I’ve summarized some key points below and you can get a copy of the article from the iRise Website.
“RIAs represent a real opportunity for companies to improve their online offerings because they are the tools that provide Web designers the greatest flexibility in meeting the needs of your brand. But added richness will not always equate to an improved (or even a good) experience. At every point, you must think about what the best possible experience is for your customers.”
The article also included a discussion of the five pitfalls of adopting RIA:
Not understanding customer needs
Implementing for technology’s sake
Creating a distracting experience
Reduced web site performance
Limited metrics tracking and reporting
If you are interested in learning if RIA is right for you and how to avoid the risks, be sure check out the article.
SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to Wikipedia, SOA is “is a computer system’s architectural style for creating and using business processes, packaged as services, throughout their lifecycle. SOA also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.” And for a more humorous definition of SOA overload, check out Greg the Architect in the “SOA This, SOA That” video from YouTube.
We recently had an interesting internal email discussion on how iRise deals with SOA and I have excerpted the highlights below:
From Sherrick Murdoff, VP of Alliances and Business Development:
“SOA is most often interpreted as back-end plumbing only, but this is not the case. SOA includes the back-end plumbing, but you don’t start with the back-end plumbing and you don’t start with building web services
What many CIOs and industry leaders have learned and are promoting is to start with the customer experience – this should drive your SOA implementation more than anything. iRise lets you visualize the customer experience and iterate with both end-users and IT to gain alignment on what needs to be built that drives the “how”
Visualizing SOA is important to let the customer experience drive the requirements for what infrastructure you need to put in place
iRise aligns well in any SOA discussion and brings the customer back to what is important – visualizing “what” you need before you begin to think about the “how” you want to implement.”
From Matt Smith, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager
“Most people over-think the relationship between SOA and simulating applications. SOA basically means there is a provider (machine) and a consumer (machine or human) of a service.
The processing of the service is all the back-end wizardry that goes on within the SOA, which iRise doesn’t diagram in the traditional sense of architecture modeling tools, but it does simulate the action.
The line of business manager and end-user don’t care how the SOA actually processes the service request. iRise simulates the important bit from their perspective of application usability.”
From James McWethy, Enterprise Solutions Director
“SOA…three loaded letters. I’ve seen companies spend years talking about defining and implementing an SOA strategy.
Why not simulate the end-user experience that will result from the tiresome SOA planning process to: (1) Verify that the information being delivered via the service (informational or transactional) will be of value to the end user, and (2) simulate a set of components (portlets, widgets, gadgets, web parts, etc.) that will show the end result of a system comprised of multiple services.
iRise Customer Success Story - At Fusion ‘07, the Customer Experience team from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan gave a presentation on how they used iRise to simulate a technical proof of concept for their new member portal. The presentation is available here and can be viewed here.
So, why risk building your SOA infrastructure without using iRise to engaging your end-users? By simulating the end-user experience with iRise first, both business stakeholders and IT will win.
Everything looks better on a Mac, right? And iRise is no exception.
While iRise is not ‘officially’ supporting iRise on the Mac yet, people are already using iRise Studio and iRise Reader on the Mac. So don’t think that you can’t experience the power of visualization on iRise because you are a Mac user, because you can.
iRise’s QA department is also starting to do some preliminary testing with iRise on the latest versions of the 2 emulators to gain some hands-on experience. This blog post discusses some of the Windows operating system or OS emulators that people have been using on the Mac and identifies a couple of key points to keep in mind.
The two emulators which let you run Windows software side-by-side in the Mac OS include:
iRise probably works with Apple’s Boot Camp (which lets you partition you hard drive to dual-boot Windows and the Mac OS), but the two emulator products are being looked at first. Note that the Windows emulators or virtualization software mentioned above lets you run Windows side-by-side within the Mac OS.
Here are some key points to keep in mind:
RAM - 4 gigabytes of RAM is recommended due to the overhead of running the Mac OS as well as the emulator
Studio and Readeronly - we are not currently looking into running Definition Center on the Mac and do not have any experience with this combination
Browser - you will need to run the Internet Explorer browser as iRise is not compatible with Safari
Issues - Parallels seems to have a couple of re-paint issues on newer Java applications that do not occur in Fusion
If you have comments, questions or real life experiences to share, please visit the iRise User Community on Catalyze. We have also posted details of what we are currently testing in our QA department in the iRise General Forum and have started a discussion topic called iRise on the Mac.
For more information on the iRise User Community, check out this link.
Interop and Software 2008 at Mandalay Bay Convention centered just wrapped up last week.
James Maguire from Datamation filmed a “virtual booth crawl” with 30 second pitches from select vendors - most of whom were being awarded for innovation in software. You can check it out here or watch below.
Yours truly happened to be manning the booth when James came by. I gave my best 30 second rendition regarding iRise below.
Do you Twitter yet? Do you even know why you should? Do you know what Twitter is?
What is Twitter? According to the Twitter website, ” Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” . Twitter lets you send 140 character messages that are visible to anyone and the messages can be sent via the web, IM, cell phone SMS text messaging and the Twitter API. Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging - and most Twits are easier to read and scan because of the 140 character limitation.
Twitter is definitely moving into the mainstream as evidenced by these two recent quotes:
“Twitter is one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet” - New York Times
‘Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app” - TIME Magazine
Common Craft put together this short video to explain Twitter:
Why do I care? Sure, people share some mundane things in their life, but the real value of Twitter is gathering a group of people you follow and learning from them. I use Twitter to find great blog posts and other resources that I may have otherwise missed. Many astute companies are now using Twitter from a marketing perspective to listen to what their customers are saying and to promote blog posts, news articles and press releases. For example, CIO.com is active in Twitter as well as the Editor-in-Chief, Abbie Lundberg, and editor/writer Esther Schindler. People have even ‘twittered’ about iRise and there is even a website called Tweetscan where you can search on companies, people and other phrases.
Twitter Resources Here are some other essential Twitter links to check out:
Twitter Pack - see who you should follow sorted by company, topic, geography, industry and profession. For example, there is a list of the key Usability/UX professionals who Twitter.
It does take some upfront investment of time to get started with Twitter and you have to find the right set of people to follow who are not going to waste your time. Here is a copy of my Twitter feed so you can visualize the value for yourself. Scroll down and see who I’m following. You can click on a user name to access a person’s profile on Twitter and start following them.
You can find me on Twitter at @tomhumbarger. I look forward to seeing you in the “twittersphere”.
The iRise Professional Services team has created a tremendous resource that is a must download for all iRise Users. This new iDoc, called the iRise 6 - Common Samples, is comprised of 53 iRise examples covering a wide range of data functionaliy, RIA and advanced interactions. A few of the documented Samples include: accordian panes, alternate views, autopopulation, portlets, table behaviors, data operations, datasheet actions and search.
One happy iRise user who already downloaded the Common Samples iDoc had this to say, “This is one of iRise’s best pro-active customer service moves. So smart. Big props to those who built them in the PS Group.”
The iDoc is provided as a convenience for all users to learn advanced features and improve their knowledge of iRise. The iDoc is available for download from the iRise Users section of the Catalyze Community. You must be sign into the Catalyze Community and have iRise User Permissions to download the iDoc. If you are not yet a member of Catalyze or the iRise Users Communities, you can get more information and register from this link.
Here are the key links to the Common Samples documents in Catalyze.
Each Sample contains a description of the functionality, the degree of difficulty, steps to demonstrate the functionality and steps on how to build the simulation in iRise as noted below:
Enjoy! If you have any comments or questions about the Common Samples iDoc, please use the Common Samples discussion forum in Catalyze. And thank you iRise Professional Services.
SOA or service-oriented architecture is a chronically hot topic - and there are as many opinions about it as there are IT vendors. According to 
Everything looks better on a Mac, right? And iRise is no exception. 
Do you 
