Digipede CTO Robert Anderson is blogging about a recent experiment we’ve conducted in our lab, assessing what it would take to get the Digipede Agent running on Mono. (For those of you who don’t know, Mono is a cross-platform implementation of .NET, developed as an open-source project led by Miguel de Icaza, and sponsored by Novell.)

And as he reports, thanks to improvements in both Mono and the Digipede Network, the answer is — not much. We’ve got a working prototype of a Digipede Agent running under Mono on Linux that runs a Digipede job.

Digipede on Linux? Has the world turned upside down?

Hardly.

Since the beginning, Digipede has been focussed on adding value to the Microsoft platform. And customers know that. Customers also understand that Microsoft is getting better and better at making sure its products interoperate with others, even on other platforms, and Microsoft’s partners have to facilitate that. We get questions from customers pretty frequently about Mono, and lately those questions have gotten more specific, so it seems prudent to investigate any technical blockers from time to time.

So let me re-state what Robert said, and what I said above — this is an initial assessment, a technical experiment only, not a shipping product.  Rob’s post (and mine) are not a product announcement — this is a blatant “trial balloon.”  We want to hear what the market thinks of Digipede on Mono.

Why might this be interesting? Let’s back up a step and take a look at enterprise grid and HPC deployments.

Most enterprise customers have what is often called a “mixed” IT environment. That’s a euphemism for an unplanned and chaotic assortment of technologies that have piled up over the years into some type of barely-managed infrastructure. In almost every enterprise, Windows runs on most or all of the desktops. In almost every enterprise, there is some mixture of Windows and Linux servers, with maybe some Solaris and/or other UNIX flavor(s) thrown in. In almost every enterprise with an HPC infrastructure, most or all HPC nodes run Linux.

This is just reality — Windows is miles ahead in 2008 desktop market share, and Linux is miles ahead in 2008 HPC market share. Do I wish it were different? Sure — if Microsoft had a bigger share of the HPC market (and we’ve been working diligently to help make that happen), we’d have an even bigger market into which we could sell our software. And that will happen, I have no doubt. We tell all our customers “Windows HPC Server is the best option for adding power to a Digipede grid,” and that’s the truth. Go buy some now.

But the fact remains, there’s a lot of existing infrastructure — desktops, 32-bit Windows servers, Linux servers and cluster nodes, Solaris servers, and more — that enterprises are not going to throw away.  All this infrastructure represents potential grid computing power.  The Digipede Network has always run on heterogeneous Windows networks — with Agents running on 32- and 64-bit Windows desktops, 32- and 64-bit Windows servers, and cluster nodes running Windows HPC Server (formerly Compute Cluster Server). Our reluctance to include boxes that don’t run Windows has always been mostly about applications — it’s still relatively rare to find applications that are actually deployed across multiple operating systems simultaneously.

But as Mono gets better and better, we hear from enterprise customers and prospects who are getting more interested in it. They like the idea of being able to use more of their existing infrastructure more efficiently. They want to take advantage of Digipede’s great developer experience to deploy more applications — with minimal changes to that infrastructure.

So let’s get back to Robert’s closing question: “Now that we can do it, what should we do with it?” What do you think? Is the market crying out for a multi-OS .NET grid? Or is what we’re hearing just idle curiosity?  Let’s hear from all sides.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, HPC, HPC Server, Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Solaris

Releasing software is hard.

Sure, the individual steps like specifying, developing, testing, documenting, and planning support for new software features are difficult enough — but the discipline of knowing when to STOP adding features, and to focus instead on finishing a complete, polished, release-ready product is tougher than it sounds to those outside the industry.

In any software organization worthy of the name, there are more good ideas than can possibly be put into any specific product release. There are also just a stunning number of bad ideas competing for inclusion in shipping products (I am notorious within Digipede for proposing needlessly specific bad ideas. Mercifully, my partners of 20 years have honed their skills in talking me out of the worst of them.)

We decided early on at Digipede that our feature set would be guided by three principles: Performance, simplicity, and a focus on adding value to the Microsoft platform. Over the past five years, these principles have helped us make decisions on what to include (and as importantly, what to exclude) from our software.

Last month, we reached general availability of the latest release of the Digipede Network, Version 2.1. You can see what’s new in this release on our Web site, but now that our customers have had an opportunity to upgrade, let’s look at a few of the specific new features to see how we did in sticking to those principles:

Job concurrency: The improved Digipede Agent software can manage different applications running simultaneously on multiple cores of a single compute node, maximizing utilization of compute nodes on the grid. Users can set Job Concurrency values to allow the Digipede Agents to work on multiple jobs simultaneously: designate which applications can safely run with other applications, which applications can run side-by-side with themselves, and which applications are not compatible for concurrent jobs.

Performance! This one is just amazing. As new machines ship with more and more cores inside, I am continually baffled at the lack of attention from ALL the major vendors out there about how to take advantage of those cores. Sure, Intel talks about compilers and Microsoft talks about Parallel Extensions and so on — but in shipping products in 2008, there’s just incredibly little help for users and developers who want to take advantage of multi-core processors. What we shipped in Version 2.0 last September is still miles ahead of other software options in terms of both development patterns and execution modes for multi-core processing. With Version 2.1, we’ve extended that lead significantly — if you want to take advantage of dual-CPU quad-core servers and desktops TODAY, you need to take a look at how the Digipede Network handles concurrency. Watch the 4-minute video that shows how, then get an evaluation copy of the software and try it yourself!

Management APIs: New management APIs give developers programmatic ability to create, modify, and delete resource pools. (Available in Professional Edition only)

Performance (specifically, scalability), and Simplicity (of grid management). A browser-based UI for grid management is great — for small grids. As our customers deploy larger and larger grids, they need both the browser-based UI of Digipede Control and a wider range of tools for the programmatic manipulation of grid resources. It is vastly simpler to take advantage of thousands of grid nodes through simple extensions to our management API.

Risk-free sharing: “Pool Rank” permits risk-free sharing of resources: you can add your servers to the enterprise grid and ensure that they always work on your jobs first. That means that by joining the grid, you can only improve your application performance. You can donate your cycles when you are not using them without worrying that your application performance will degrade, because you are always guaranteed that your machines will work for you.

Performance and Simplicity. We’ve also referred to this feature as “Selfish sharing.” We hear from other grid vendors about how users “must” get over the practice of “server hugging.” We try not to be so arrogant; we’ve never found that scolding our customers is good business practice. If customers want to preserve unconditional priority on their own servers, we say “good for them.” So we’ve built a straighforward way to preserve absolute priority for the resource owner, even when they offer to share surplus resources. From what our customers tell us, we think this approach encourages efficient resource sharing far more than lecturing ever would.

First Grid Computing Solution Certified for Windows Server 2008: We followed the long and winding road of the Early Adopter program to become the first grid solution to obtain this important certification, so that customers can be confident that our software works not only with the Microsoft products they use today, but with all the latest improvements Microsoft is bringing to market now.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. By aligning with Microsoft’s technology and strategy, we help our customers create a truly dynamic IT infrastructure. Server 2008 brings many benefits in performance and manageability, and we’re confident that our customers will be upgrading quickly (more quickly than, say, to Vista); we want to be sure they can use our latest capabilities on Microsoft’s best OS platform.

Let me be candid here; these benefits do not come free to ISVs. I have considerable anxiety over extending yet further the number of versions of Microsoft products we support — for example, while I think Server 2008 is great, and Visual Studio 2008 is great, and the new SQL Server 2008 will be great, staying current means we’ll have to start enforcing our requirements by turning away requests for support of Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000. The combinatorics for testing on multiple OS versions, .NET versions, SQL Server versions, IIS versions, and upgrade paths for our own software versions get out of hand quickly. I’ll have more on this issue another day. For now I’ll just say I’m happy with our decision to stay current — mostly.

Automatic Failover Package and Integration with NLB: Failover has long been a feature of the Digipede Network Professional Edition but with the optional Automatic Failover Package, organizations can now have complete out-of-the-box integration with Windows Server 2008 load balancing, giving “hands-free” failover to mission-critical applications.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus — yes, even this advanced capability was guided by our goal of simplicity. While automatic failover is often considered a complex requirement, we made some basic decisions to keep it as simple as possible. First, we made automatic failover it’s own SKU, so customers without the need for high-availability configuration don’t even have to think about it. Second, we did away with a lot of the manual scripting that often slows implementation of failover solutions — you can have it running very quickly. Finally, we left as much as possible to popular existing technologies — SQL clustering and NLB — so the implementation steps will be as familiar as possible.

Reports Package: Assembles critical information about the use and optimization of the grid, with easy-to-understand charts and graphs, flagging of critical information, and drill-down capability, giving enterprises fully integrated optimization of grid performance, with tracking of who contributes to and who benefits from grid resources.

Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus — In larger systems, simple and informative visual tools are essential for wringing the most performance possible from a grid. Users and administrators become far more productive in their routine monitoring functions and troubleshooting activities with this new package, which plugs directly into Digipede Control (our admin UI). And by building on SQL Reporting, we’ve created a framework for future extensions.

Overall, I’m pleased with the extent to which we have driven the improvement of our product by staying focused on the three principles described above. To be a little less self-congratulatory, I wish we had stopped adding features at least two months earlier and brought most of these capabilities to market sooner, rather than piling quite so much into a single release (and there’s certainly more than I’ve had a chance to discuss here).  Perhaps another day, I’ll have a chance to discuss some of the things we (purposely) left out!  Now that V2.1 is in the market (and getting rave reviews from our customers), I’m eager to see what great new applications our imaginative customers create and deploy on our latest platform.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, Microsoft, software, SQL Server, Visual-Studio, Windows Server

Derek Furguson of Bear Stearns (now JPMorgan Chase) has a good article in .NET Developer Journal about how to apply genetic algorithms and grid computing to the problem of market timing in stock trading. I was pleased to see that he chose to implement his algorithms using the Digipede Network.

His article is in two parts, and this first part provides a good overview of the complex problem he’s facing — he confronts issues in financial modeling, data sources, genetic models and grid computing. As a result, Part One does not dig too deeply into coding details. But it’s worth a read — you’ll understand the architectural decisions he’s facing, and how he’s planning to address them. Plus, from what I’ve heard about Part Two (which will be out in June), there’s plenty of detail (and code) coming.

This is the second time in two months that we’ve seen influential financial modelers implement their public examples using the Digipede Network (see also Matt Davey’s recent Dr. Dobb’s article).

This is consistent with what we’re seeing from customers. While there are many grid offerings in the market, there seems to be a growing consensus that if you use .NET, there are significant advantages to working with a grid solution built on .NET. Or conversely, there’s no point trying to fit a square peg into a round hole — i.e., there’s no point trying to graft a .NET application onto a grid built for other technologies when a better option exists.

This is the “application centric” view — grids should follow applications, making it easier for developers to adapt applications to a grid, even if that means limiting the options for running those applications to a particular set of resources (in Digipede’s case, Windows machines running .NET).

The other view is “infrastructure centric” — that OS should not matter, that a grid should allow applications to be deployed across all resources, even if that means restricting the application technologies and development patterns allowed for such deployment.

Digipede has been unapologetically in the “application centric” camp for five years now, but what do others think? Has Derek made a wise choice by trading off ease of development for deployment limited to a single OS? We think so, but let’s hear from you!

Tags: .NET, Bear Stearns, Derek Furguson, Digipede, dotnet, genetic algorithms, grid-computing, JPMorgan Chase, market timing, Matt Davey

In the spirit of Todd Weatherby’s comments about opening a dialog regarding the Microsoft Partner Program Web Site, here are five technical things Microsoft could do to improve interactions with partners and customers.  I (and other partners) have put forward some more radical ideas for redesign of partner program policies and tools, but let’s start with things that could be done relatively quickly, without major surgery:
1. Enable better search tools on all parts of partners.microsoft.com.
Microsoft Live Search is actually getting pretty good. The quality of search results is usually (not always) on par with Google. The UI is simple, the search engine is fast, it’s reasonably comprehensive, and it’s relatively good at ranking results. Now step into partnerland, and you’d never know you were dealing with the same company. Try to search for a Microsoft partner interested in teaming with us to market and sell to hedge funds — go ahead, I’ll wait. The search tools are limited by the fields imagined by the designers of each application lurking behind partner.microsoft.com. The way the rest of the world (including large chunks of Microsoft) addressed this years ago was with better free text search tools (like Live Search). More recently, much of the rest of the world has discovered the value of tagging, which allows users to decide on the importance of words and phrases to help others find their content. (And yes, this example is from Channel Builder, but similar restrictions limit the value of other applications as well.)

2. Improve the compatibility of partner.microsoft.com with all major browsers, especially Firefox.
OK, I know, we’re all Microsoft partners and we’re all just delighted to use IE because it’s great, and because we’re all part of the great Microsoft dogfooding process. Mostly, I’m OK with that. But processes like obtaining customer references drive customers into parts of the partner site, and neither Microsoft nor its partners should be imposing IE on our customers. (One of my customers gave up on the reference process over this issue last month — thank you to the fine person on Todd’s team who approved the reference manually, but that hardly seems like the smoothest approach.)  Digipede is unusually highly focussed on the Microsoft platform — our software is written exclusively Windows — yet over 25% of visitors to www.digipede.net use Firefox.  Microsoft simply can’t assume partner customers use IE.
3. Speaking of dogfooding — Windows Live ID: All or Nothing.
After years of preaching to partners and customers about the value of Windows Live ID (formerly Passport) — why do so many Microsoft properties still not use it? Yes, I log into partner.microsoft.com using my Live ID — but when we go to the Worldwide Partner Conference, CommNet uses something else, and Structured Networking (now WPC Connect) uses something else else, and when we participate in the ISV Royalty Program we use something else else else, and so on. This is just login — how hard could it be to standardize?

4. Clear, useful, accurate, and complete partner status reporting
How was the number of points from our “Microsoft Tested Products” calculated?  How can my points associated with our only location be different from our total number of points?  Where did these 2 points I see in “Other Activities” come from, and when do they expire?

A long-standing request from partners far and wide is for a way to track the source and expiration dates of ALL partner points through partners.microsoft.com.  The Partner team showed a beta of this functionality at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver last July, and promised it “in the Fall.”  This functionality alone would be a great help to those of us who administer our firms’ participation in the Microsoft Partner Program.  Is this still in the works?
5. More human review of the partners.microsoft.com experience.
I hear Todd when he says:

We continue to invest in our on-line resources for our partners and customers worldwide. During 2007 we made several enhancements including a major release on November 30th. In early January, we realized we had some serious performance problems in some very specific steps in the enrollment process (eg. customer reference processing).

Since detecting the problem, we’ve been running 24×7 triage/test/fix cycles. We also added call center staff and extended hours of service to help partners work through enrollment and maintain their access to their benefits. We’ve made some fixes that have yielded improvement. We have more to do.

While parts of the enrollment process have been rough for some, partners have been using resources on the Microsoft Partner Portal in record numbers without problems, including online training, marketing and sales resources.

We continue to monitor system performance closely 24×7 worldwide. Status messages are being kept up to date on the site. Our Regional Support Centers are standing by to help partners.

OK — Granted. I realize that running a Web site for the largest partner program in the IT industry is complex, and I’m sure that somebody is monitoring system performance 24×7 — but let’s have a look at what I see today when I log in.

The first message, the VERY TOP item that Microsoft wants to bring to my attention today is:

Re-Enroll! It’s time to re-enroll the DIGIPEDE TECHNOLOGIES LLC in the Microsoft Partner Program. Read More

OK, no, it’s actually not time to re-enroll. I re-enrolled over two weeks ago. Let’s expand this message:

Re-Enroll! It’s time to re-enroll the DIGIPEDE TECHNOLOGIES LLC in the Microsoft Partner Program. Read More
Your Gold Certified Membership is scheduled to expire on Saturday, January 31, 2009. Continue your Partnership with Microsoft and retain member benefits by Re-enrolling Here.

OK, no, it’s really not important for me to rush out and re-enroll to avoid an expiration date more than one year in the future. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason for this message.

Let’s move to the second message Microsoft has for me today:

Attention! You must submit payment to complete your re-enrollment. Read More

OK, no, I submitted payment for my re-enrollment over two weeks ago, through Microsoft’s own interface, and received confirmation at that time.

Let’s expand this message too:

Attention! You must submit payment to complete your re-enrollment. Read More
The Microsoft Partner Program shows that you have not submitted payment for your Gold Certified Partner Membership. You may pay your Invoice now in the Payment Center.

OK, no, that’s wrong, I’m positive I paid, let’s dig around some more — sure enough, there in my Payment History (https://partners.microsoft.com/PartnerProgram/PaymentHistory.aspx) is the record of my payment, on 1/11/2008.  Now to double-check, let’s have a look over at the American Express site — yes, sure enough, I have a charge from Microsoft Programs two business days later for the exact amount I paid at the Payment Center.  So why is partners.microsoft.com still yelping at me for money?
By the way, this is not a trivial point. I’m not the only one at Digipede who can log into the Microsoft Partner site. I’ve promised my partners that I’ve taken care of our Gold Certified Partner status, and that we’re all set. Yet when they log in, they see Microsoft’s top two messages, and are led to believe that I’ve forgotten to pay and that our status is in jeopardy despite their herculean efforts to get our products tested and certified in time. This makes me look stupid (and I get enough chances to do that without Microsoft’s help).

That’s it for messages, so let’s hop over to the Partner Dashboard to make sure everything’s OK there:

Partner Dashboard is not available right now or does not have data for the organization you are mapped to. Please see your PAM for more information.

You get the idea.

There’s lots and lots of wonderful information at partners.microsoft.com, and I’d love to use it more consistently — but my experience with the site is that information specific to our company’s program participation is often problematic.  To me, this feels like a testing issue; some part of the 24×7 monitoring process could still use improvement (as Todd’s message clearly states).

So there’s my list — what do other partners think?  Todd has stepped up, and is ready to join the conversation — who else has ideas that can help improve this community?

Tags: Digipede, Microsoft, MSPP, Partner-Program, Todd-Weatherby

All my regular readers know I use the Microsoft partner Web sites fairly often, and that I experience frustrating time-sucking issues almost as often. Believe me, I spare my readership the great majority of my experiences with the unending nightmare that is the Microsoft partner online world, and when I do raise these issues I’m trying to be constructive — I really want to see Microsoft improve the online experience for its partners and customers. So I sometimes do a lot of self-editing and softening of language and hedging . . .
But I’m done caring who I offend — this is just ridiculous. The emperor has no clothes.

One thing I get to do every year is renew our status as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Fine. The program requirements are difficult enough without technical hassles. Previous years have been a joy — one time, partners.microsoft.com was sufficiently screwed up that I managed to pay our $1500+ fee twice (yes, I eventually got a refund) — and this year appears to be worse.

So far, using the forms on the Microsoft Partner Program Web site, following absolutely basic and routine steps that are completely necessary to renew our status, I’ve encountered timeouts a few dozen times in the past two weeks. Fine. If Microsoft wants to provide a poor online experience for its partners, we can assess for ourselves whether the value is worth the pain.

But those few dozen timeouts don’t even include the repeated timeouts encountered by Digipede’s best customers, who have agreed to serve as references for us.

That’s right — my best customers get to sit in front of multiple timeouts waiting for the Microsoft Partner Program Web site, following Microsoft’s own instructions in an autogenerated email, just so they can provide Microsoft verification that we’ve done work for them. And yes, I get to explain to my best customers that they should be patient with Microsoft in order to do Digipede a favor. And yes, this conversation is every bit as delightful as it sounds.

My experience is not “bad luck,” nor is it unique. I’ve tried to submit information at different times of day, and on different days of the week; my customers have tried the same. And yes, I have talked to technical support, and reproduced the problem for them (”yeah, we’ve been having some of those problems lately…”). Is this just viewed as an acceptable cost of doing business by other Microsoft partners? By the rest of Microsoft?
Hey Debra Chrapaty — do you really expect to deliver online “cloud computing” services to hundreds of millions of customers when you can’t serve 640,000 partners any better than this? Do you want the help of those 640,000 partners in delivering online services to your customers? What level of confidence do you think your best partners and best customers have in your ability to deliver responsive online applications when our primary online experience with Microsoft goes through partners.microsoft.com?

Hey Kevin Turner — is this the “operational excellence” we keep hearing so much about?

Hey Allison Watson — how can your team be so great in person (and they are) while your systems are so consistently flawed (and they are)? Never in all my interactions with Microsoft do I encounter as much eye-rolling and well-practiced apologies as when I talk with your team about your systems.

(Woohoo! Invoking Allison’s name must have been the key — I just hit “OK” for the 8th or 9th time on the dialog box that’s been sitting there mocking me as I type this — these are LONG timeouts –, and FINALLY I’ve assigned ONE additional customer reference successfully. Hang on — gotta go tell another of my best customers to hit retry while the site may (briefly) be working!)

And these minor trials and frustrations are NOTHING compared to the slog we’ve been going through to get Certified for Server 2008 — but that’s another story for another day.

UPDATE:  In the past two hours, I’ve had about 70 hits on this post from within Microsoft.  In the past two hours, I’ve had one of my customers give up trying to provide a reference through the Microsoft Partner Program Web site because he does not run Internet Explorer (not sure what he uses, but I just tested with Firefox 2, and sure enough, there are some features that apparently do not work).  In the past two hours, a different one of my customers tried again to approve his reference; he received timeouts again, and now wants to know how to fax in his reference instead.

Tags: Allison-Watson, Debra-Chrapaty, Digipede, Kevin-Turner, Microsoft, Partner-Program, timeout

As a vocal detractor of Microsoft’s Channel Builder, I feel I have to report anything positive that happens there, too (note that prior to this week I have never had anything even remotely good to report in my 2.5 year history of using this tragically misguided Microsoft tool). So I promise, buried in this long diatribe is at least one positive nugget. But you’ll have to dig.

For those who don’t know, Channel Builder is part of the Microsoft partner Web site (partner.microsoft.com), through which Microsoft partners can (theoretically) find one another and expand their business.

This is, of course, a great idea — facilitation of partner-to-partner relationships can be hugely beneficial to Microsoft and its partners — but the implementation is a train wreck. In my opinion, Channel Builder is the highest achievement of the Microsoft wing that believes you build communities by making databases more complex. I once described this philosophy as the belief that “if we get the E-R diagram just right, a community will emerge.”

More than two and a half years ago, like a good little Partner, I went on Channel Builder to fill out details about our solution, and to look for partners. I was amazed at the complexity and clumsiness of the application. Clearly, a huge amount of effort had gone into creating a giant database application here, yet the use cases supported were (to put it mildly) unclear. Sure, I had to re-enter everything I’d entered in multiple other places on partner.microsoft.com, but was used to that. But the process by which I was expected to associate my solution with Microsoft’s products and Microsoft’s view of the market was way too restrictive, the search tools were primitive, and the whole thing just smacked of command-and-control overengineering and underthinking.

I spent a while entering data, making selections from lists that did not adequately describe our product, nor our relationship with Microsoft, nor our desired relationship with other partners, and eventually I saved the profiles of our firm and solution. And nothing happened. For months. No leads, no questions, no contacts of any kind.

So I went back in a tweaked the profile, started an “opportunity,” and waited. Nothing. For months. And at various times I went back and tweaked it again, less and less frequently over the years, with exactly one nibble that never panned out. I must confess, I haven’t been back in there for a few months…

So it was with some surprise and bewilderment that I saw the following note in my inbox a few days ago, from “partnote@microsoft.com:”

Partner [name omitted] posted a response to your opportunity HPC, Grid Computing, Compute Cluster Server, CCS, .NET, SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, application scalability, high-performance computing, high-throughput computing on 10/15/2007 8:43 PM GMT. You may view the response thread in the opportunity details accessible via My Opportunities, or at My Responses page, section Responses Received.

Say what? That’s the whole note? No mention of Channel Builder, no signature, no link, no contact info, no hint as to where it comes from other than “partnote,” but I eventually remembered creating this “opportunity” and went fumbling around looking for Channel Builder on the Microsoft partner Web site. (And yes, the name I gave to my opportunity is a flagrant attempt to fool Channel Builder’s dismal search tools.)
Sure enough — there was a real live response from a real live partner prospect! I called him up, and we had a good conversation — we may very well have found a reseller in an interesting market niche. Cool! That’s just how I hoped this would work, when I started with Channel Builder 30 months back. (OK, actually I had hoped I’d see leads like this every week, but you get the idea.)

So — that’s one. One good experience in 30 months of futility. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be worth it!

So while I was in Channel Builder, I thought I’d refresh the information about our product. I hit “edit” and got a warning message — something about how fields had changed in the “new” profile for solutions, and I should expect to spend a few minutes if I continued. What the heck, let’s go.

Big mistake. The “new” profile places more restrictions on the number of items (such as Microsoft products, or vertical market segments) you can associate with your solution.

Our product, the Digipede Network, is grid computing software that integrates with multiple parts of the Microsoft technology stack. We touch all flavors of the OS since 2000 (32-bit and 64-bit, desktop and server); we integrate with Visual Studio; we integrate with Windows Compute Cluster Server; we incorporate and re-sell SQL Server; we speed up and scale out .Net applications; we provide application to Excel (2003 and 2007); we scale out Excel Services on Sharepoint; there’s more, but you get the idea. But try to check off all the corresponding boxes for those, and I get:

Great.

Oh, and we address multiple horizontal applications. But:

Oh, also we have customers in multiple vertical industries. But:

Oh, also we address customers in all three of Microsoft’s size categories, plus government and education. That’s five categories, but:

The old version had somewhat similar limits, but they either were not this restrictive or were not strictly enforced, because my old solution profile listed “too many” products, horizontal applications, vertical industries, and size categories for the new software.

OK, I’ll just keep the old profile — CANCEL.

Nope. Saved as draft. Now I have NO profile published.

Great.

I can finish in the new format, or just be left out of the catalog (tempting, given the lack of response…). So I made yet more compromises and inappropriate choices, and published the new, downgraded profile. As bad as this was a year or two or almost three ago, now it’s worse. Ridiculous.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

I went to the Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis in 2005, and reported my early experiences to the ISV team and the Channel Builder team specifically. They smiled and nodded and said go try again, the Next Version (just released) is much better. Meanwhile, Alison Watson touted Channel Builder as another triumph of the Partner program, and urged everyone to get on and try it. Re-charged by the enthusiasm of the Microsoft team, I went back and tried it again, with the same (lack of) results.

I went to the Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston in 2006, and reported my experience to the ISV team (couldn’t find the Channel Builder team at this one…), and the response was quite different. There was a lot of uncomfortable shuffling about, and no coherent message this time — and while people were still talking about improements, there was decidedly less enthusiasm.

I went to the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver in 2007, and had many productive meetings with Microsoft people in the partner and field organizations — many of them in fairly senior positions. Whenever I mentioned Channel Builder, the most common reaction was an embarrassed eye-roll followed by a furtive peak over the shoulder to see if anyone was listening. Then they described their experience with the product, using terms like “embarrassment,” “disbelief,” “disaster,” “life of its own,” and many less printable expressions.

And yes, I’ve read the TenDigits case study, showing the wonderful experiences that one partner (out of the 272657 supposedly enrolled in Channel Builder) has had with this product. And frankly, my conversations with others indicate that they’re an outlier. I talk with many Microsoft partners, and I’ve never spoken to one who had secured a single valuable channel relationship through Channel Builder, ever.

The solution is very clear to many of us outside of the Microsoft echo chamber — and even, apparently, many of those within. I say this as someone who has been on Channel Builder since 1.0, has been to in-person Channel Builder events, and who has to this day maintained a presence there, hoping against hope that something good will come of it:

Please, please, please give up.

Channel Builder was a noble experiment. Redeploy the vast resources that obviously went into this effort into something completely new.

And yes, I realize it’s easy to throw stones but harder to be constructive, so here are at least a few ideas on Channel Builder 3.0 (and the first idea is — don’t call it that!):

• Create a 21st century social networking platform for partners. Model it on LinkedIn, or any other successful social networking solution.
• Remove as many of the specious restrictions cited above as possible.
• Fewer checkboxes, more tagging.
• Fewer puzzling categories that map to Microsoft’s worldview, more free-form text entry opportunities with better search tools.
• Remove all restrictions on the number of vertical markets or sub-markets addressed, all restrictions on the number Microsoft products or product areas linked to the solution, etc.
• Facilitate free-form inter-partner communication (with wikis, link blogs, and so on).
• Open up the idea of a “news” page or section to partner entries (there is ONE Microsoft-generated piece of news in 2007, matching the ONE article in 2006…).
• Revive the in-person Channel Builder events organized by vertical (which were as great as the online tool is not-so-great).
• Open up the concept of references and recommendations beyond customers only, to include partner-to-partner and even Microsoft-staff-to-partner references and recommendations.
• Expand the options for how partners describe their solutions. Allow partner-generated content, and make it YouTube-simple to add such content — or at least facilitate and encourage links to multiple types of partner-generated content:
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Demonstrations
• Presentations
• Go beyond partner-generated content, and send your evangelists out to find and report on great, interesting partners with Channel9-style reporting. Make the lawyers nervous by shamelessly publicizing the partners who are doing cool stuff and ignoring the ones who aren’t. Play favorites. Show bias.
• Offer an award at the next Worldwide Partner Conference — maybe co-sponsored by the IAMCP — for the “most partner-friendly partner,” where partners can vote on who’s doing the best partner-to-partner work in the ecosystem.
• Offer another award, again partner-driven, for “most partner-friendly product group at Microsoft.” Yeah, this one is fraught with peril (I can feel my arm being twisted for votes now…), but it could also be a great motivator for some of the groups that should poke their heads into the partner ecosystem a little more often…

Whew. OK, that’s a wrap. Starting tomorrow, I will be at the Worldwide ISV Partner Advisory Committee meetings at Microsoft, where I will doubtless get grief for this posting. But what does everyone else think? Am I on the right track? Or did I just miss a checkbox somewhere?

Tags: channel-builder, Digipede, Microsoft, partner, wwpc

I will post another million positive things about the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC) any day now.  Promise.  I love this event.  Honest.  But for now — arrrg.  Microsoft’s use of its own tools is driving me nuts.  Here we go again. 

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of large conferences, under certain circumstances.  But as I’ve posted before, the investment in money and time and travel-based pain is only worth it for Digipede if we put in some time and effort up front, and commit corresponding time and effort to following up.  (See the now-classic “work it or it’s not worth it,” posted one year ago today.)

So here I am, working it.  I’m in Microsoft’s WWPC Web site, trying to build my schedule.  A meaningful day at this event is composed of four things:
- Attending sessions (presentations, labs, break-out sessions)
- Having meetings scheduled through WPC Connect (formerly called “structured networking,” basically a way to schedule meetings at a set of tables with other attendees, etc.)
- Having meetings NOT scheduled through WPC Connect (perhaps elsewhere in Denver, perhaps with people not registered for the conference, perhaps with attendees who I already know have not bothered to sign up for WPC Connect)
- Visiting other partners in their booths on the exhibit floor, or at least reserving time to check out those booths.

And Microsoft has provided me with various tools for arranging my schedule — a searchable course catalog, tools for finding people to meet with, and more.  Of course, for many years, it has been possible to build a Web site that allows one to manage a calendar.  Also, for those managing their calendar in Outlook instead, it has long been possible to create online the calendar item and download it to your Outlook calendar. 

And for many years, Outlook has known all it needs to know about time zones. 

Best practice for a Web site that makes Outlook calendar items, as far as I know, is for the Web application to include in any calendar item it creates information about the time zone in which the meeting takes place, so that when you download that item, your Outlook (which knows your own time zone) can make the appropriate adjustment and put it into your calendar accordingly.  Then, when you travel to Denver (for example), you tell Windows “hey, I’m on Mountain time now,” and voila, everything works.

Second-best practice, equally common in my experience, is for the Web application to include NO time zone information in any calendar item it creates, to assume the user never re-sets his or her time zone when traveling, so that the calendar item stays in the same time in Outlook regardless of where the user is.  Then, when you travel to Denver, you do nothing, and voila, everything works, pretty much (ok, the clock on your computer is not on local time when you’re in Denver, but when you look at your calendar your appointments match what local clocks say). 

Ninety-third best practice is to use best practice for Sessions, and second-best practice for WPC Connect. 

Yup.  That’s right.  Try it.  Sitting here on Pacific time, when I save a 2:00 PM WPC Connect meeting to my Outlook calendar, it lands at 2:00 PM.  When I save a 2:00 PM conference Session to my Outlook calendar, it lands at 1:00 PM.  And when I want to schedule a bit of my own time (for a non-WPC Connect meeting, or for time on the Exhibit floor), I just…umm…I just….what?

Now I am nobody’s idea of the brightest Outlook power user out there.  I’m probably about average for a Microsoft WWPC attendee, and somewhat above average for the general Outlook-using public.  And even I know that the fix is to just decide for myself what system I will use, and (manually) adjust the time of the “other” system accordingly.  So this is hardly a “critical bug,” since it has an easy workaround.  And yeah, I realize that different groups inside and outside of Microsoft are involved in these two pieces of functionality.  But why should I, Joe Partner, have to know that, and why should I care?  Presumably, people with vastly more Outlook experience than I (e.g., many many Microsoft employees who will be attending the WWPC) have already had this delightful experience.  How can this NOT have been one of the first use cases they tested?? 

Oh — and let me add that this is only a problem (and workaround) when the process of downloading calendar items works at all.  Often (half the time maybe?) Outlook just gives me an error that says “Cannot import vCalendar file.”  The workaround for this is – do it all by hand.  (Yes, this really only happens sometimes, some Sessions work fine, others don’t.  And yes, there are numerous references online to this same error, going back years.  Grrrrrrr.)

OK, enough ranting; back to the clunky process of preparing for a great show.

Tags: denver, Microsoft, WPC, wwpc

I post a lot about our experiences as a partner and customer of Microsoft, and anybody who cares to go back and count knows that most of my posts are positive.  For whatever reason, my complaints / rants tend to get more attention, so I want to re-iterate – our experience with Microsoft is on balance largely positive, and we remain an enthusiastic Microsoft partner.

With that out of the way – LiveMeeting has to go.  It’s great software, and good, reliable service – with no understanding of business whatsoever.  The treatment our company  has received from the Microsoft Office LiveMeeting organization (still referred to within Microsoft by its old name, Placeware), has ranged from comical to appalling.  Today, we reached appalling.

In 2005, we started experimenting with LiveMeeting as a way of demonstrating our software to prospective clients.  There were pluses and minuses, but on the whole it proved to be an effective tool.  For a while, we mooched off a friend’s account at Microsoft, but by spring of 2006 we settled into a pattern of bi-weekly Webcasts, and got our own account.  My partner Dan Ciruli set up that account; the only form of payment they offered for this type of account at the time was to put the monthly charge on his credit card, so he filled out the necessary forms and received confirmation from Microsoft.  So far, so good.

Then, Microsoft never billed him.  Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time reviewing my credit card statement for transactions that aren’t there.  And apparently, neither does Dan.  So he did not notice that Microsoft was NOT billing us for this service.  And neither, apparently, did Microsoft.

Then somebody from Microsoft popped up in February 2007 and said to Dan HEY YOU HAVEN’T PAID US and Dan said “so take the money already!”  He completed a second credit card form, and was told (again) that everything was fine.  Then the exact same person from Microsoft popped up in March 2007 and said the exact same thing, as though he’d never had the previous exchange, and Dan forwarded all the exact same information, and got the same response – oh, sorry, everything is fine now.  It became a running joke in the office, wondering how they made any money.

And then in April, somebody new at Microsoft woke up and said HEY YOU GUYS OWE US A WHOLE TON OF MONEY.  Always a great day when that happens.  So Dan and I researched it and sure enough, we had been getting free LiveMeeting service for almost a year.  So I called the friendly and helpful person at Microsoft (all names withheld on this one) and asked if we could just pay by check (a) for the outstanding balance, and (b) monthly thereafter.  She agreed, and said she’d send (a) an invoice for the outstanding balance, and (b) a monthly invoice thereafter.  And everything was fine again.

Then, Microsoft never billed us.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time searching the mail for bills that aren’t there.  You put a valid invoice in my hand, I pay it promptly.  You don’t, oh well.  I pay a lot of invoices for other parts of Microsoft – most departments / divisions / business units / subsidiaries / whatever at Microsoft are pretty competent at getting a valid invoice to my desk, and I pay ‘em right quick.  But the LiveMeeting group apparently has not mastered this Business 101 concept. 

And of course, there’s only one way these things can end – we found our LiveMeeting account deactivated seven minutes before our scheduled Webcast this morning.  With attendees invited everywhere from here to India.  No warning emails, no onscreen notice that the account will be suspended in the future, no reason given on the Web page that says we’re dead, no “pay to reactivate” option, just — dead.  I don’t get real upset in the office very often, but I hit the roof. 

I called the toll-free number helpfully posted on the deactivation notice “for immediate service,” which presents a robotic phone tree with four options none of which are “TURN ME BACK ON NOW.”  I punch 4 to “talk with an attendant.”  I am transferred to Microsoft tech support, and am told I need to “talk to Placeware.”  I’m steaming now.  Four minutes and counting.  I call back and punch 2, “sales,” because in my experience humans usually answer when you talk to sales.  I get a human who is sympathetic, but says I need to call tech support; I get a new number to try.  Three minutes to go.  I call the new number, and find out the name of my account representative, and am transferred to him, but it turns out to be someone who sits near him, and eventually I reach my account representative.  Nope, I am assured that there is no way no how no human on earth who can turn my account back on in two minutes; my partner sends a note canceling the Webcast to all participants.  We look like idiots, and I am seriously pissed.

I stay on the line with my account manager, who asks many questions about who I had been working with previously on our account and billing issues (we find a couple of names, one gone and one still there).  I vent some more at him, and he’s sorry, and we’re done. 

The urge to open a WebEx account is now quite strong, but we suddenly realize we’ve got ANOTHER LiveMeeting with an important prospective customer later today.  Time for a deep breath.

I call the person who had previously promised to send me an invoice by mail, but never did.  I explain the whole situation again – she was “just talking with” my account manager.  I ask “did he mention that I ripped him a new one?”  She laughs nervously.  Between further apologies and digging into records, we eventually just put the whole bill on MY credit card, and she promises (really) to send me monthly invoices from here on.  Within an hour, the account is turned back on, and we’re good to go.

So – if customer service is “falling on the grenade,” these folks get a B+.  (To get an A, I had to be back up and running for the FIRST meeting we had scheduled.)  For processes and procedures – F.

Now we’ll see if I ever get a monthly bill – and yes, this is one I’ll be watching for.  And the Webex experiement begins in parallel next week.

Tags: LiveMeeting, Microsoft, Placeware

John Dvorak’s column in the back of the May 22, 2007 issue of PC Magazine (and online here) points out the “Windows’ Words of Doom” that he “dreads to hear” which are:  “Preparing to Copy.”  He goes on to lament the decades-old problems that Windows users encounter in moving or copying files (or more accurately, folders full of files).  And while I take issue with one or two minor points in his rant, basically he’s right — the process of selecting one or more folders and dragging them someplace is fraught with far more peril than necessary. 

So don’t do it. 

Since 1999 (or maybe earlier), Microsoft has included a full-featured but lightly-publicized tool for handling heavy-duty file copying chores.  It’s called Robocopy, and it’s as brilliant and elegant and reliable as the “select and drag” method is perilous.  (Robocopy is one of the few truly useful bits of technology I discovered before Robert Anderson, who now uses it regularly — it saved his bacon again this week, but I’ll let him relate that story.) 

Robocopy started as a command-line tool with enough readable documentation to make anyone a copying wizard in just a few minutes.  It solves most of the seven “idiotic Windows glitches” Dvorak cites in his article, although it does not help with estimating the total time to copy (a harder problem than Dvorak cares to admit).  It is especially useful for copying chores that take a long time (like the one Dvorak describes), because it never pops up a dialog box to ask a stupid question in the middle of the activity (so it’s safe to walk away in the middle of the process!). 

No, it’s not as “easy” as just selecting and dragging — but spending 10 minutes figuring this out once will elimnate headaches for years to come.  Or you can just take my word for it that the following is sufficient for 99% of home copying chores: 

Robocopy source destination /S /E /W:3 /R:2 

I still use the command-line version, but there is also a Robocopy GUI (as described in this Microsoft Technet article). 

Robocopy is available for all versions of Windows since 2000 (and I think even NT 4.0).  The best version for XP is buried in the “Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools” (where else would you put a useful tool for Windows XP?).  Earlier versions are also tucked away in obscure ”resource kits,” but it actually ships with Vista.  It may very well be on Dvorak’s hard disk right now, hidden in plain sight.

Dvorak makes a final observation:

We’ve all experienced [these problems], wondering to ourselves “Gee, does this ever happen to Bill Gates?  And if it does, why doesn’t he do anything about it?!”  I have no idea. 

More mysterious to me, however, is why Microsoft does not TELL anyone that this problem was solved many years ago.  Microsoft seems to think this is the sort of tool that only an enterprise system administrator should want — but anyone who has seen the “preparing to copy” message should go get it now.  You’ll be glad you did.

Tags: copy, dvorak, file, file-copy, Microsoft, robocopy, Windows

I just returned from New York where Dan and I worked the 5th Annual Microsoft Financial Developers Conference at the Grand Hyatt hotel. Dan and I did a tag-team presentation entitled “Scaling SOA with Grid Computing for .NET,” which was well received. Frankly, I felt like I stumbled through the first part, but eventually warmed up. Dan’s code demo was the best part of our session — showing clearly how to go from a service designed for a single server to a service designed for a grid in just a few lines of code.

If you want to go deeper into this topic, a good place to start is the Dr. Dobb’s article by Robert Anderson and Dan Ciruli.

I ran into Tom Groenfeld who has moved on from Windows in Financial Services, dedicating more time to some direct projects with Microsoft and his excellent blog; if you’re following Microsoft and its partners in this market, it’s a must-read.

Speaking of Windows in Financial Services, they caught up with me for an interview and (no guffaws please) a photo shoot. They’re doing a special HPC edition this summer, which should be out sometime in June; watch for it.

Maybe the most controversial guy at the event was Harvard Professor David Platt, who teaches .NET classes through his firm, Rolling Thunder Computing. He’s an excellent speaker — funny, smart, polished — and his emphasis on championing a simple user experience was certainly a breath of fresh air at this event. He was plugging his book, Why Software Sucks…and what you can do about it, and I may pick up a copy for more of his humor.  Frankly, his presentation offered more problems than solutions (i.e.,  examples of why something sucks, without recommendations about how to fix it), but he’s calling attention to a really, really important issue.  While we pride ourselves on ease of use, it’s clear we can make many further improvements.

Kudos to the whole Microsoft event team, especially the folks I worked with most directly — Asli Bilgin, Laura Leedy, Kathy Ross, and Michelle Ledesma for putting together an event that went off without a hitch.

I look forward to participating in this event again!  

Tags: Digipede, finance, grid-computing, Microsoft, New-York, scalability, Usability