Mix06 day three

I am a little behind schedule... busy at work... but I wanted to get my thoughts down about the final three session on the last day of Mix06.

Everywhere you went, you heard lots about RSS. Microsoft's new version of IE as well as Vista are heavily tied to serving up information as RSS as well as consuming it in simple and highly extended forms. The big message is that RSS just isn't for text anymore. Using Simple List Extensions you will have the ability to tailor a very advanced experience directly within the feed, introducing things like filtering, sorting, and interaction commonly associated with search results.

A couple "best practices" were laid out by Walter vonKoch as far as using RSS feeds:

• Use a GUID tag in your feeds to prevent duplicates
• use the PubDate field to allow for predictable sorting
• Use good titles so users can scan for the entries they need
• Emit well formed XML, even for the content. Bad XML will be blocked in most cases.
• Choose one and only one feed format. The readers support them all. Multiples confuse the user
• Use the TTL (Time to live) tag if your content changes slowly

One of the cooler demos showed how an RSS feed of events was piped directly into an outlook calendar and kept in sync using the Microsoft Common Feed List. Pretty rad.

In between sessions, I bumped in to Molly Holzschlag from Molly.com. I worked with her a great deal when my company was adopting CSS and well formed XHTML markup. It was good to see her again and exciting to find out she is working with others on setting up classes that focus on technical designer training.

I have looked high and low for that type of instructional material and have come up empty. As the large enterprise software environment  moves to a more Agile methodology following in the footsteps of many innovative Web 2.0 companies, the role of the Application Designer is fundamentally changing. There is definitely a need for training that can help explain how SDLC process changes alter design deliverables and responsibilities. I have continues wracking my brain on ways of communicating this effectively... it is good to know that massive amounts of brainpower is being spent on these issues by people like Molly.

The second class of the day was an inside look at Microsoft Research. Currently, the primary research themes are:

• Human Computer Interaction
• Information Analysis, management and retrieval
• Collaboration
• Mobility
• Media & Entertainment
• Software Development
• Hardware

It was fascinating to learn how a Microsoft Research project gets started:

1. Watch the trends in technology
2. Wait until there is a visible leader (person of knowledge) in the space
3. Approach them with a research position
4. Give them a budget and let them go to town

The research is shared and monitored and if it aligns with a product, it is integrated, if it isn't, it is patented (if possible) and licensed (if appropriate) to anyone who wants it. It really makes me want to dive into the Microsoft Research site and see if there is something I can use!

I was happy to see them demo SNARF, an email monitoring tool that I have been playing around with for almost six months. I had this theory that you could discover who really controls your workload by the amount of incoming email requests. For instance, which department is requesting the most of my time? I could tell by examining (from a very macro and content-independent level) my incoming email on a daily, weekly and yearly basis. SNARF allows you to essentially do that. The results were really cool. I would suggest checking it out yourself.

The last presentation of the day (and the conference) for me was an overview of Sharepoint Technologies by Jackie Bodine. It was great to see how customizable the new version is and how well it adheres to web standards. There is so much new stuff packed into Sharepoint that I don't know if you can even think of it as the same package. While the current version is definitely "portal" centric, the new version supports an entire content management system. The example they used for the demo was a version of Xbox.com converted to Sharepoint... and it looked identical. For anyone that works with Sharepoint regularly, that is pretty impressive.

Aside from architecture differences it looks like great strides have been made in the areas of caching/performance and collaboration. The new version comes with all kinds of great default configurations for blogs, wikis and discussion boards that go far beyond what is available today. All kinds of good stuff.

Once again, Mix06 gave me plenty to think about. The next challenge is taking all this great technology and figuring out a strategy for taking advantage of it.