Thom Robbins

A couple of weeks ago, while I was on my way home, my cell phone rang and I was greeted by one of my favorite customers, who sounded like he had had better days. He had just left a meeting with the CIO and received his annual development budget for the following year. The problem was that the CIO was unable to justify a new set of Web service initiatives around a set of just-completed internal Web sites. He and the upper management felt that it was too early to redevelop these sites. After all, as he explained, "the users had just been trained and were just starting to take advantage of these sites." It certainly wasn't that they didn't see the clear business and technical advantages of Web services but the business value just wasn't there. "Until we can get some return on our investments for these sites, they will stay as they are," was how the CIO later phrased i... (more)

Introducing Microsoft InfoPath 2003, Part 1

A few weeks ago I was meeting with the CIO of a local health care customer and his IT staff. They were explaining the various technology initiatives and projects that were occurring over the next year. What the CIO was the most proud of was that he had declared this a year of integration projects. He had followed the IT trends closely and was seeing that now was the time to ride the Web services wave. With the release of Visual Studio .NET and Windows Server 2003 he felt comfortable in the platform. He and his staff were focused almost exclusively on the development and deployment... (more)

Introducing SharePoint Web Services

Last week I attended a follow-up meeting with the staff of a local customer that had just completed a major deployment of SharePoint Services. The results, as the CIO reported to me that morning, were a very excited IT department that had seen a rapid adoption of SharePoint across their global enterprise. He said the purpose of the meeting was to focus on additional ways they could use SharePoint within their application infrastructure. The CIO explained how they had a variety of Windows Forms and Web-based applications that needed access to the data that appeared to be locked wi... (more)

Introducing ASP 2.0 Master Pages

While meeting with the development staff of a local company we began discussing a project that the CIO had assigned them earlier that morning. The project was actually the first in a series of about 15 planned Web sites scheduled over the next year. Each site was designed to expose sales and marketing collateral to their international reseller community. Their lead developer explained that the first site would contain about a hundred pages, but when complete they expected each site to have several thousand distinct pages. He said, "Layout control and reusability are key for this ... (more)

Introducing the "Web Part Framework" For Microsoft .NET

Last week I had a lunch meeting with the architects of a local company. The meeting began with a review of their current Web-based customer portal. This application had been deployed almost two years ago and had quickly become an important part of their business. Unfortunately, as they explained, the application had been a victim of its own success. With an increased customer demand and a broader set of business requirements it was slated for a substantial rewrite later this year. This was really what had brought us together that day. They had recently completed their initial use... (more)