Bing vs Google

Since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” I’ve noticed quite a few bing URLs cropping up in the referrer stats for this blog.  I thought it would be interesting to take an example of one of these referred searches, in this case “add pdf ifilter to sharepoint” and see how it fares with results from Bing and from Google.

Blackdog has a neat split-screen page where you can type a your query into one place and compare the Bing and Google results side by side.   So I tried this -

The Bing search returned one of my blog posts in fourth place, as you can see here:

And Google returned it in third place:

Interestingly though, I’m currently seeing more referrals from Bing.  Maybe Bing users need more PDF iFilter Info…

Technorati tags: Bing

Clever UI Mock-Ups with Balsamiq Mockups

Often I get called upon to produce some kind of user interface mock-ups as part of the initial design phase of a project.  I definitely believe that a showing your customer a mocked-up version of what the finished user interface will look like as early as possible is a good thing.  No matter how much detail you go into with words and flowcharts, a picture of what the user is going to see on screen helps a lot.

Now I certainly don’t claim to be a graphic artist.  In the past I’ve prepared this sort of thing for users in a variety of ways.  Visio has some UI template components “out of the box”, and there are add-ons out there which extend it’s capabilities.  I’ve even roughed things out using lines and boxes in MS Word and PowerPoint before now. 

I’d heard good reports about Balsamiq Mockups, a tool developed using Adobe Air and available as a desktop or web-based product.  Balsamiq deliberately use hand drawn user interface components – the idea being that when you present your design you can focus on the functionality, and not, as they say “that pretty colour gradient”.  As they also say, you aren’t giving the impression of a polished UI with code behind that’s already to use.

For my first attempt, I thought I would put together a mocked-up page for an online books/CDs/DVDs/whatever store (you may have already seen some of this functionality elsewhere ) -

I was pretty impressed with how little time this took me to put together – in total, including downloading and  installing the trial, less than half an hour.  I really liked the way you can do stuff like add images to the mock-up, then quickly get Balsamiq to turn these into sketches.  Again, this gives the user a good representation of what’s going on without too much distraction.  The UI components they make available are pretty comprehensive, and extensible as well I believe.  Also I notice they’ve already added iPhone UI components, as you can see below:

So far I have to say I like Balsamiq Mockups a lot.  It’s very refreshing to work with a tool that lets you be very productive very quickly.  And at $79 per desktop licence it seems to be a bargain.  I’m planning to spend more time with it over the coming months and will report back on how it works out.

Update 5 April – I changed the example mockup image -  for some reason the original wasn’t always rendering in my WordPress theme.

Technorati tags: UI, User Interface, Mockups, Balsamiq

Got Those CSS Curly-Bracket Blues

A little Friday afternoon light relief for anyone struggling with a SharePoint re-branding exercise:

 

Got those H1 curly bracket property colon value semi-colon curly bracket blues…

Technorati tags: css, branding, sharepoint

Jazz Up Your SharePoint Dashboards With Graphical Indicators

Many SharePoint users have variants of the out of the box Team Site for the bulk of their collaborative efforts, and many of these end up with a landing page displaying web parts such as “Tasks Assigned to Me”,  “Overdue Tasks”,  “Project Status” or similar.  Where possible it’s good to make the status pages a little more interesting by providing some form of graphical representation of the current state of play.

Standard lists like Project Tasks come pre-configured with a view which lets you see a simple Gantt view which is often a good starting point, and several of the free application templates from Microsoft have nice overall status graphs on their front page, like this:

If you want to do something similar yourself, then providing you are OK using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio, there are several articles which show you how, for example this one from Bill Burke, or this from Paul Galvin.  As Bill points out, there is also a section on dashboards in Application Templates Under the Hood giving more information. 

If you want to display status indicators against individual list items (as opposed to the “rolled up” view above) I would recommend taking a look at Christophe’s Path to SharePoint blog.  Christophe has come up with the idea of using calculated columns to write HTML, within which you can generate coloured bars, traffic-light symbols etc, like this:

or this:

The nice thing about Christophe’s approach is that you don’t need SharePoint Designer – just the calculated column to create the HTML, and a Content Editor web part in which you put Christophe’s JavaScript.  This is a really interesting approach and certainly something I would never have thought of before.

In fact, the Content Editor web part can be used in lots of other scenarios – take a look at some more examples at the Content Editor Site which is dedicated to “enhancing the lives of SharePoint users around the world, one CEWP at a time”.

Technorati tags: dashboard, SharePoint, Content Editor Web Part, cewp

Data Mining in the Cloud

I’ve mentioned Microsoft’s Data Mining site in a previous post – it’s well worth a look if you are interested in the Data Mining capabilities of SQL Server 2005 or 2008.  There’s good coverage of the excellent Excel Data Mining add-in for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 plus links to lots of good training material and Webcasts.  

In the past week they have also released a Data Mining in the Clouds sample.  This lets you try out many of the features that the Excel add-in gives you, but instead of connecting to your own Analysis Services server you connect to a Microsoft Cloud Service.  You can try it out in a browser by visiting this site, or there is an option to download a new Excel 2007 add-in specifically for connecting to the cloud service.

Technorati tags: Data Mining, Excel, SQL Server, Cloud Computing