Kategorie: Uncategorized

wysiwyg = What You See Is What You Get. Meaning you don't enter any kind of code, but you rather just see what you are doing. Want to make a text bold, press the corresponding button and the marked text appears bold. If you don't use a wysiwyg editor you would see something like [bold]My Bold Text[/bold]. The term wysiwyg is mainly used in the HTML world.

Markup languages

HTML is a markup language. You are marking your text with statements about how the text should be displayed. There are though other markup languages:

• TeX (or Latex)
  All studens probably know what one, as it has strong academic roots. Very well for formulas and other scientific stuff.
• XML
  Probably everybody has been in touch with XML. XHTML is a form of XML <mytag>Hello World</mytag>
• GML
  Sorry, don't know that one. Seems to be an ancestor of HTML and TeX.
• HTML
  We all know that one.
• BBcode
  Mostly used in forums, where one don't want to use a wysiwyg editor (for whatever reason) but also want to give users the possibility to "style" their posts. They look like [italic]here is my stuff[/italic] that.

To most of these markup languages there's also a corresponding wysiwyg editor.

HTML
It's easy and there's plenty of such wysiwyg editors: Microsoft Word, Dreamweaver, Amaya, Golive (not sold anymore), Microsoft Expression, NVU. There's actually a nice list on Smashing Magazine.

XML
Don't have much experience, but just look at the google search results.

TeX
I've been working with MiKTeX and LyX.

GML & BBcode
Don't know of any editor for that.

Pros and Cons of wysiwyg

Pros	Cons
Very easy to learn and use. User sees directly what he gets.	You don't have full control. You are dependant on your editor.
Wysiwyg editor might have automation integrated	HTML: For SEO reasons, your editor might now always produce the best HTML code (advantages of clean content markup)
Syntax erros are not possible	Options provided by the editor might mislead the user to do ugly things.

I love wysiwyg editors. In fact, I wrote this article using a Wysiwyg editor, but in this same article here, the editor didn't provide me with the option of writing a table. So I could either find some configuration option for wordpress or just go ahead and quickly write the HTML myself (which I did). It's always good to know the underlying technic, but then in the daily work, I'm too lazy to write all the markup myself.

Using a wysiwyg editor is like drawing with a given pattern. You can never fully express your creativity.

And to all you students out their: Writing a diploma thesis on Word can be a pain (at least on version < 2003). Latex is so much nicer!

Microsoft is everywhere: 72% of all internet computers in the German speaking world is using Microsoft Office! If you look at enterprises the percentage is even higher and I would guess if you look at big enterprises the percentage is once again higher (this is just my guess). These stats are from webmasterpro and they should only provide some kind of orientation about the league we are playing in. Once you are going to truely embrace the Sharepoint technology I believe you will stick to it for quite some time. Let me explain why.

Traditional/common IT structures

Let’s first have a look at some common IT structures. First of all, I’m not an IT infrastructure guy. This knowledge is just from what I’ve observed.

Central Fileserver

There’s a central fileserver. Every department has it’s folder where it can organize it’s subfolder. Mostly those folders are organized very hierarchical. A hierarchy might look like «Department > Group > Projects > Sharepoint Migration > …». In the daily work, you open files, edit them and saven them on the server again. This is a simple solution to set up and for the users to actually use as they don’t need chance any habits.

The drawbacks of this solutions are obvious:

• Collaboration is non existent. You take the document and you save it. Office is smart enough to tell lock the document once it’s open. What if I only want to look at the document, but my co-worker actually wants to edit it..?
• Searching within documents? -> impossible.
• Workflows? E-mail or paper will probably have to do. Obviously this is not what we want.
• Keeping a history of the file is impossible. You have to make copies of the file and save them in the different versions.

You are going to be very loosely coupled. You can run that central fileserver on Linux or Windows or any other system and it’s not going to be too much effort switching the system (I’m not a system administrator, but besides some technical issues not much else will need to change).

Exchange Server

So, who is not using Microsoft Outlook in their company? I guess Google Apps is a valuable alternative to Microsoft Exchange and there are actually some pretty big companies using it (for example Salesforce.com with almost 4000 employees). We were actually using it at my old employer. Basically the Exchange Server sends your e-mail, manages your calendar your task list and probably some other stuff.

The workflow is very much centered on the central fileserver. Documents are being sent by e-mail (as copy) or with a link to it. For example for creating a requirements documents: Business Analyst (BA) writes a first draft and sends it to the stakeholders with the please to give feedback. Those who feel like replying will reply, the others just ignore it. You’ll never have confirmation about who actually saw it and who didn’t. They might add some stuff (probably using word’s built in revision system) send it back to the BA where the BA has to assemple all of the feedbacks.

Again here: Systems are very loosely coupled. You can again easily replace you exchange server with another solution.

Intranet Solution

Well there are tons of different solution. Drupal is trying to get in to enterprises, and I bet there’s many more. I’ve also seen Typo3 as Intranet and then there’s some closed source projects to choose from and probably lots of company who have written their own intranet. Probably there’s some integration between those systems, that has been built over time: Maybe an Active Directory integration? Maybe some SAP integration? Maybe an integration with your central filesystem? Maybe an E-mail integration for some ticketing system? Maybe anything? Intranets are usually managed very decentral and have therefore a chaotic touch.

Sharepoint the Giant

It’s a beast (just look at the licencing costs and the needed hardware). So, what’s sharepoint going to do? It’s going to make your file library and your intranet become one big platform. It actually provides a framework for all of those little applications you traditionally find in an intranet: vacation planing tool, travel expenses, document approval workflows and anything you can think of. It’s easily integrated into office (the probably most used software for the normal office person), it fits perfectly into the whole Exchange infrastructure and hey, it’s Microsoft (they will stick around for a couple more years for support) and best of all: we can also use it for our extranet. One giant that does it all.

One to rule them all

Possible? At least for marketing people. In practice… umm. It can be a pain in the … . Let’s say building an extranet on Sharepoint. There are tools that do is just soooo much easier. Just take Drupal, Typo3 or even some closed source project. A bugtracker. Sure, take a sharepoint list, takes a couple minutes to set up and even has notifications out of the box. … maybe take 1 hour to install some open source tool, that is a true bug tracker, and people will be so much happier.

To come back to my initial statement: «Once you are going to truely embrace the Sharepoint technology I believe you will stick to it for quite some time.» You’ll only rely on MS technology. You’ll loose knowledge in other technologies. Since Microsoft is not particularly famous for inovation, you’ll miss out on a lot of cool stuff that is out there in small tools. Getting knowledge (Linux, Java, PHP and that kind of stuff back is a long way). The Sharepoint guys will tell you every request: «Yes of course we can easily do that with sharepoint» and four month they still be busy with your request, that some PHP freak would have completed in 4 weeks…

Documents will be in some sharepoint library, getting them out of there won’t be as easy, as when they live on some fileshare server.

Processes will change and rely heavily on what you can do with sharepoint. You can configure a lot but since it’s just such a giant it might also take lots of efforts or might even be impossible, so you’ll have to adapt your processes to what sharepoint provides you with.

Conclusion

After all it boils down to the question «Best of Breed» or «Integrated System». Whatever you choose: «Choose your love, love your choice» because you will probably be sticking around with that solution for quite some time. If you set on Sharepoint, Bill Gates will be happy $$$$$

 

I had been looking for a PM software for quite some time. I worked a bit with IBN from MediaChase. It's a powerful tool, but it has so many options and features that you can't even use them all and that they are keeping you away from using the features you really need (we actually had to somehow hide most of the features so that users don't get confused). Through some blog review I found out about Apollohq. I decided to write a couple blog posts about their software, because I think it's really great (plus I don't have other good topics to write about right now, plus they seem to be some really nice guys).

Basics – First slow – then ultra fast

The first time you open the website it will take some time. It's loading the application and will then rely heavily on Javascript/Ajax to load new parts of the application. I think google does something simlar with gmail. Well the benefit from this: Once it's loaded everything runs in the browser and is super fast. You can't really tell, you are working in a browser. It's just very fast. Manage your project? Well, you just want to do things quickly and not waste time waiting for the application. That's actually the part I like the most about the platform. I'm very glad to make a trade off between fewer feature but more speed, after all for most small and medium sized projects I'm just fine when I can track tasks and timelines.

Simplicity

Ok, don't think Apollohq doesn't have any features. It is actually still fairly powerful (tasks, milestones, messaging, contacts, timemeasuring), but I think the guys did a very good job at grouping functions, so that they don't bother you. I'm actually using apollohq for a tiny project. The client is not very good at all with computers, but he could find he way easily around, to comment on tasks and to upload needed files without any training from my side.

Again, if you have small projects you don't want have long trainings just so that they can actually use the software. You want them to be able to do their job right away.

Is there some scrum?

No apollohq is not some scrum platform, but what I've learned from scrum: It's the people and what they do that is important. It's not complicated processes and software, but what they actually do. There you go. Fast, easy and simple.

More thoughts will come.

Everyday I'm using software for a couple of hours. In fact we are all using software: computer, TV, mobile phone (just to name the most obvious). Probably I couldn't even start listing them all: Windows, Office, Evernote, apollohq, Android, Facebook, Twitter, Sharepoint, Photoshop, Remember The Milk, Gmail, Google Maps, Pixel Ruler, VLC, Notepad++, Phone, some apps, ticket buying software, train schedule and, and, and.

Were you ever thinking what the developer of that piece of software looks like? Have you ever tried to get in touch with a Windows developer? Or someone who designed the software for your TomTom? Most likely you are not. Sending an e-mail to Microsoft, you'll just end up talking to some communication guy.

In the past weeks I had the pleasure to meet somebody from Wuala and just recently Andrea from Apollohq. These are just small companies building great software. Wuala is some cloud storage solution (that is actually becoming increasingly popular). Apollohq is a hosted really cool Project Management software. Talking to them made me realize that normal people are actually making awesome software. It's not just downloaded or bought in the store, it's actually coded and designed. And guess what you can actually talk to them.

There are hundreds of task management and pm software out there. It feels like they just come and go without human interaction… well they don't. If you look at all those services somewhere out there in the depths of the world wide web, probably most of them are run by some small team, a single freelancer or a small company. Only very few are like Facebook or Twitter are giants with their own offices and even they started out in a bedroom. So next time you use software or some kind of web service, try to picture the people who build it. And if you have a problem or if the software is just running really well: talk to them. Tell them. If it's not Microsoft but rather some smaller company/product they will hear you and even respond to you.

… maybe they are not people like you and me… almost, but just a little smarter and geeker 🙂

SBB TrainWe Swiss are champions in using trains. In 2009 the average Swiss has made almost 50 train rides and traveled over 2000 km by train. I used to be a heavy train user, but them switched job which made the train less convenient (so I thought).

Day after day I get stuck in traffic (it's actually not that bad as it sounds), have to wait at the red light and listened to radio. I actually caught myself listening to DRS 1 (because they bring interesting contributions and have good news). If you had told me that 10 years ago I would have laughed at me. Well, is there anything else to do in the car? Pondering and listening. Oky, I was/am pretty well informed about what's going on in the world, about what's happening in Japan and Lybia. I guess I could use the time to make some phone calls, but who are you going to call at 7:30 am?

The "office train"

After all, it's just wasting time. That's why I love the train. Sit in get out. Things to do in the train… computer and internet access, it's almost like the office. Here's what my train routine would look like (30 minutes):

1. Quickly (not more than 7 minutes) flip through the newspaper "20 minutes" (yes you can easily get it done in that time).
2. Switch train
3. Open computer, answer unanswered mails that came in over night
4. Use the last minutes to sort priorities on what I'm going to do in the office at first and most important
5. Get out

Once in the office I can just start working not having to worry or be "scared" about what could come in via e-mail. Day starts very relaxing. Loving it. Now I just have to figure out a way to make this easily work… as the way back home is not as convenient.

And if you are really stuck to a car. There is a pretty funny list of things to do in a car 🙂

Contents

Auto generated table of contents
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## HTML Elements

Below is just about everything you'll need to style in the theme. Check the source code to see the many embedded elements within paragraphs.

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

### Heading 3

#### Heading 4

##### Heading 5

###### Heading 6

### Body text

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, test link adipiscing elit. This is strong. Nullam dignissim convallis est. Quisque aliquam.

{: .pull-right}

This is emphasized. Donec faucibus. Nunc iaculis suscipit dui. 53 = 125. Water is H2O. Nam sit amet sem. Aliquam libero nisi, imperdiet at, tincidunt nec, gravida vehicula, nisl. The New York Times (That’s a citation). Underline.Maecenas ornare tortor. Donec sed tellus eget sapien fringilla nonummy. Mauris a ante. Suspendisse quam sem, consequat at, commodo vitae, feugiat in, nunc. Morbi imperdiet augue quis tellus.

HTML and CSS are our tools. Mauris a ante. Suspendisse quam sem, consequat at, commodo vitae, feugiat in, nunc. Morbi imperdiet augue quis tellus. Praesent mattis, massa quis luctus fermentum, turpis mi volutpat justo, eu volutpat enim diam eget metus.

### Blockquotes

> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, test link adipiscing elit. Nullam dignissim convallis est. Quisque aliquam.

## List Types

### Ordered Lists

1. Item one
1. sub item one
2. sub item two
3. sub item three
2. Item two

### Unordered Lists

Item one
Item two
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## Tables

| Header1 | Header2 | Header3 |
|:——–|:——-:|——–:|
| cell1 | cell2 | cell3 |
| cell4 | cell5 | cell6 |
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| cell4 | cell5 | cell6 |
|=====
| Foot1 | Foot2 | Foot3
{: rules="groups"}

## Code Snippets

{% highlight css %}
#container {
float: left;
margin: 0 -240px 0 0;
width: 100%;
}
{% endhighlight %}

## Buttons

Make any link standout more when applying the .btn class.

I really don’t understand how Microsoft can’t make a CMS that would produce clean and valid HTML markup. I though table based designs are relicts from the last century. Well, obviously not. I understand that Sharepoint 2007 would maybe still rely on tables, but we are in 2011. I definitely would not expect layout tables in Sharepoint 2010! Dear developers at Microsoft: It’s time to move to new methods.

Here’s what Sharepoint 2010 does: For it’s general layout it’s not using tables. Thank you. But unfortunately that’s not everything. Have you ever looked at a Sharepoint 2010 navigation. You would think HTML lists (<ul><li>) would be the best solution for that. Developers at Microsoft think that cascaded tables are a better solution! Unbelievable. It blows up markup and I hope we’re not going to have to manipulate that navigation with CSS. It would be horror!

At least Microsoft is trying to make up for IE6 horror: «We are very sorry about IE6».

Sorry for posts like that. I’m just a little bit frustrating, coming from PHP/Open Source being confronted with very unflexible and desktop centred software. It will all be good eventually… let’s hope.

Just to start off: Sharepoint 2010 is a giant. You don’t want it to just power your personal website. You also don’t want it to power your corporate website, unless you are also thinking about migrating your intranet to Sharepoint. I’ve been working with Sharepoint only for two weeks and I didn’t like it at the beginning, but this was maybe because some technical issues, which made our platform very slow.

So, here are some things, I think are really cool about Sharepoint 2010:

1. Ability to open a document from the Website, edit it and save it back to the website.
   I’ve been working long times with google docs. It’s really cool and I love to work on the same documents with other people. Nevertheless, the possibilities are also limited. Google Docs is not a Microsoft Word. MS Office is just about anywhere and I don’t really see big companies banning MS Office as defacto standard. With Sharepoints there’s a good option to finally replace those central file repositories where you always have to watch out not overwriting somebody elses changes. I’m still hoping that there’s eventually going to be co-editing possibilities…
2. Infopath to create pretty power full form applications. No need to code anything. Just point and click.
   Infopath is a powerful tool. Build a form (that can even look nice), connect it to lists and libraries, build validations and triggers. It’s really easy to use and if you are familiar with «Designing-with-Word» you’ll find your way around. As a Webdeveloper I just wonder what the HTML code looks like. Probably I rather not want to know. Since that form stuff will be mostly used for Intranet applications, it doesn’t really matter.
3. Sharepoint Designer is just awesome and I’m glad Sharepoint Designer 2010 doesn’t look like Frontpage anymore.
   Sharepoint Designer replaces FTP client and Eclipse (or whatever editor/IDE you’ve been using). This is actually a really cool piece of software. It allows you to administer most of your site, create lists, libraries, content types and workflows. Further you can build Layouts and do all kind of tweaking of your site. The nice thing is: This IDE/Client is built just for sharepoint. Imagine having an Eclipse distribution for Drupal, that’s Sharepoint Designer. One more cool thing: It’s free to download.
4. Out of the box integration of SQL Server, SOAP or Rest Interface, to display data in lists.
   Microsoft was actually trying to be open… well not quite. You can only plugin to a MS SQL Server, but then with a REST or SOAP Interface you can plugin to mostly any system. I have not done extensive testing on this one, but it does look very nice. You just define the source and then you can start using items that come from that source.
5. Easy creation of Workflows.
   There is a really nice addon called Nintex Workflows that makes the whole workflow building even easier. But again you can also use Microsoft Visio or Sharepoint Designer to build workflows. This allows creating simple form applications. My first little application I’m working on is an electronic customer satisfaction form. It turns out to be pretty easy with just out of the box Sharepoint tools. Since it doesn’t include any programing it is also very dynamic and can be changed easily.

Having said all this, don’t expect me to be a Sharepoint disciple. I believe, my Anti Sharepoint list is going to be longer (10 things I hate about Sharepoint), but it will probably be more focused on smaller things. In general I have to say: «well done». Plus I’m sure Microsoft is going to earn a ton of money from Sharepoint.

$$$ Sharepoint

I don’t think there are very many big enterprises that don’t have Microsoft technology. At least Office will be on most of the computers. With that you have an Exchange Server plus some Fileservers (maybe Linux?? but probably Windows) and maybe you even have some MS SQL server somewhere. With Sharepoint, Microsoft provides a platform that tries to connect all those application. Good for the user, but also good for Microsoft: Once they are all tied together your not going to split them up just like that.

Lets stop here and have a look at this in more detail later.

 

With the coming of the iPhone the mobile web became something for the normal person. Mobile web has been around for quite some years, but it wasn't really popular (and if you've ever tried it with some old fashioned Nokia handy, you know why). Most of the newer mobile phones that come out today provide a pretty decent web experience. Even though people still have the opinion that only iPhone user surf the web. Wrong!

I used to be a developer and we actually built a pretty nice looking mobile website for a customer… it was more of an iPhone website. It was all optimized to run on the iPhone and tested exclusively on the iPhone. The reason? Our client only had an iPhone and was zeroed in it plus the budget was too tight that we didn't even bother having a look at the site with another mobile device. I think due to the redirect rule you couldn't actually access it with an Android device (but nobody cared/cares?). We thought: Who cares, it's mostly iPhone users that will surf the web anyway. Wrong!

There are other players on the market and they are catching up fast!

It's pretty evenly distributed with 23% going to Safari devices like iPhone and Ipod (iPad is not included here), 20% to Opera, 18% for Blackberry, 16% to Nokia and only 13% to Android. Android is though going to catch up fast, as cheaper and more devices will come to the market. So if you optimize your site only for the iPhone you are not going to make the majority of your users happy.

In those last 10% is also the Windows 7 phone included. I would guess they are going to have a hard time catching up with all the others: Business people stick with Blackberry, the cool trendy people haven an iPhone and the techies have an Android phone. Let's hope it's not going to catch up more, because the browser is based on IE7 and I don't think IE7 supports very many features of HTML 5 and CSS 3 (if any?). Maybe the people with a Windows phone should just stick to Opera.

Data comes from quirksmode.org.

There are several events in Zürich, for example the Drupal usergroup or the Webmonday. There hasn't been anything like that here in Basel until recently. Basel now also has it's social web event: Webilea. There have been some great presentations:

• PHP from the point of view of a webhoster: Dominic Lüchinger (Cyon)
• PR and Social Media: Oona Grauers is responsible for running communications at Wuala. Oona will be talking about PR, Social Media and the development of their communication strategy over time – from the very beginning up to now.
• Technical Challenges of Developing a Facebook Game: Patrick Hüsler is a Berlin based programmer currently working on a Facebook game for Wooga. (It's pretty amazing how much traffic those games produce!)

But after all it was also nice to just meet some faces. Audience was pretty heterogeneous: Somebody from PR, somebody from Day (CMS), Baloise (an insurance company), some people of the hosting company cyon and bunch of students and freelance webdevelopers. It was though mainly a techy round.

I'm thinking about giving the Basel web geeks a presentation on Drupal. Even though I'm not on top of all the latest changes for the Drupal 7 release basics stay the same. Lets first see when and where the next webilea is going to take place.

A side note: There were about 20 people attending. Everyone but one was speaking German… presentations were held in English. Swiss people are just awesome. Way to go!

Checkout pictures. Thanks @Ruflin.