but after looking at the site again, realized it wasn't :-(
Until I get a chance to tweak this, I wanted to pass on that the feeds are located directly underneath the calendar to the right.
Cheers,
Marc
Lots of questions from folks about why the blogs gone quiet.
With the release of the CTP and the Go Live in January and wrapping up the book, I've been a very busy guy, so the blogs been a bit quiet. I've got a ton of blog material in queue - so you'll be seeing a lot of posts over the next few weeks.
Over the weekend, John Vlissides, one of the 'Gang of Four' passed away. In an interesting use of wiki, a memorial has been put up where people are placing anecdotes. http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?JohnVlissides
In a connected world where we regularly interact electronically with people beyond the borders of our respective geographies, the traditional ability to mourn and share rememberances as a physically congregated group becomes less realistic. The need to mourn and share remembrance remains, however, and it will be interesting to see how the same technology that facilitates the connections is re-mixed to facilitate handling disconnections.
I found the Wiki As Memorial interesting, and thought back to the funerals and wakes I've attended in the past. The major focus was on celebrating the life that had been lived. While written anecdotes and stories will always have their place, when I looked back what I remembered most about those events was the stories, the facial expressions, and the tid bits of family history that would leak out. Those small stories that may not be long enough or meaty enough to warrant writing down, but trigger a succession of smaller stories that define an individual, a significant event, or a shared understanding. All of which is lost in words alone.
If you look at spaces.msn.com and myspace.com, you're starting to see the dawn of things happening. What is 'cool' for todays teens will become institutionalized, and we'll start to see people taking technology in interesting places to build these interactive histories and memorials.
Digitized media - and the rapidly decreasing costs to create and share it - mixed with third party content is how I think we'll handle it. Recording our stories, storing them in a shared media driven Wiki/RSS hybrid, linking them to information in third party stores and sharing them out to a set of individuals be they friends, families, or the world.
There are certain stories that only come out at events like weddings and funerals, and are relayed so much better by the people who lived them and/or were impacted by them. Imagine a personalized Encarta for your family, with pervasive digital media story telling from events like these, with links to relevant information (i.e. information on where the individual came from in Italy), with links to similiar sites of their friends. Imagine taking the evolution of the spaces concept forward 10,20,50 years and the rich media historical tapestry you end up with.
I was recently talking to a colleague, and he mentioned he had an Enterprise customer with clients running Windows 2000 Professional, knew WCF wasn't supported on that platform, and asked what he could recommend they use until they upgrade their clients to XP or Windows Vista. Variations of this question came up a couple of times while on the road these past couple of weeks, and I wanted to share my response in hopes it could help others with the same query.
WCF and WF do require .NET framework 2.0 be installed on the machine, and the official systems supported for *installation* are Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and eventually Longhorn Server. That being said, it is totally reasonable for you to install/use WF and WCF on a server using Windows Server 2003 and then expose services (either through WCF or a Workflow exposed as a WCF Service), which can be consumed by non-WCF clients on downlevel OS'.
The first question to ask yourself is this - do you have the ability to deploy .NET Framework 2.0 to the systems where your client will be installed? The next question is - do your services need to be secured at the message level or will security at the transport level suffice?
If you can deploy .NET framework 2.0, look at creating clients using Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET framework. If transport level security will suffice, encrypt the channel using SSL. If message level security is required, utilize WSE 3 which will be wire compatible with WCF.
Now, if your target audience will have framework 1.1 installed and you are not empowered to install .NET framework 2.0, you're not left out.
Remember that WCF and WF can be exposed as Basic Profile 1.0 compliant web services, which can be consumed by any software on any platform that can understand Basic Profile 1.0. On Windows Server 2000 / Windows 2000, there are a number of options here.
We’ve had SOAP/web service support on Win2K for some time, so this is reasonable. The great thing is, because you can expose multiple endpoints, you build a service today that exposed BP 1.0 services, and add additional endpoints (all external to the application) in the config file. This allows you to simultaneously provide support for older clients, as well as the opportunity to service employees and partners with newer/different clients with WS-* secured services, TCP, etc.
In addition, remember that WCF (and Workflows exposed as a WCF service) can also be utilize MSMQ. This provides another opportunity to utilize an application on a Windows 2000 system. Here you could write messages to MSMQ through System.Messaging (or via other means – even VB6!), again with the service on Windows Server 2003, supporting downlevel (win2k) clients.
Also, if you have existing COM+ applications, you can expose these as well. (again using WCF/WF exposed on Windows Server 2003, with clients consuming them downlevel).
Finally, remember that you can compile WCF/WF code down to an assembly and make those assemblies visible to COM (via interop). If you have a legacy app and it’s residing on any of the supported applications, you can consume WCF services using something as simple as com based scripting (works great for customers running things like Lotus Notes, early versions of Offices, even VB6 apps!).
Naturally, these items mentioned for 1.1 framework are also compat on 2.0 version of the framework.
You can start to see the power of this unified model combined with the framework opens a number of possibilities.
Earlier this week I wrote about my recent experience on Air France. The net-net was that the clerk at check in wasn't paying attention,
caused a number of problems, and was asking me to pay an extra 200 Euros for a seat I'd already paid for.
In the end, I ended up with my ticket - but I walked away with a negative feeling about their airline. Undoubtedly, there are marketing people spending millions upon millions, canvasing radio, television and print with advertising to attract new customers. This clerk lost them potentially thousands of dollars of my future business.
I'm a pretty rationale guy, if this type of service was an isolated incident, I'd write it off as such.
Unfortunately, it isn't - it is only the latest of a number of instances where I've interacted
with a company I've done business with, and walked away disappointed and likely not to engage in any future business with them.
In our industry, we spend hours talking about service oriented architecture (SOA). but in order for us to be able to debate SOA, our organizations realistically need customers.
This requires a core focus of our organizations on the relationships with thier customers, providing the foundation for a truly "service" oriented enterprise.
Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked for a company called Gazelle Systems. Gazelle wrote sofwtare in the
hospitality vertical, specifically around CRM for restaurants. The company had a core belief that 20% of customers were responsible for 80% of the restaurants business. People had great experiences and they told their friends, their colleagues, and if quality was maintained, the buzz grew and so did their clientele.
The flipside is that while good news travels fast, bad news travels faster. People who have bad experiences tend
to tell people to avoid these businesses like the plague. In a connected world, information travels further and faster which can really cause impacts.
Think about the last negative experience you had with a company. Did you tell/warn your friends in the hopes to avoid them the same pain? I bet you did. And the worse the experience, the more passionate your explanation. This kicks of a domino effect where people tell their friends, etc.
We seem to have a bad trend in customer service - here area a few other recent examples:
Capital One
A few years ago, I was a principal consultant in Microsoft Consulting Service, working out of Latin America. I'd been offered a credit card from Capital One, but it had never arrived, and had disappeared enroute to me.
Funnily enough, a bill from Capital One for an annual fee did make it to me in the mail. I contacted the company to let them know I hadn't received the card, thus hadn't activated the card, and thus had not intention of paying any fees. Unfortunately, Capital One saw an opportunity to impact their bottom line by outsourcing their call center. The challenge was that the staff they hired were non-native English speakers, and had significant challenges when discussing items outside of established scripts.
This situation was one of those that were off script. While the credit card company saved money by hiring these individuals, it was now costing me in my time and patience to attempt to describe the situation several times, in hopes that each new description would finally click with the customer service rep.
Eventually, I gave up and asked them to cancel the card. Because I cancelled the card and it was within the first billing period, there was no issue about charges. The annual fee assessed would be reversed and the account would be closed.
I thought it was, but found out otherwise when I moved to Redmond and was shopping for a house. The card account was still open, the annual fee had still been assessed, and as it was not payed, it'd reflected negatively on my credit.
After another 4 hours of my time, I had the issue resolved and received an apology letter from Capital One. They added savings to their bottom line, but now they've added a level of inconvenience to me
They are inundating the airwaves with millions in advertisements, and this customer service rep has ensured that I'll never have a Capital One card in my wallet.
Fortunately for me, I checked my credit early on in the house hunting process. Knowing that this could have caused major problems for me, I'm extremely negative on this brand.
Overstock.com
I purchased a Tag Heuer watch from Overstock.com. This was not an inexpensive purchase (>$2000), and my credit card was charged. Several days later, I was told they didn't have the watch, wouldn't have the watch, and my card would be refunded. They made an offer of a $20 gift voucher as a consolation. Disappointed with the situation, but still willing to give them another shot.
I went back to their site and saw what I could get for $20. I found a DVD that I liked, saw that they had it in widescreen, and placed my order. When the DVD arrived, it had 'full screen' in large letters on the case, however the invoice indicated it should have been the wide screen version. I called customer service, and sure enough, they goofed.
Even then, I'd not written them off. Then I was told what I needed to do to resolve their mistake.
To get the item I orderd, though, I'd need to either pay them again and return the DVD they sent, or return the item. If I returned the item, I'd have to wait up to 5 business days for an envelope to return the item, and then another 5 business days for them to receive it.
This was a movie I was looking forward to seeing, and now would have to wait an extra 10 days to receive what I'd ordered initially. Now, I'm a lost customer and a negative evangelist. A month later, I've still not received the envelope to return it.
If you've turned on a TV in the last 3 months, you know this company is easily spending millions of dollars on advertising, but they're losing people in the last mile due to non-customer friendly policies.
Mistakes happen, it's how you respond to them
I'm not saying that companies can't make mistakes. Most customers understand mistakes happen, it's how you respond that defines the relationship going forward. The sad thing is, I could have been 'saved' as a customer in all of these scenarios. And it wouldn't have taken much - for less than the cost to acquire another
new customer, or combat the negative evangelist that ensues as a result.
These sorts of things are more common now than in years past, and it really differentiates a brand when a company gets it right.
Amazon.com
Amazon is a great example, and in similiar situations to Overstock. I've had challenges when the wrong item was shipped to me, or there was an unplanned delay. The key differentiator is that their customer service team made it right, and got me what I needed, when I needed it. The actual costs involved for them were trivial, but
the way they responded increased my loyalty to their brand/site. While initially I bought books from them, that comfort level has led to thousands of dollars in purchases for non-print items.
Ritz-Carlton Hotels
Ritz-Carlton hotels is another company that 'gets it'. They recognize the value of their clientele, and empower their employees to make things right and have a strong focus on service.
They effectively employ technology to record guest preferences for VIP service at their properties.
Going beyond doing the expected level of service
But let's look at going beyond the basics and really adding value -
Use technology to recognize John Smith from Boston when he visits <business/> in Seattle.
If you've never seen John before, you might not give him the same VIP service that your colleagues in the Boston location do,as he spends alteast $1000 each time he visits <business/> in Boston, and does that 3 times per month.
And when John takes his wife to Hawaii on their anniversary and wants the same pink champagne the night they were engaged and had dinner at the Boston location, and the maitre'd in Maui can identify it easily. It's that sort of service that inspires loyalty and customer evangelism.
Having had these various experiences with corporations as a consumer, a deliverer of services, and VP of development for a CRM company, I've seen some recurring themes.
The folks that get it right have three key things in common:
There is communication from the top that the customer relationship is crucial.
The customer facing employee is reasonably empowered.
There is technology in place to assist in managing the relationship.
When I was developing products in this space, one of the big challenges in bringing this to fruition were infrastructure and technology. With poor bandwidth, real-time data services weren't realistic and to handle the data necessary for such a system required the developer to get very creative with replication. But that was then, this is now.
The hurdles from the technology perspective have all but disappeared. Connectivity is now more pervasive and both PC hardware and media storage costs are a fraction of what they once were.
So why write about this now? When this recent incident occured at the airline ticket counter, a short while later I was checking my email and reading about the SQL Server 2005 launch. It was then that I was reminded that of an article/statement I'd read where Bill Baker from the SQL team talked about the future of BI.
I forget the exact wording, but the gist was that SQL 2005 would bring the capability to deliver analytics to not just executives, but everyone in the organization, including those on the front lines, dealing with customers and helping shape the customer experience.
As a consumer, I'm really looking forward to seeing people take advantage of the product and run with it.
I've had an interesting day today. Checked into the airport this afternoon, and had a debate with the woman at the counter about my reservation. I received my ticket and was surprised to see I wasn't sitting in business class.
The funny thing is, I had an itinerary and record locator that indicated that I was in business class, but our check in clerk claimed I didn't.
A quick call to her supervisor came back with a confirmation that I did not have a business class seat. The options - take a business class seat for another $200 Euros or take a seat in coach. There was some additional discussion on my part, but I was amazed at how uninterested and unhelpful this particular individual was.
Before leaving the desk, I requested that she use my air miles card from a partner airline. Her response, which struck me as a bit odd, was that there was no need, as I was a gold member.
I begrudgingly took the coach seat and made my way to security. While in line I was thinking about her comment about my being a gold member. While I'm gold on other airlines, this (and the partner) weren't one of them.
I rechecked my ticket. Not sure who Vincent Mercier is, but he sounds a bit more French than this guy who grew up in Tewskbury, MA and knows just enough French to be either polite or offensive. I returned to the desk, pointed out the mistake and had my business class ticket in hand.
When sitting in the airport lounge a bit later, I thought about what had just transpired. Air France has asked initially for my passport, to check claims of identity. That claim wasn't used successfully by the requestor, and a secondary claim - my reservation locator - was provided. Again, this wasn't used. Without success, the workflow required an escalation to another service - the supervisor - and again there was a failure. Here it was based on the information provided by the initial requestor.
It stresses the potential for a breakdown in an identity valdation scenario which involves a human component. The difference between Vincent Mercier and Marc Mercuri is fairly obvious, but the check-in cleark may have done some faulty pattern recognition based on seeing MERC in both.
Had this been a machine driven interaction, this would likely have gone flawlessly. A selection of destination city would have been used to limit the number of potential name matches and from that subset, the name would have been valdated either 1:1 or possibly with something along the lines of a Soundex).
What makes this breakdown of 'the system' incredibly alarming is that there was no validation of claims from that point forward - once ticket was in hand, I had free access to the system, boarded the plane, disembarked in Paris and am now in my hotel.
Sure, I provided the token assigned by the airline (a boarding pass) at security - but there was no requirement/check of my passport. If I had continued through with my initial, erroneously issued token (the ticket in someone elses name), I would surely still be in Paris eating the French interpretation of Cajun Chicken wings.
In this specific context, an identity breakdown has horrific potential. Suppose the mistaken identity had occured not with a guy less interested in connecting systems as disrupting them - a terrorist.
There were no further checks for identity (intra-EU flights do not have passport control), so someone who slipped through the system could now be freely traversing France. Given the political climate here in Paris this week (for those unaware, there have been riots and indivduals setting fire to cars in France), it's even more alarming.
With the recent move to self-service kiosks for check in, the mechanisms I mentioned earlier are helping avoid this issue. Introducing some of the technology used there in the human interaction piece (i.e. scanning of passports and system retrieval of information) would help solve the issue, surely.
But that answer begs different questions. We do quality assurance of the software systems, but how do we and how much time do we do testing of the human components in connected systems? And once you've established your test plan, and you go to 'rtm' of the process/workflow, how do your federated users report bugs? In this particular instance we're not talkng about a situation that results in some bizarre behavior in an IDE, we're talking about international security in the heart of Europe. The clerk surely isn't going to tell her manager, as it points out big mis-step on her part. There's no contact information on the boarding pass or airline timetable. Going to the Air France web site, I went to the link to their corporate office, which is entirely in French. I'm on a hotel internet connection at 90 cents per minute, chances are I'm not going to spend an hour navigating their site to let them know about the issue, resulting in an open loophole in a frequently used workflow with potential for failure far, far worse than any blue screen.
In this particular scenario, the issuance of a false token was an 'honest mistake', but suppose that it wasn't. Imagine if a terrorist cell had someone working behind the ticket counter, what checks are in place to prohibit <i>intentional</i> bad issuance or trust violations?
This isn't just with transportation companies, it spans verticals. For example, if John Smith is caught owing $200,000 in taxes, and the workflow for resolving this dispute is handled by Bill Jones who makes $20,000 per year, John paying $50,000 to Bill Jones to make this whole matter disappear happens. Depending on the country, it happens alot.
These example involved a relatively simple workflow, this obviously gets more complex when dealing with interactons that run multiple partners/parties deep.
If you have a business with a high volume of transactions or high value transactions with consumers or areas with complex workflows , how do you / would you handle these situations? What types of SLAs and legal terms do you have in place to handle scenarios where a human taints the system with a manual violation of trust in a federated scenario?Feel free to speak in the third person and without corporate identities, I'm curious how/if this is being addressed.
I'm writing this from the airport in Amsterdam, I've got a few hours here before connecting
on to Barcelona, the first stop in a three city tour through Europe. For the next week and a half, I'll be visiting with customers and MS field in Barcelona, Munich, and Paris.
As I was disembarking from the plane, I'd turned on my smart phone and within seconds was attached to the local Orange phone network and downloading email from my colleagues back in Seattle. While waiting for my luggage, I was on the web, reading a blog.
A few minutes later, and I'm in the KLM lounge. I flip open my tablet PC, and I'm on a wireless network. I'll be at my hotels today and later this week, all with wireless access. I've not checked on mobile service, but I think I'll be 'live' there as well.
It never ceases to amaze me the level of connectivity that's been put into place over the past 5 years. With connectivity so pervasive, I'm even more interested in our recent Windows Live and Office Live announcements that were made last week.
Did you see them? If not, go over and check out www.live.com to see what's coming.
Ok, so it's been awhile since my last post - about 3 months. Lots of things have happened in the interim, and I've decided to reboot the site.
So what's new?
On the professional front, I made an internal move from being a PM to an Architect Evangelist for the Longhorn Server Evangelism team. I focus primarily on Windows Communication Foundation, Workflow Foundation, and the Identity and Access Management technologies and how they're used in the Enterprise space.
I've also co-authored an upcoming book on Windows Communciation Foundation (WCF) with team mate Craig McMurtry (details to come), and have some cool demos/code I've put together that you'll see posted as the weeks, months go on. I also had the opportunity to participate in Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, as a co-owner of the Ask the Experts session, writing some labs, and participating in one of the sessions.
On the personal front, I've dropped about 59 pounds with a little help from my friends at the 20/20 program over at ProSportsClub, and am targeting another 50 by next March.
For those rare few of you who subscribed to the blog before, you may have noticed that I've dropped the name 'whyanotherblog' and gone with the 'Living in a World of Connected Systems'. The original name seemed novel whatever late night I bought the url from GoDaddy.com, but in hindsight, was kind of lame 
In the days/weeks/months to come, expect to find code, discussion, links, and screencasts on the latest and greatest stuff coming down the line.
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