content management | web strategy

Just posted to NLC’s blog: Architecting Widgets in Sitecore: A 5-part Series

In this post, I outline 4 ways to architect widgets, or small modular blocks of content (such as advertisements in the sidebar) in Sitecore 6. Enjoy!

One of the best examples I’ve seen of useful, relevant social media/community usage.

I was doing my taxes online using QuickTax and a community sidebar miraculously appeared (outlined in red below). Whenever I had a question, I just had to refer to the sidebar and lo and behold…someone had already asked the same question and several people had responded.

As I moved through the tabs and schedules, the sidebar responded to the context change and updated itself to show questions/answers for the current tab.

This was great for a couple of reasons:

1) It was a warm-and-fuzzy feeling to be part of a community of people that were having the same experience. (Likely an Intuit marketing team goal - good job)

2) It was gratifying to know I wasn’t the only one with questions, and to see answers from other users. I received instant feedback without having to call either Intuit or the Government of Canada with questions. The contextual nature of the sidebar was extremely helpful - saving me time and frustration.

[Click image to enlarge]

This week, NLC published my first whitepaper, Six Tips for Delivering Faceted Navigation within a CMS-Driven Website.

Inspired by the Service Alberta project, the whitepaper shares some key insights about building a faceted navigation alongside a CMS. While Service Alberta was using Reddot, the whitepaper’s tips apply to any content management system.

I’ve been working on this since November, with the help of editor Luna Allison, and I’m really glad to see it finally published! Enjoy.

I’m incredibly proud of the work our team did for the Service Alberta project last year. Hence I took the time to write up an entry for the MS Ignite IT Competition, which recognizes and rewards the efforts of Canadian IT Professionals and Software Developers.

If you have a minute, I’d encourage you to read NLC’s entry and cast your vote as you see fit. Every vote helps, and the competition is tough - there are some great entries this year. Thanks in advance!

I had no idea how many opportunities were available to grad students. I keep finding them, printing them and posting them on my bulletin board… In the span of the next 16 months I want to fit as much in as possible!

If you’re a grad student, especially in Ottawa and/or studying business or technology, you should check some of these out. They are all amazing opportunities and events.

• Technology Venture Challenge
• IBM Extreme Blue Internship
  
• PARC Internship
  
• Stanford Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship
• Grace Hopper Conference
• CASCON IBM Conference
• Google Workshop for Women Engineers
• Mindtrust Leadership Development Program - Sprott School of Business
• MCETech Conference on eTechnologies - hosted at Carleton

Taking a moment to post a quick update on what’s been happening. Balancing work and school this semester has been extremely challenging, but the focus will shift from coursework to thesis writing from now on, meaning I can structure my schedule in a much saner way.

Work

I’ve completed a Reddot consulting engagement (see my last post) and am now focused on Sitecore technical planning for a large nonprofit. A number of interesting Sitecore challenges cropping up:

• Branching workflows
• A keyword tagging approach to dynamically assemble content
• Integration of legacy applications

I’ll be crunching those out with the team, but they should make for some great blog posts once we’ve determined courses of action.

Finally, after a few months of hard work, my whitepaper on building a faceted navigation with a CMS is to be published imminently. Stayed tuned on the NLC blog.

School

Ahh….school! It’s been a whirlwind since January. In one course, we are building business plans to be presented in front of certain members of the Ottawa community (!). My team is pitching a small-scale renewable energy device and we’ve had some hard schooling in class around our business model, value proposition and financials. It must be an incredible amount of work to do this “for real”. Wow.

In addition to that, I am presenting my “Gate 0″ next Friday, which is basically a 10-minute pitch on my proposed thesis research, which I have to defend in front of the faculty. Current working title: “The Mashup Ecosystem: Linking Competitive Actions, Event Sequences and Ecosystem Evolution“. Huh? This will become a lot clearer in the next few months.

For the next three weeks…it will be a matter of survival to get everything done. I can’t wait for April!

I’ve been in Edmonton all week on a consulting engagement for the Government of Alberta, which has some fantastic people on staff. While it wasn’t the focus of my visit, I was inspired to learn of some really neat Government 2.0 initiatives happening in Alberta.

I ended up having a great conversation with a digital media guru - we shared enthusiasm for rich interface applications and showed each other some great inspirations for showcasing interactive content:

• A Journey into Time Immemorial virtual museum exhibit
• BSD Medical hope flower garden
• Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia mosaic

I was also really impressed that Alberta Parks has worked with Immersive Media out of Calgary to create 360 degree videos of Alberta’s wilderness - from helicopter, boat and land vehicle. Immersive is the very firm whose technology is used to capture Google street view.

• Alberta Parks/Immersive videos

I also chatted with an employee of one of Alberta’s museums who was hoping to attend the Museum and the Web 2009 conference in Minneapolis. This conference features a fantastic line-up of sessions tailored specifically to leveraging the web and online strategy for museums, archives and heritage organizations. There is an incredible potential for showcasing museum content online and engaging audiences.

Finally, I was impressed to learn of the ongoing Respect The Land in Alberta campaign and its launch of a Facebook page last year.  The use of Facebook helped spark a passionate public debate about annual land damage wrought by ATVs and law enforcement challenges.

Surprise - I’m doing some of the fun parts of my thesis first. What I really need to focus on is my first presentation coming up this month, where I lay out my research plans to the faculty and proceed to get light- to medium-roasted.

A key part of that is the literature review, where I demonstrate that I’ve effectively surveyed existing research and am providing a new and valuable contribution. But despite my helpful DabbleDB paper index, it’s slow progress.

But on to the fun part: starting to map out the key players and events within the mashup ecosystem. Aside from the usual suspects such as Google Maps, I’ve discovered a wide range of “complementary assets”, platforms and communities all tied to this ecosystem. It’s fascinating.

Here are some great examples:

• The Open Stack as an architecture AND a social movement. Its influence on the web platform and competition with the likes of Facebook Connect.

• Programmable web as the key API/mashup index. It’s like the town center.

• The constant release of new APIs such as Kiva’s API. I’m already a big fan of Kiva, but the mind boggles at this outreach and innovation potential.

• Energy surrounding mashup security issues - oAuth and Microsoft’s WebSandbox.

• Service language and protocol evolution. SOAP, XML, JSON, REST, ATOM.

• The mashup/portability paradigm carried over into specific enterprise segments, such as enterprise content management. The CMIS initiative is seeing a lot of energy recently.

• The arrival of services such as Mashery, who offer API infrastructure and management services. Mashery also sponsors an API conference called “The Business of APIs”.

• A plethora of enterprise mashup platforms on offer. Jackbe, IBM, Microsoft, Denodo to name a few.

I came across this thought-provoking video via Twitter, “A Vision of Students Today”. Has led me to ponder the following:

• How much re-organization educational institutions would have to undergo to depart from lecture-style teaching
• How much input students should have into their learning experience (too much structure vs. not enough structure)
• How different learning styles have been well-studied, yet education still caters to only one style
• How students still need to meet schools/teachers halfway. Just because it’s easier to Facebook through a class doesn’t mean you’re exempt from making the effort to pay attention. Some subjects are boring, but still must be learned (and how much more that is true in the workplace!)

I’d be keen to hear what this Cultural Anthropology class comes up with in terms of solutions!

There’s some passionate backlash on the video’s discussion page - more extreme views dismiss the video as typical millenial whining and a lack of understanding of what education truly is. Have a look and decide for yourself.