Infragistics Extends UX Patterns Explorer with Private Library Service

On Tuesday Infragistics Inc. launched Quince Pro, a collaboration tool and repository for user interface (UI) artifacts, design libraries and other digital assets. The software-as-a-service, built on Silverlight 3, is hosted on Amazon Web Services.

The new service grew out of the UI developer tools company's online Quince catalog, a free, community-based user-experience (UX) patterns explorer, available since February 2009. Quince offers 100 UI designs, advice on best practices and social networking features for sharing tips and UX pattern experiences.

"The goal here was to get people to think about building user experience in a different way through UX patterns," said Jason Beres, director of product management at Infragistics. "It was mostly read-only except for the social networking aspect. We also allowed people to submit their own patterns."

Quince Pro, expands the UX patterns explorer, allowing members to "cultivate" private libraries or style guides for development projects. Designers and developers can communicate feedback or changes to digital assets with annotations or attachments across dev teams and organizations. "No one wants to use Word as the main tool for communicating ideas," said Beres.

The service supports multiple projects, tagging for navigation and common design tools such as highlighting, zooming and resizing capabilities. A corkboard interface provides a familiar work space for posting sticky notes and sharing UI examples. Infragistics followed a UX design process for Quince Pro, responding to feedback from Quince users and soliciting input from an international design council.

The software-as-a-service can be accessed by any device running Silverlight 3. Private library managers can control how their digital assets are accessed and by whom. They can also print example files or save them as downloadable PDFs. Infragistics will store all data and assets in the cloud for up to a year after a subscription has expired, said Beres.

User experience is becoming a key differentiator in software. In a January report by Forrester Research, analysts advised application developers to make five key changes in 2010. On that list: "Become passionate about user experience."

According to the report: "Application development teams can absolutely create great user experiences. The problem is that many application development teams have never learned how." Managers need to ensure that their dev teams understand and adopt UX design best practices, advised the Forrester analysts.

The demand by the end user is to have a richer, more engaging experience in the applications that they use, agreed Beres. "From a developer standpoint, from a corporate standpoint, it is a key differentiator," he said. "If you go on the Web and see application A, which didn't have any user research or UI work done and then you look at application B and there a user-centric design process was used -- application B is the one that will get chosen."

Quince Pro is available now for a free, 60-day trial period. Pricing is yet to be announced, although it will be subscription based with annual licensing fees for five users (5 GB storage), 30 users (30 GB) and enterprise. "Our test pricing is putting it at $10 to $15 per user per month. We will have that resolved by the time we ship the product," Beres said. The subscription-based service is expected to launch before the end of Q1.

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VS2010 Release Candidate Expected this Month

Microsoft is slated to offer a public release candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2010 this month, delaying the formal "launch" of the upcoming IDE and .NET Framework 4 by a few weeks, according to the company. If Microsoft adheres to that schedule, VS2010 should be released to manufacturing (RTM) by April 12, the new launch date.

Beta 1 of VS2010 and .NET 4 were made available last May, followed by beta 2 in October. Participants in Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program and Visual Studio Industry Partners had access to limited community technology previews (CTPs) after the beta 2 release.

In November, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), company officials announced that the upcoming IDE and framework would officially launch on March 22.

But by mid-December, approximately two months into the public beta 2 release, Senior VP of the Microsoft Developer Division S. Somasegar announced plans for the unexpected public RC build in his blog. He noted that developers had provided positive feedback on the new capabilities in VS2010 and .NET 4.

Somasegar also acknowledged: "[Y]ou have also given us feedback around performance issues, specifically in a few key scenarios including virtual memory usage. As you may have seen, we significantly improved performance between beta 1 and beta 2. Based on what we've heard, we clearly needed to do more work."

Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president in the Developer Division, further explained in his blog: "We've been doing an intensive performance-optimization push the last two months that is delivering significant performance and virtual memory usage improvements across the product. The early feedback from a small set of customers testing interim builds since beta 2 has been positive about these improvements. We still have several big performance fixes in the process of being checked in that will improve things even further."

According to Guthrie, the public RC will include a "go-live" license with support for production deployments. The go-live license doesn't apply to Internet-based technologies such as Silverlight 4, currently in beta and slated for release in the first half of the year.

Developers have reported problems with VS2010 beta 2 hanging when XAML files are being worked on, crashing if debugging is done with the XAML editor open and other Silverlight and ASP.NET 4 issues. Similarly, sluggishness around Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and bugs in the automation models of the WPF command bars for VS add-ins have caused headaches for some people.

"For me, the main issue is XAML designer load performance, especially in a VPC [virtual PC]," says Stephen Forte, chief strategy officer of Telerik Inc. VPCs often lack the vector graphic video drivers and can slow down WPF and Silverlight, he points out.

"I can't say it's WPF that's slowing it down, but it's something to do with the rewrite. At the end of the day, I'm happy that [Microsoft] did this rewrite to bring Visual Studio's code base into more modern technology," Forte adds.

On Par with VS2008
Despite performance issues, beta 2 shows considerable progress over beta 1, according to most accounts. "Beta 2 is definitely better than earlier builds in terms of performance and stability," says Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist for Magenic Technologies Inc. "They clearly have some way to go, though, to match VS2008. I think they understand that, as it's the reason given for slipping the March release date they were talking about at PDC."

Telerik's Forte also notes the great performance improvements between beta 1 and beta 2, but says he's happy that Microsoft has delayed the final release to work out some of the remaining kinks.

"I'm not too surprised about the performance issues -- I think it has a lot to do with getting it to at least match the previous release," says Rob Sanfilippo, analyst, developer tools and strategy, Directions on Microsoft. "They're probably getting beta feedback that it's just not performing."

Microsoft is making numerous changes in this release as it tries to move some of the technology to managed code, make better use of multithreading and debut a rebuilt interface that's based on WPF.

"One of the things that they're trying to do is scale it, so that you can deal with thousands and thousands of files," says Sanfilippo. "It's kind of ironic, but I think that's a separate segment of performance -- I haven't seen any feedback from developers who've tested scalability."

The ambitiousness of the project has led some developers to suggest that Microsoft should have considered a three-year release cycle, instead of a two-year one. But Sanfilippo believes Microsoft is responding to competition from open source environments such as Eclipse.

"Eclipse has the whole base of environments and add-ins, which makes it a lot more extensible," Sanfilippo says. "Microsoft's concerned with competing with that, so extensibility is one of the big advances. The new interface is WPF, and it's based on the Managed Extensibility Framework, so that it's extensible and can do all the things that Eclipse offers."

Performance Gains
Even with all these changes, Microsoft's goal is to get the IDE to meet an acceptable performance level for fairly basic systems. Brian Harry, Microsoft technical fellow and product unit manager for Team Foundation Server, explained in his blog in January: "We're really focused on taking a modest-class machine (a laptop-class hard drive, less than 2GHz CPU, 1GB of memory) and making sure it's a pleasant experience to use. We're also testing VMs [virtual machines] and Terminal server (with limited) bandwidth, etc. We're testing quite a few configurations, but it's all oriented toward making sure that whatever you're doing, your experience is good."

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Spyrus To Offer 'Secure' Portable Windows OS

Spyrus Inc. plans to release a portable USB device marketed as "secure Windows on a stick."

The new Spyrus Hydra PC secure pocket drive for Windows PCs will be available on March 1, according to company officials. The device can be plugged into any laptop or desktop PC, enabling storage and backup operations. The product uses Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 2009. Spyrus, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, worked with Redmond to bring the product to fruition.

"When we first undertook this project in 2008 with Microsoft, we thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have your operating environment in your pocket -- not just your data but your whole Windows environment -- and wouldn't it be nice if there were greater surety in security'," said Susan Pontius, Spyrus' CEO, in an interview.

The workforce is becoming increasingly mobile, and so the time was ripe to produce a secure processing environment streamlined for that mobility, she explained.

Initially, government and other public-sector organizations will be the target market. Specific markets include battlefield IT support, electronic health records and the mobile government workforce. The USB drive can support backup, disaster recovery and business continuity operations.

IT organizations typically must guard against security breaches due to the use of portable media and peripheral memory drives by employees. Spyrus pointed to flaws in several vendors' enterprise-grade USB encrypted drives, citing a report by SySS.

The release of the Spyrus Hydra PC pocket drive in March will be a very important "companion to Windows desktop PCs in an administrative and user environment," according to Pontius.

Microsoft welcomed the upcoming release and plans to continue its collaboration with Spyrus.

"There's a strong relationship with our [federal government] sales team and we saw significant short- and long-term synergies with this solution," said David Feldman, Microsoft's senior business development manager, in a phone interview.

Feldman touted the portability and high degree of confidence in an "encrypted drive designed specifically to protect Windows OS architecture" as the main strengths of the collaboration.

Dynamics AX for Retail Arriving Midyear

Microsoft unveiled a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution at the National Retail Federation's Annual Convention & Expo, which is happening this week in New York City.

On Monday, the company described "Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail" and how it can help an industry currently reeling from a depressed economy. Microsoft's main selling point to retailers is that Dynamics AX for Retail integrates with the Microsoft solution stack while supporting merchandising, point-of-sale, store management and supply-chain functions for vertical industries.

Dynamics AX for Retail includes intellectual property that Microsoft acquired from LS Retail EHF and To-Increase Denmark A/S, which was announced in September, according to Kees Hertogh, director of product management for Microsoft Dynamics AX. Hertogh also noted that Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail integrates with Microsoft's SharePoint, Office, SQL Server and Windows 7 products.

The native business intelligence capabilities of SQL Server are used directly in Dynamics AX, Hertogh said. Dynamics AX also taps directly into the workflow engines used in Windows 7, he added. In addition, the product offers a familiar user experience through the Office interface.

"Increasingly, the line between Office and ERP and a retail application -- from a user experience perspective -- is being blurred and it becomes much easier for customers, and specifically users, to be more productive in using these applications," Hertogh explained. Retail data also can be accessed through Excel, he added.

Currently, all Dynamics products work with Windows 7 "as a matter of policy and to the benefit of our customers," according to Crispin Read, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics ERP.

Collaboration is enabled in Dynamics AX due to Microsoft's commitment to support strong unified communications capabilities in the product, Hertogh added. It supports retailers by enabling collaboration with suppliers.

Dynamics AX, which Microsoft markets toward midsize companies, is one of four ERP products offered by Microsoft. Dynamics AX and Dynamics NAV are both available worldwide, while Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL are more focused toward the North American market, according to Read. Microsoft's main Dynamics ERP competitors include Oracle, Sage Software and SAP. For customization to meet vertical integration needs, Microsoft typically relies on the support of its partner community.

Two companies have been using Dynamics AX for Retail so far, although the product hasn't been generally released. Those companies include HDS Retail and U.S.-based retailer Swiss Farm. Microsoft plans to make Dynamics AX for Retail available in 16 countries, including the United States, in "the summer of 2010," according to an announcement issued by Microsoft. Other markets will follow thereafter.

Microsoft offers two services for the retail space that will work with Dynamics AX for Retail. One of them, called "Payment Service," lets users process transactions using payment-processing service providers. That service is currently available. The other service, "Commerce Service," will support shopping cart functionality, linking Dynamics AX for Retail with e-commerce Web sites. Commerce Service is expected to be "generally available in the first half of 2010," according to Microsoft's announcement.

"What we've done with the Commerce Service is that we didn't want to build complete e-commerce solutions for our customers because there are many partners out there who can do that," Read said. "But what we did want to provide is the core infrastructure for that -- taking a shopping basket and having it automatically connect back into the ERP system."

Microsoft may charge extra to use those services with Dynamics AX for Retail, but the details haven't been announced yet.

"Pricing [for those services] is going to be announced a bit later -- more like June," Read said.

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Microsoft's Azure Cloud Service Now Available

Microsoft's Windows Azure and SQL Azure cloud services are now generally available, ending the free test period for those who signed up for commercial accounts last month.

The launch represents a key milestone for Microsoft, which has had Azure under development for several years and released it to its developers for beta testing in late 2008.

Though the platform went through numerous changes over the test period, Windows Azure and SQL Azure represent Microsoft's official challenge to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, among other rival offerings.

"Starting today, customers and partners in countries across the globe will be able to launch their Windows Azure and SQL Azure production applications and services with the support of the full Service Level Agreements," Microsoft said on its Windows Azure Team Blog.

Microsoft's AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control will remain free until April 2010 for those that sign up for commercial subscriptions, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft last month also began offering packages for partners to deliver to customers. The company has released a comparison table of offers. Nevertheless, it's still the early days for services such as Azure and EC2, analysts note. Many large enterprises remain concerned about security and compliance issues, saying they are awaiting private cloud offerings.

"It's going to take years -- probably five years -- for customers to get comfortable enough to move some serious stuff out there," said IDC analyst Al Gillen in a recent interview.

However, a recent survey of 670 IT executives by Saugatuck Research suggests the move might happen sooner. The survey found that while only 3 percent of executives currently see cloud services as an extension of their existing internal IT infrastructures, 50 percent believe it will steadily progress into their portfolios by the end of next year. That number is expected to rise to 76 percent by year-end 2013. Only 14 percent of executives were uncertain if the cloud would become mainstream in their operations. В 

The release of Azure also sets the stage for Microsoft partners to develop and commercialize applications that they may not have had the resources to build until now, said Directions on Microsoft's Paul DeGroot.

"I don't know if it will be a big profit maker for Microsoft but it's potentially a great deal for the partner channel," he said. "Not only will you have people developing on Azure but many of them do not have delivery mechanisms."

While the official date for Azure's commercial release is today, billing will officially kick in Feb. 2 to ensure that no one in any of the different time zones across the world is charged for usage on Jan. 31, Microsoft said.

Dan Kasun, a senior director for Microsoft's public sector business, posted tips on how to keep usage costs down.

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Microsoft, Intuit Strike Cloud Pact for Small Business

After jettisoning its small-business accounting product line late last year, Microsoft is aligning with former rival Intuit to help bring Intuit's large contingent of QuickBooks users into the cloud.

In an agreement between the two companies announced Wednesday, Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service will become the preferred platform for Intuit App Center, a marketplace of small-business applications and services launched in October 2009.

"We think there's a big opportunity for developers to build on Azure, a best-of-breed application, and then federate that application into the Intuit App Center so they can get the distribution through the channel that we have," said Alex Chriss, director of Intuit's partner platform.

The two companies are aiming to let their respective developers and channels build and sell those applications to small and mid-sized businesses. Intuit App Center only has 40 contributions to date, but Chriss claims it is gaining traction. The Microsoft deal should help facilitate development and cross-selling of Web-based apps based on the QuickBooks platform, he said.

The pact will also let Microsoft developers and channel partners reach out to QuickBooks customers to develop new apps or those that integrate with Microsoft's core offerings such as Exchange and SharePoint.

"It's another example of vendors joining forces to expand portfolios, capabilities, and provide more complete offerings," said Gartner analyst Tiffani Bova.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft made the beta of a Windows Azure SDK for the Intuit Partner Platform available for download. The SDK includes a Security Access Markup Language (SAML) gateway that provides the single sign-on, said Jamin Spitzer, director of platform strategy at Microsoft. The APIs that provide the data access are built into the SDK, which will be available to developers using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Partners using Intuit App Center can pick applications via Windows Azure, which provides federated access in the form of a single sign-on across all the applications. Developers and partners will also have common billing across all of the apps, unified management and a common data model, Chriss explained.

"We've actually put a common data model in the cloud which includes the QuickBooks data that allows developers to access that data as they build their applications," he said. "Take, for example, a CRM application. You as a developer can build that application and actually call the customer list inside of QuickBooks. So from the small-business end user standpoint, they don't have to do double data entry. As they make changes to their customer list, it replicates across all their applications."

While the agreement primarily gives Intuit partners access and integration with the Microsoft developer and Windows Azure platform, Microsoft plans to offer more hosted services via Intuit App Center later this year. Services such as Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Server Online will all be made available through Intuit App Center, Microsoft said.

The alliance between Microsoft and Intuit may once have seemed unlikely. After a merger between the two companies more than a decade ago was curbed by the U.S. Justice Department, Microsoft launched its own products but was never able to make a dent in Intuit's market. Microsoft last year pulled its consumer Money product and ultimately Microsoft Office Accounting.

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Report: Google Android Gaining Mobile OS Share

Competition in the consumer mobile operating system space is starting to shift, according to a new report from IDC.

Nokia's Symbian mobile OS currently leads in market share, but Framington, Mass.-based IDC sees Google's Android mobile OS as the number two competitor by 2013. The report, "Worldwide Mobile OS 2009-2013 Forecast and Analysis: December 2009," announced on Monday, provides a high-level view of the various mobile OS platforms. IDC is predicting a 20.9 percent annual growth rate in worldwide shipments of "converged mobile devices."

The surprise showing in the report turned out to be Google's Android mobile OS platform, according to William A. Stofega, project manager at IDC.

"Nokia has a strong hold on the worldwide smart phone market, and we projected that Symbian would continue to lead the pack in mobility," Stofega said in a telephone interview. "We were a bit surprised by the strides Android is taking and its adoption by device makers and consumers."

Stofega said that Android has been gaining popularity with handset vendors because of its open platform for development and the absence of licensing fees.

"Google has made it easier for vendors to leverage the code base of Android for development," Stofega said. "Importantly, it is a high-level OS that supports high-end devices, but it also has the potential to go down-market with less expensive devices."

He noted that while Apple's iPhone enjoys huge success in the United States and areas of Western Europe, it has not done well in markets such as China and India, where price is a major factor.

Legacy players, such as BlackBerry, Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, are being outdone by "newcomers touting open standards, intuitive design and navigation," according to IDC's announcement of the study.

Microsoft has so far remained mum on when its next major mobile platform iteration (Windows Mobile 7) will be released. The company will hold a press conference on Feb. 15 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, according to a Microsoft spokesperson. It could be the next springboard for any Microsoft mobile OS news.

"We have steadily delivered on our commitment to ship additional features and services through a regular stream of exciting new devices," a Microsoft spokesperson stated by e-mail on Tuesday. "We're always working on future versions and have nothing new to announce."

Speculation around Microsoft releasing a "Zune Phone" running on Windows Mobile 7 has been ongoing for many months. The device, sometimes rumored to be a "Project Pink" phone, is expected to go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone.

With a host of new devices hitting the market this year, Stofega noted that the definitions of smart phones, or converged mobile devices, and netbooks are getting a little blurry.

"There's a lot of fluidity and flexibility in the mobile device market, and we are seeing all kinds of adaptations morphing Internet connectivity to telephony," Stofega said. "The defining factors for these new devices will be the pain of adoptability and the cost."

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