Institutional Knowledge

So, it’s over. I’m exhausted. I met a ton (figuratively and probably literally) of new people. I talked, a lot. I felt like I did a lot more talking than listening, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

I have some thoughts on the conference that I want to mull over first, as posting when I’m this tired would be is silly. Maybe I’ll be able to compose my thoughts on the plane ride home.

This session was far more “nuts and bolts” than I expected — useful nonetheless. Key takeaways:

• Use virtualization to test, test, and test some more your configuration and deployment environment. Also a great place to play with and learn the new technologies involved (SCCM, Server 2008, Vista itself, etc.)
• BDD Solution Accelerator
• Win PE is a core part of the BDD imaging process
• In environments where SMS/SCCM may not be the best fit (like smaller labs or clusters), Server 2008 and BDD make deploying and managing Vista easier
• Server 2008 consolidates many, many imaging and deployment tools into one console

I think it says something that MS seems to be past the point where significant new technologies/tools are being developed with respect to workstation management and deployment. The big pushes are now on tool consolidation, interoperability, and — most importantly — frameworks to wrap them all together.

I got word today that one both of my two proposals were accepted. Here are the executive summaries:

Lessons Learned from Rails Development

So you’ve deployed uPortal, CAS, Confluence, and JIRA. You’ve conquered Maven and your entire life is represented in XML configuration files. You’ve got Java application deployment down to a science. Now some guy from Denmark comes along and says you’ve got it all wrong. The nerve!

We treaded lightly into the world of Rails but over the past year we have learned a lot of valuable lessons that can be applied to web development in general.

• Convention over configuration in the right measure
• Deployment needs to be easy
• Deployment needs to integrate with your SCM

Rails has benefitted from a tremendous hype cycle, but a lot of the benefits are real and can translate to other frameworks.

Pragmatic Issue Tracking with JIRA

As technology workers and managers we often have more things to do than we have time, so we are constantly on the lookout for time savers. They say that time is money and we all know that to make money you have to spend money. A similar concept applies to time in that you have to spend time to save time. We’ll look at how JIRA helps you do this, but also focus on how to implement JIRA to make sure it’s a success.

Specific topics will include:

• Who should get a JIRA project
• Setting realistic expectations
• How usage will differ between types of users
• Using JIRA to Get Things Done

For those who missed it or were unable to attend, You can view the slides from Accessibility Evaluation of Next Generation Web Applications.

I was glad to see that someone used S5 and gave a link to the slides. The best tidbit that I took away from this session was that WebAIM’s Wave 4.0 (when released) will be a great tool for testing applications for different accessibility checks without having to send data over the network. This is a big advantage to those application using AJAX technologies or sites that are password protection or on a secure network. I’m anxiously awaiting the public beta version.

Technorati Tags: csun, accessibility

The Accessibility Experience

The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect – Tim Berners-Lee

The presentation by representatives from the User Experience Team at Google was a very insightful look into how they’re approaching accessibility.

Accessibility is more than just code compliance

Google is spending a fair amount of resources researching how people with disabilities interact with their products, and the Internet in general, to ensure they can have a similar experience to those without disabilities.

One of the great aspects about their approach to accessibility testing was that they brought in engineers to watch the test, and even in some instances provide a translator who can explain to engineers what the screen reader is saying.

I was also pleased to hear that accessibility efforts were being applied to Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and Google Video. Simple things like headers can go far toward improving the Google experience for those with visual impairments.

Technorati Tags: csun, accessibility