d9.com Solutions

Announcing WebSheet

WebSheet is a Web Search and Social Media Toolkit that speeds up the process of organising, cataloging and analysing content acquired through your interactions with the Web.

Many of the tools we use today for search, marketing or content curation were designed many years ago when the web was much smaller, a single search engine could provide most answers, and the available time was relatively longer. These tools are designed for simple, non-intensive work and have little end-to-end process support. And they all use their own proprietary storage mechanisms for intermediate data.

The challenge these days is much greater, with relatively entry-level Content Curation or Search Marketing tasks requiring many steps with data sourced from multiple online and local applications, and with the number of Social Media and adjunct sites exploding in the last 2-3 years alone.

Most meaningful Social Media or Social Marketing tasks require multiple steps, dozens of browser windows, intermediate data stored and retrieved, and constant change.

Whilst some online application suites have emerged to support these complexities , their focus tends to be specific and not generic. Further, their prices are high and their xx is yyy

There is little support in the desktop space for more general purpose tools that provide enough support to enable and enhance long-chain tasks, but at the same time providing flexibility to "roll-your-own" process or quickly adapt to new opportunities.

WebSheet fills this gap at a very reasonable price, providing a Windows desktop application that supports richly enhanced Browse, Search, RSS Feed, WebInfo, Twitter and Spider modes

We call these modes, Smart Browse, Smart Search, Smart Feed Smart WebInfo, Smart Tweet and Smart Spider respectively

These Views into the Web enable you to acquire and use a large range of data from your web interactions.

Each of these modes gathers data into structured lists and grids (ListSheets and DataSheets) which can be further analysed, augmented and distributed by the built in list management and datagrid management functions.

All this provides you with a one-stop shop for managing data acquired through your Web Search, Social Media or Content Curation activities. Processing and managing keywords, links, categories, content fragments and pages, and provides interfaces to numerous popular web services to obtain information directly from them into WebSheet.

This web-oriented functionality is built on top of a powerful data management and distribution engine which provides advanced data manipulation, analysis, and communications capabilities. WebSheet both augments the Internet browsing experience, and enables rapid acquisition, analysis and dissemination of information from Internet-based data sources.

WebSheet is aimed at advanced web users, and website content managers, advanced bloggers, SEO consultants, paid advertising campaign managers, and website developers.

WebSheet will be available for Beta Tester users from Monday 10^th October 2011.

Visit the website or register as a Beta User with this online form.

mid last year I dug out of my library an old book called "Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions", which I bought in the early 90's. Despite its goofy (but very apt) title, it is a serious and wide-ranging assessment of problems with the Waterfall approach to software projects, and a review of alternate approaches. it's significance to me is that it's the first reference I can recall to Scrum methodology (along with many other techniques).

I found this after lavishing much time and love on Barry Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics" which initially opened my eyes to alternatives to waterfall. Much as I adored the precision of what Barry laid out in his book, I was finding it difficult to apply in the solution and business spaces in which I was working. Reluctantly, and as I mention - after much labour, I followed authors, publishers and titles (remember, this is all pre-internet) to find the "Righteous Solutions" book.

I was driven to disinterr this book from my own haphazard book stacks after I did the Certified ScrumMaster course mid 2010. Of course the CSM curriculum covers the origins of agile and scrum's place in the world of agile, but I had a nagging thought at the back of my mind that some timeframes weren't fully reconciling themselves.

the CSM course covered then (and I am reminded only this morning in the advertising material for the Agile Alliance 2011 conference http://agile2011.agilealliance.org/ ) that the Agile Manifesto was signed 10 years ago this August.

But my brain was telling me that I had at least read about scrum and similar practices at least 10 years before.

And so, digging out this wonderful little book, I confirmed that Scrum, "Paired Programming" (then called "Handcuffing") and a whole bunch of other interesting approaches were reviewed and analysed in a book published in 1990 and therefore one resumes, evident enough in real life to be noticed, researched and written about during the late 80's. Although the book was published in 1990 - how could I be sure that's when I bought it (or thereabouts). To confirm the timing I found, lovingly tucked between the pages, an article on the "State of the Art" of inter-system communications, torn from the "Byte" magazine in June 1993. that article alone is worth a separate post (once I re-read it).

Why is this significant? Well for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the perspective of how long ideas can take to pervade and disseminate into broader culture, and even more, how long it can take for other ideas to fade, despite their manifold problems: Waterfall is still up there on the altar of methodologies - it seems we've added some things but not removed others.

but its significant for me because I spent a lot of time over the past 4 years looking at how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a fairly large development / integration team (which I left about 4 months ago) and it is really only after being outside the intensity of that group that my thoughts have really collated themselves to the point of writing about them.

so this post is really a pre-amble to a series of upcoming posts covering the potted thoughts of Adam Russell on complex software development.

But find the book if you can and take a look - it is well worth the effort.

OS4XL Scores "5 Cows" Review Rating

OfficeSheet for MsExcel - Professional Edition recently scored a high 46 out of 55 in a review by tucows.com, the respected shareware download site, which puts OS4XL - Professional edition with a "5-Cow" rating, their top software quality rating.

We were so happy with the review of the first full version that we asked for, and obtained, permission to publish the full text of the review as well as the overall "5-Cow" rating.  To see the full text of the review including a breakdown of the reviewers rating, please see the full article.

Thanks Tucows, and you can bet that we are working on those areas where we didn't get 100% in the first round.

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Why we do what we do (Part the 2nd)

in the first post on this topic, I referred to one of the steps required in assimilating information in unstructured or semi-structured environments, such as a typical professional in enterprise or government, or a busy consultant, or... just about anyone.

this step was "Conversion" or getting the data in a "container" from the format in which it arrived to a format that you can use.

Often this step is implicit, but you should never underestimate the cognitive overhead in making mental conversions of apparently obvious, but heavily formatted or structured info (or the opportunities for error that this step introduces).

the most common "containers" for semi-structured information are MsOffice documents (word docs, spreadsheets and powerpoint packs) together with the mass of Html floating around.  Xml perhaps too in the various open document flavours becoming more prevalent.

So in this discussion, I neglected to quote one of my favourite bloggers on this topic, Joel Spolsky, who wrote a blog a couple of years ago about the complexity (and up until then, the secrecy) of the MsOffice document formats.

Amongst other things, he touched on the various strategies for accessing information in Office document containers.  I quote: 

"Let Office do the heavy work for you. Word and Excel have extremely complete object models, available via COM Automation, which allow you to programmatically do anything. In many situations, you are better off reusing the code inside Office rather than trying to reimplement it. Here are a few examples."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html

the reason that I wanted to quote this passage (apart from a teaser into a very interesting article from Joel), is that it summarises one of our objectives with the OfficeSheet and other products: 

Our objective is to be the most integrated, easy to use, and comprehensive access point into the MsOffice applications and (via the app) the information in the MsOffice document containers.

Why do this when there are literally thousands of MsOffice add-ins available?  And probably millions of articles, posts and blogs about VBA programming techniques, VSTO and other programming tools that interface to MsOffice via the COM Automation interfaces?

Well, the answer is both in the question, and the subject of another post.......

New Promotional and Partnering Opportunities

we've just published some new promotional and relationship programs on our website.  These include a new referrals program that pays big benefits in terms of vouchers for d9 product offerings.  Please refer to our "Tell a Friend" program page.

For more info, please refer to our Marketing and Deals page: 

just loaded the first of the OS4XL product videos: http://www.d9.com/resources/52-resources-videos.html

Why we do what we do...

now that we have our first product to its first release, its worthwhile to spend some time describing what's behind this process, and why we develop the set of products that we have, are, and will develop.  This will probably cover a few posts so this first one is really the "setup"

there are a couple of principles that we've (perhaps largely unconsciously) been following.

Firstly, it's about trying to bring some better order and structure to unstructured and semi-structured data that is found in most government, corporate and community organisations, and is now starting to find its way into domestic situations as well.

I have worked in many environments over the years and never cease to be amazed at the level of disconnected-ness that exists between the various items of information that are used in most knowledge-intensive or information-intensive situations.  The development and proliferation of "office" products like spreadsheets, word processing tools and presentation platforms like powerpoint together with the internet has meant that there are more and more ways of creating and distributing more and more information to more and more people. 

And all these "containers" of information are largely uncontrolled in either design or in the data with which they are populated.  This becomes much more extreme when we add to the mix a growing group of temporary workers (contractors, consultants and the like) who work across multiple organisations.

Given that email and other messaging is such a large part of many knowledge-workers interactions with other people, these "containers" of information get distributed around and we process them in a continuous stream of information "transactions": receiving a document or spreadsheet or even an extract of one of these in an email, doing something with it, and then issuing our own communications out to others as a result (including responding to the originator).

But I've noticed that a larger proportion of time is involved in one or more micro-steps in each of these "information transactions" that occur in our working lives: these micro-steps are: conversion and validation.  

"Conversion" is getting the data in the originating container into a format that we can use for whatever our function is at a particular time.  Sometimes its as simple as just digesting an email, but often it goes further.  Perhaps we have a table in a Powerpoint pack that originated in an spreadsheet in some other person's computer.  Formatting is different (wrapping font etc) and perhaps there have been some extra rows/columns thrown in for added meaning (subtotals or even just category grouping or spacing).   

So at some level, whether its' just unconsciously cognitively decoding and absorbing this, or even physically converting it to another format, it seems to be taking more time and energy on average to access the information in the container.

"Validation" is making sure that the information is actually what you want, and is accurate for the purposes that you wish to perform with the information.  So now I'm thinking that there are two kinds of validation that we do: content validation (say for accuracy) and validation of "completeness".   

there are plenty of other "micro-steps" too: analysis, manipulation (e.g. merging), summarisation etc but I'll come to those later.  between the outside world and these other steps are the two I've just mentioned above.

An example: Say you receive a table copied and pasted into the body of an email, say its a set of projects with some statuses, or territories with sales figures or whatever.  If the data in the table is the full set of a known and small population of items (i.e. it's all the projects or all the territories) then there's little completeness validation - you've either got all your sales districts or not.  But if the data in the table represents a small and / or varying subset or a larger population (say a small set of projects out of a large portfolio) then there is the issue of completeness.  Usually this subset has been extracted from the larger set and given that the contents of the container are largely uncontrolled, how do you know that the set of data you are looking at is actually the complete and current set that you need to have in order to perform your function?

do we have another list that we compare the first list too?  Mentally in many cases we do and we either assume that all is ok, or we rely on our mental comparison of one list against another, or we get out a pen and paper and check off one against another.

whatever we do, it seems to me that the amount of effort involved in these two micro-steps in my end-to-end treatment of each information transaction is getting larger, the probability of error is going up, and the downside of making a mistake grows.

So all this is a long-winded way of describing a scenario that we want to try and solve: how do we put simple power in the hands of individual knowledge workers to address the growing burden of conversion and validation.  So what we want to do in the example above is make it really easy for someone to get the information out of whatever "container" they receive, convert it to a format that is manageable, and do the validation that they need to do as quickly as they can.

the problem with not handling these micro-steps well are all too common and all too manifest in many work environments today: assumptions, errors, missed communications and sometimes inadvertent disclosures.  And of course sometimes information that gets completely lost.

so providing tools to assist with these microsteps (and others) is what we set out to do in the long product development journey that is starting to bear fruit, initially with OS4XL.  

Have we succeeded in this with OS4XL - in part yes, but there's still some way to go (watch this space for new enhancements soon).  And, there's all these other containers as well (watch this space for new product announcements along those lines as well).

Next post will be about what we do with the data once we've unpacked it and validated it. 

cheers.

as always, welcome your feedback.

OfficeSheet for MsExcel (OS4XL) full version released

On March 8th we rolled out the full release of OfficeSheet for MsExcel (OS4XL), officially now v1.0.1.12.  There are many exciting new features but mostly the last few months has been about fixing bugs, cleaning up inconsistencies and (my personal favourite) documentation.

We now have 6 guides and consisting of over 500 pages of very detailed descriptions of the products and their capabilities.  Admittedly some pages are repeated, but so what...

the one area that needs a bit more work is the documentation on the over 100 command extensions that we've implemented for our VBScript scripting environment.  The help for this is a neat command browser that works right out of the script text editor.  this is actually re-use of our own technology as the command browser is actually the same as the datasheet grid and the data is maintained in a DataSheet.

there are still a few defects we are working on and some additional examples and sample data files to be added, but we'll do this over the next few weeks as we roll out some videos of key functions.

pls download the latest version and take a look.  we welcome your feedback and pls always submit your defect reports and enhancement requests via the built-in mailer.