Isuzu’s Beginning

In 1916 the Tokyo Ishikawajima Shipbuilding and Engineering Company created a plan to work with the Tokyo Gas Electric Industrial Company to manufacture automobiles. In addition, in 1918 this new company received a license to build and sell cars in Japan that had been designed by the Wolseley Motor Company, which was based in the UK. This began a long history of international joint ventures for the future Isuzu Company. By 1922 the Wolseley A-9 was produced in Japan and sold locally. Their first truck, the CP, debuted two years later. Over the next couple decades, various corporate mergers change the name of this company until 1949 when Isuzu Motors Limited became the official company name. By this time the company is one of the largest manufacturers of heavy-duty trucks in Japan.

Continued Partnerships and Growth

The need for heavy reconstruction after World War II led to a boom in production of Isuzu vehicles, and especially trucks. By 1959, Isuzu had created the cab over forward control truck which came to be known as the N series. Due to the quality, ease of driving, and constant innovation, the N series remains a popular seller to this day. In 1971, a deal was signed with General Motors to begin producing Isuzu vehicles in America for the first time. Further partnerships ensue over the next three decades as Isuzu makes deals with Subaru and Honda to develop and exchange car lineups for various models. Popular trucks like Isuzu Rodeo and Isuzu Pickup furthered the brand name for high-quality vehicles, and the multiple world records Isuzu established in 1983 for their diesel engines show the world their commitment to innovation and excellence.

Focus Turns to Commercial Trucks

By 1999 GM had taken a 49% stake in Isuzu Company and effectively taken over the direction of the company as the majority stakeholder. Unfortunately this happened right about the same time as the new millennium hit its first recession. After several years of falling sales, Isuzu decided to shut down its American operations for consumer cars and trucks, and focus exclusively on their commercial vehicles and diesel engines.

Isuzu Commercial Vehicles Today

Today you will continue to find the Isuzu N series and F series on the road. In addition the successful line of vocational commercial vehicles is available for towing, pest control, landscaping, and food service. Since 1986 they have been the number one seller of low cab forward trucks in the US. In addition, over 86% of the trucks that Isuzu has sold in the US are still being driven today, which means that Isuzu has established itself as a premier truck manufacturer in the US and around the world.

So you might be wondering, what is a train horn kit? A train horn kit is comprised of three main parts. You have a triple train horn assembly, the air tank, and an air compressor to fill the air tank. The kit also comes with every component you will need to connect the parts and install them into your truck.

The way the kit works is that the air compressor is set to automatically fill the air tank and keep the tank at 120 psi so it is ready to blast when you are. You can either set up your train horn so it sounds when you honk your horn as you normally would or you can set it up so there is a separate toggle switch to sound it. Once this happens the solenoid will open and release the air from the air tank and sound the horns. People will notice!

Now you know how to set yourself apart from other trucks on the road and make everyone take notice. Train horns for trucks are the newest, most sought after accessory for trucks and their popularity is going daily! Do not be the last one to the party. Make sure you are the first among your friends to get and install a kit and blow your friends away. It will clear a path for your truck and broadcast yourself to everyone letting them know who is in charge. These kits are easy to install and the chrome plating makes them look great as well.

Get over to http://trainhornsdelivered.com today and check out their screaming deals!

Probably the most popular modification F-150 enthusiasts make to their trucks is getting that tire and chassis clearance up nice and high with a Ford F-150 Lift Kit. Whether you’re an off-roading fanatic, or just want to ride higher than the rest of traffic on your way to and from work, AmericanTrucks has a lift kit that’s right for you. Plus, we’re also offering a huge selection of Ford Truck Bed Covers. Not only does it maximize your hauling space, not only does it protect whatever cargo it is you’ve got back there, but you can’t forget the fact that truck bed covers improve your fuel economy by up to 10%, and will give you significantly better gas mileage. And with the prices at the pump rising like they do every summer, this is a modification you’ll really appreciate.

Now, it’s one thing to make your truck look different from other trucks. But if you want to really get people to notice your truck from miles away, you need to get a new Ford F-150 Exhaust. Aftermarket exhausts from AmericanTrucks will let you announce yourself and let people know to clear a path for you and your behemoth of a truck. Easy-to-install and great looking, these exhausts will also give you a noticeable performance gain of some additional horsepower and torque, after you kick those restrictive factory pipes to the curb.

Wi-Fire

I was approached a few weeks ago by hField Technologies to review their Wi-Fire product since it is a perfect fit for people who are on the go, such as folks who need to entertain business calls 24/7 on their latest mobile phone and particularly truckers who have laptops and would like to increase their range for wifi hotspot connectivity. 

The Wi-Fire is a product that acts as a wireless adapter with a high gain antenna.  Best of all, the design of it is meant to be used on the go with a retractable USB cable and slick fold up design, it is compact and easy to stick in a laptop bag. 

I was particularly interested in reviewing the product because I had built a cantenna a few years ago using a coffee can experimenting with increasing the range of my wifi signal.

After firing up the laptop and experimenting with the Wi-Fire, I am pleasantly surprised at the results.

 I used an Asus EEE PC 900 Netbook with XP as my test machine.  It is a small 8.9″ laptop that I use when traveling and is the one that I would likely be looking for a wfi hotspot somewhere, so I thought I’d see how it did with this unit.  I tested from my home where the built in wifi card picked up 13 access points, I was curious to see after installing the Wi-Fire how many more would show up.

The setup instructions for the Wi-FIre were very easy to follow, basically just pop the CD in and load the drivers up, then plug the device in, no reboot required.  The device shows up as another wireless card, so you could use this to enable wireless connectivity for a machine which doesn’t have a wireless connection.  I recall back to a warehouse installation I did with a machine that was about 300 feet away from the access point, the internal wifi card produced too weak a signal to reach the AP.  If I had an external adapter, I likely would have had better luck.

I fired up the wireless manager software that is loaded with the driver to see what it did.  It provides a very intuitive interface showing access points that are close by.  I compared the number in the list to what I had previously and was amazed that 22 showed up now, 9 more than I had previously been able to see.  The product worked as advertised, it definitely boosted the visibility of my wireless access.

I thought I would do another test and load it up on my other laptop which I currently use Ubuntu 8.04 Linux on.  It loaded up just fine and was recognized instantly by the operating system, no drivers needed which I did not anticipate.  I observed the same results there with regard to an increase in connectivity.

So I’m pleased to give the Wi-Fire a big thumbs up and recommend it to anyone who travels around and needs internet access looking for hot spots, or if you have an application where you need a signal boost, this is a cheap (< $100) way to gain this functionality.

Please visit their website for more information and feel free to drop me a line or share a comment.

I was excited the other day to get a testimonial from Arizona from a customer who wrote in to let me know that my hard work developing the temperature scan saved him a lot of potential grief.  In his words:

Pretty cool seeing such a simple and stupid idea yielding fruit for others!

For those who are not linked in, here’s a few reasons why you may want to consider it over some of the other popular social networking tools:

1) It’s for Professionals and is built for business.  Facebook and My Space are neat, but they are more casual and best suited for personal applications.

2) Popularity.  Linked in is quickly growing in number of users as well as functionality.

3) Features.  They provide easy ways to network and search employment opportunities as well as abilities to search for talent you may be looking to hire!

4) Network Updates.  They provide statistics and quick facts about your contacts updates which help you keep up to date with what is going on in your network of colleagues.

5) Online Resume.  I have stopped producing a paper resume and keep my linked in profile up to date.  I include it on my email tagline and offer it to people who want to know more about my experience and skill set.  It’s always up to date and I don’t have to worry about someone looking at a stale copy I had emailed months ago.

Feel free to checkout my profile for an idea of the value it adds.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/beckerben

Some of the topics I’ve queued up include open source business intelligence, outsourcing collaboration overseas I’ve been involved with and a sweet mobile GPS application I’m in progress of building which will be spun off as yet another side venture!

On a side note, if anyone wants a Trucking Nerd Mug, let me know.  The first batch I ordered were a misprint with the ink which faded so they sent me another batch for free, however they also were a misprint, so now I’ve got mugs coming out the wazoo.  Just drop me a line, you pick up shipping and I’ll gift you a mug!

It leaves me with the undecided question, what to do with this blog? I’m still a nerd, but not just a “trucking” nerd anymore.  I will probably make updates as it makes sense and as time permits.  Out of the gate, I’m finding my plate is already pretty full, so we’ll have to see how it goes. 

I’ve got a lot of trucking and related systems knowledge, so it’d be crazy to abandon it all, so if you have a project or need, don’t hesitate to give me a shout!

We worked crazy hours the past month preparing for the final stages of the migration and worked through this past weekend rolling out the new landscape and making the necessary systems changes.  I had expected a massive issue list when everyone returned Monday, but to my surprise, the issues were relatively lightweight, I guess that means we did a thorough job executing the plan…or maybe we just got lucky!  At any rate, I did walk away with a few key lessons that may yield value to others proceeding down the path of virtualizing their servers.

If you are like me, you read the trade journals and I doubt you will find one that does not mention something about the emerging virtualization market.  I had written a previous post about the growing market and Microsoft’s share of this market.

If I had a large budget, the winner in this market today is clearly VMWare, they have the most experience, the biggest client base, by far the more industrial product and they were the pioneers in this space.  However, being on a tight budget, I always opt for the cheaper most qualified candidate, which turns out to be Microsoft in this case.

Yes, I know VMWare has released their Virtual Server product for free to compete with MS’s, but I read way to many cases of system instability and having to reboot the host machine after a week with the VMWare solution.  I also couldn’t find a host based backup solution that enabled a clean / consistent state for host based backups or snapshots.  This exists in the ESX version of VMWare, but it is not free.  I also had been running for over a year several of the servers in my lab as virtual servers on Microsofts product and had very good luck with it.  So I decided it was the right choice at Tradewinds.

The project started off with a lot of diagrams and figuring out what components to virtualize and which to leave alone.  My biggest business reasons for pushing the project along were:

• Disaster Recovery = the ability to bring virtual servers up on other physical peices of hardware in time of disaster is huge.  I am no longer tethered to a physical machine and waiting for parts to get a server back online.  If a box dies, I simply bring up the virtual machines that lived on that box somewhere else.
• Server Consolidation = Instead of buying several physical machines, I could purchase fewer machines and have them run multiple servers.
• Flexibility = Being able to shuffle machines around is great.  If one machine is getting bogged down, I can offload a virtual server to another machine which has more resources…This is a non-event with a virtual machine.
• Testing = I was always hesitant to do anything to a live production machine.  Installing software or updates can be dangerous business, so being able to save the state of a virtual machine and apply an update and revert back easily to a previous state if the update goes south offers peace of mind.  I can take a copy of a virtual server and do whatever to it and if I crash it, I can just pitch it.

A few pointers I did come across during the project that are note worthy are as follows:

• Do your homework = There are a number of different options for virtualization.  We chose Microsoft, but if your budget permits it, you really should look at VMWare.  I also recommend reading the whitepapers that are out there, they are useful.
• Backups = Make sure you leverage a good backup strategy of your virtual machines.  On some of my virtual servers, I am running a host based script which enables a “live” backup be taken through VSS writers, and I am also using a guest based backup solution in addition to the host based backup for critical machines.  I like to have options in time of disaster.  I like having a backup to the backup plan.
• Virtualize Smartly = Just because everything can be put in a virtual server doesn’t mean it should.  Anything that is very I/O intensive should probably not reside within a virtual server.  We opted not to put our DB server in a virtual environment for performance reasons.  We did however setup exchange in a virtual environment.  We decided that even though it is an I/O hog, being able to bring it up on another physical machine quickly in time of disaster was critical, so we’ll take an extra second or two checking our emails.
• Test = Be sure to virtualize slowly.  Doing this allowed me to flush out many issues and make sure that I was comfortable supporting this new paradigm.
• Distinguish = The number of servers I support now has doubled and it gets confusing when working simultaneously on multiple machines.  Be careful you don’t get confused which machine you are working on…as simple as it sounds, changing the desktop color or doing something else to distinguish a machine is a worthwhile and simple exercise.  During the migration, I almost ran a command on the wrong machine that could have been disastrous…of course it could have been because I had been working 24 hours straight, but having helpful indicators to help you remember where you are is a good idea.
• Document - I am a huge fan of putting stuff down on paper.  It is a good idea to document and outline your physical and virtual environment.  Going through the exercise of updating our disaster recovery diagram, having pictures to look at helped me figure out the different scenarios for hosts and guests going down and what services would be unavailable.  To give an example of where this helped, we leverage two VPN tunnel paths into the office for redundancy.  One of them now lives in a virtualized machine.  I had planned to put the virtual machine on the physical machine which hosts our second VPN tunnel.  So what would have happened if the host went down?  All of our VPN would have been down.  If I happened to be working remotely, this would have been a big deal.  Going through the exercise of taking the time to document the environment allowed me to see things that weren’t as clear in my head!

We’ve been on this new paradigm a couple of weeks now and are very pleased.  I’ve seen a few hiccups with network connections and some clock drift issues, but nothing that I would consider major or warrant regret for how the infrastructure looks today.

Tags: Server, Virtualization, VMWare, Microsoft, Virtual, Server

After I put a fan in the room and started shutting down non essential equipment, I decided it was time to install a temperature monitoring system into the server room.  This wasn’t the first time we had issues with the A/C unit, but it was the highest the temperature had ever gotten, and I know if it gets to hot, things start going south real quick.  I did some googling, and came up with all kinds of results, but most of these systems were very expensive and did a lot more than what I really needed. 

What I wanted was simple (or so I thought it was):

• USB - Had to be a Plug and Play Sensor that works with any computer.
• Un-tethered - I didn’t want something that was connected to any one machine, I wanted to be able to get readings away from machine exhaust so I could get the ambient temperature of the room.
• Paging / Emailing - I wanted a solution that would alert my blackberry and treo of issues in addition to a number of my hundred email accounts.
• Customizable - I wanted to be able to specify my threshold to monitor and how often to monitor it.
• Temperature Only - I know there are technically a lot of other factors that sophisticated data centers monitor such as humidity, but I also know that it is temperature that I have the most control over and can do the most damage if it gets out of control.
• Cheap - Most importantly, it had to be cheap.  I’m at a small trucking company and the economic times right now don’t warrant me the luxury to throw a rack mounted sensor in that does all kinds of fancy stuff.  I was looking for the <$100 solution!

After digging, I decided the solution I was looking for didn’t exist, so I decided to create one.

I went to work designing the basic components and coming up with the requirements and set down the path to create one.  Like all projects that sound simple enough, this one turned out to be tougher than I thought.  I had to learn a little about C++, voltage and some funky math conversions for receiving input from a USB temperature sensor.  Not your typical programming 101 stuff. 

Talking with my other colleagues, I realized that this was a tool that would not only benefit me at Tradewinds, but also many other businesses that have the same need…to be notified before disaster strikes is always something worth knowing.

So I decided I’d create the solution, use it for my needs, and recoup my investment of time and energy offering it to others for a small fee.  I created a web presence over at http://temperaturescan.com/ where you can download a working demo and purchase the solution.

Here’s a screenshot showing what the interface for the program looks like, very simple, but effective…I like things clean and simple, I’m not a fan of over complication:

Tags: Temperature, Control,, Temperature, Alert,, Temperature, Scan

When I first started the blog, I also had registered TruckingNerds.com in the event that additional perspectives would be added to the blog.  I encourage anyone else who enjoys writing and is interested in technology and / or trucking, feel free to drop me a line!

During my career in transportation, I have been fortunate enough to work with a large, mid-sized, and small carrier.  A carrier as large as 9000 trucks down to a carrier of 150 trucks.  I’ve seen and experienced many things but one thing that I’ve seen in common at all these companies, relative to relationship between IT and Operations, is how these departments work together. 

Many times I’ve seen operations requesting reports, new applications, improvements, customized programming, etc. that, in the heat of the moment, they “need” but 2 weeks later has fallen to the wayside with the latest fire. 

I feel for the IT folks that are continuously chasing their tails, trying to catch the latest “we gotta have” and not working on driving efficiency into the operation.  The frustration of spending countless planning, programming, and implementation hours on something no one uses or looks at any more.

Here are a few things I have seen work:

Op’s - Don’t ask for stuff you’re not going to use!  You are wasting time and resources.  Do you absolutely need this?  How often are you going to use it?  Who is going to use it?   What value will it bring?  Is there something we have today that we can use?

IT - Make sure you have periodic prioritization meetings.  Don’t be afraid to ask the questions that Op’s needs to ask themselves before they make a request.  Make sure you fully understand how all the cogs of the organization fit together.   Try to provide insight into what other areas of the company may be doing that pertains to the project from an IT perspective, insight as to what new technology may be available, and insight into possible options/features that could be added to make the program more valuable.

As an outsider to IT, my perception is that they want to make an impact on the business.  They want to create tools, that users actually use, to improve the overall results of the company.

As operator’s, our biggest desire is an IT department that understands what we do, spends time periodically to analyze how we could harness technology, and make improvements.

Operations frustrations come from an IT department that sits back and says “spell out exactly what you want and we will do it for you.”   There are so many options out there of what it could be. 

There must be a marriage between the 2 departments.  Operations can start with a basic outline of what is needed but there must be dialog from IT of “if we could provide this, would that be helpful?” or “did you know this is out there and available?”  Communication is key!

In my opinion, those carriers out there that invest in and harness technology, to drive efficiencies into their operation, will survive over the ones that don’t see IT as an integral part of the overall company rather just a necessity.

There are a few blogs out there I enjoy, as mentioned the Private Fleets blog and a few of the others I link to here.  There is also another author, Dan Goodwill, a transportation consultant / author.  He recently posted an article highlighting some popular trucking related blogs.  I recommend checking it out if you are looking for blogs to subscribe.  I also recommend periodically checking for new blogs which enter the arena which it seems a few more here and there keep popping up.  You can leverage blogged.com and technorati to help you out!

Tags: Trucking, Blogs, Blogsphere

I get asked from time to time about our phone system and why I like it so much and why I’m so eagerly awaiting the next release of it in 2008 which we’ve got plans to upgrade to.

The System

We ended up moving from a traditional PBX based device (a Toshiba CTX100) to a system that allowed us full call center functionality, a rich client experience and ease of administration to boot.  The system is a Microsoft / Intel powered system developed by Interactive Intelligence which is headquartered here in Indianapolis.  We opted to go with their Vonexus (EIC) solution which is a subset of features offered in their flagship CIC product.  It is geared toward small to medium sized businesses and offers tons of features and flexibility. 

We did a brief evaluation of some different solutions and settled on the benefits of VOIP.  We worked with our communication partners G3 Technology Partners who ended up putting together a nice case study of our solution which can be read here.

The Benefits

• Windows Based Client - The system works with VOIP network phones, but also comes with a windows based application that is loaded onto a users desktop (pictured below).  There are actually various flavors of this client available.  They have a Microsoft Outlook version, Great Plains add in, web based client, etc.  The client is nice because it shows some advanced call capabilities on your screen.  It is windows based, which means it is intuitive and easy to use.  So now to transfer a call, you can click the call on your screen and drag it to a person you want to transfer it to rather than entering some cryptic # + transfer code + station + yada yada yada. 
• Easy Configuration - Not only is there a windows based client, but the administration is all done through traditional windows type applications.  Creating users, manipulating auto attendant configurations, setting up call queues and all other aspects of phone programming couldn’t be easier.  I was used to the confusing programming methods of the Toshiba, so going to a point and click windows application was great!
• Soft Phones - While we originally went live with Polycom VOIP phones, most people in the company have converted over to use the soft phone.  The windows client doubles as a soft phone.  Instead of having a physical phone at your desk, you just do all of your call control using the windows client and a headset connected to your machine.  This works great because the computer headsets cover both ears and you’re not having to mess with a third device on your desk, you’re just operating the mouse and keyboard for everything including call control!
• Virtual Connectivity - This is my second favorite feature of the system.  You can work virtually anywhere so long as you have a high speed VPN connection back to the phone server.  Since we leverage VOIP, you can have your voice traffic routed back through to the server from a remote machine using the soft phone.  Or, if you prefer to use your home phone or another land line as your station, the system has the ability to dynamically create remote stations so when you sign into the system from home, you put whatever number you want as your phone and calls are directed to and from your phone.  When you call through the system, it appears as if you are calling from the office.  You can work anywhere, just as you would at work and nobody knows any different.  This worked out great when we had a snow emergency last February.  Nobody was at the office, but we didn’t miss a beat since most of the office was signed in remotely operating business as usual.
• Unified Messaging - My favorite feature is the unified messaging.  This has actually been a huge time saver across the company.  Being able to interact with faxes and voice mails as emails is huge.  Faxes come across as TIFF images and your voice mails are WAV files.  You can forward these around, store them, etc.  Rewinding and doing whatever you want to with a voice mail file is now a breeze.   You don’t have to dial into an automated system punching keys on a phone to listen to a message.  You can simply double click the wav, continue reading some emails while listening to your message, then forward it on if you need to, all in a few seconds compared to minutes with traditional voice mail!
• One Number - The system is intelligent enough to assign a single direct dial number to each user of the system.  When a call comes in, it listens for fax tones at the front of the ring tone, if it detects them, it will automatically not ring the recipient and receive the fax.  Each user has their own dedicated fax line and voice line that is the same number and the faxes they receive go directly to their inbox.  This is a great convenience, no running to a machine and losing your fax in the shuffle.
• Easy Call Control - The great thing about the client is that complex call control features are very easy to execute.  Take for instance a transfer.  You have the option of parking, speaking to the person you are transferring to, sending to voice mail, blind transferring, etc.  To do all this with a traditional system involves a bunch of digits you’d have to enter in the right sequence on a phone.  Using the client, you are using a wizard and just clicking some intuitive buttons to make it work.  How about conferencing?  Just click the conference button and drag your calls into the conference.  Then you have the option of muting certain parties, putting parties on hold, etc.  Try doing that with a traditional phone system!  You also can easily record calls which end up as wav files in your inbox.  You’d have to see the client in action to give it justice on the power and ease of use, I can’t do it justice here trying to explain it with words.
• Stats out the Wazoo - There is a SQL server database that all statistics are written to.   Every call is logged.  Every interaction and status change is logged.  You also get about a hundred canned reports that tell you just about everything you could ever imagine relating to phone traffic and user usage.
• User Presence - Traditional phone systems have huge panels with a bunch of lights representing stations.  With this system, we have the client which shows directories of users and presence information about these users. You can see when users are on the phone, away from their desk, out of the office, etc., all without having to look anywhere else.  The really cool thing is the system will present your presence to your callers. So if I change my status to out of the office until 3:00 PM, callers calling me will hear “Ben Becker is out of the office until 3:00 PM today.”  No longer do you need to record personal greetings, let the system do it for you!
• API - We love customizing applications and making applications talk with one another.  The phone system is no different.  We leverage the programmatic API that is provided to feed call statistics into our Multiplexor tool that displays on a 250″ screen in our operations room, in addition to unlocking the front door of the building programmatically through the phone system.  We also built some one click dialing capabilities into one of our custom applications.
• Scalable - Since the system is license driven, to grow, you just add additional licenses for users and resources.  We can grow on this system to 300 users no problem.
• Queue & Auto Attendant Capabilities - Phone tree’s and call control  programming can be difficult with traditional systems, however with the point and click GUI that is provided to manage the auto attendant, configuring the phone tree is very simple and an intuitive process.  Making changes to the steps in the tree is very easy and feature packed.  We’ve been able to implement some relatively complex call control into our processes and we periodically review and adapt these to our changing business environment.
• Powerful Remote Access - We don’t use this feature very much to dial into the system remotely since it is all tied into email, but occasionally you may be on the road and need to.  Since your voice mail box is your inbox, the system can read your emails to you, play your voice mails and even send you your faxes to a fax number of your choosing.  The newer version of the system has some features that you can actually respond to emails and voice mails using speech recognition capabilities.

The client that is loaded onto everyone’s machines is shown in the following screenshot.  You can see that we have the user directory which allows the presence of others in the company to be seen.  Calls show up in the upper portion of the screen and the buttons for call control become active.  There are all kinds of capabilities of this application which is a perfect call companion.

Next Release

The next release is jammed packed with all sorts of new bells and whistles.  For starters it’ll be a completely .NET based client and the APIs are completely rewritten in .NET.  We also be gaining additional queue features, security and some simple things we have desired which aren’t present today (such as a call log!).  I’m sure I’ll have a blog entry after the go live of the upgrade with the latest!

98% of the time, spending a few minutes applying deductive reasoning, googling or shooting an instant message out to my fellow nerds I usually get an answer or at least have come up with a few paths to explore.  But what happens when the issue is very vague?  Or if it is intermittent?  Or worse yet, you’ve exhausted all leads and are still striking out?

One of the biggest changes for me moving from the consulting arena to an industry position was my support network.  In the consulting world I was part of a collective group of hundreds of individuals who were subject matter experts on one topic or another.  We had an intranet of consultants profiles we could search through to find someone who had the skills needed.  Moving to a small trucking IT shop, I was now without the collective backing my efforts.

Googling I always came across cached pages from a site called Experts Exchange.  It is an online community of tech-friendly users who post and comment on questions of a technical nature.  Their membership base is around two million.

To encourage community involvement, they have setup a point system for posting questions.  You assign a point level to a question based on difficulty or urgency.  As people respond to your post, if one or more of the responses answer your question, you award those points to the associated user(s).  If your post is answered, it is stored in a knowledgebase which is then able to be queried and the solutions used by others.

The catch to all of this is that in order for you to post questions or see the solutions to questions, you must subscribe.  A subscription costs $100 a year.   I will tell you, if you are in an IT shop, this is the best $100 you will ever spend. 

I started posting questions and started finally getting answers.  Responses usually start flowing in within the first 1-2 hours and usually from multiple people.  Technical challenges that I had fooled around with for days or weeks started getting resolved! 

My investment was recouped instantly.  Actually if you take all the time I struggled trying to find solutions before and break it down by my salary and then compare that to the time it takes the Experts Exchange community to find solutions for me, the ROI is off the charts!

The way the community thrives is by having a two way street of participation.  While posting my question, I may spot another users question which I may know the answer or can at least point them in the right direction, so I post and start accumulating points myself. 

What’s the point of the points?  You don’t get paid for your points, but you can get a free subscription after a certain number of points are accumulated. 

The point system is mostly a pride and ego thing.  All over the site users points are displayed.  They have a hall of fame and each subject area you can see the top point leaders. 

They also recognize monthly contributors in an email newsletter to the community.  There are a number of users with some ridiculous quantities of points amassed.  I’ve always wondered what makes someone an “expert,” I think it is safe to call these individuals experts!

You can search the Experts Exchange database much like you search Google, you just need to have a subscription to see the chain of answers to that question.  I’d suggest looking through what technical issues you’ve been challenged on and query their database, you’ll likely find, you’re not the first to come across whatever mystery you’re trying to solve.  It’s worth spending a few minutes checking this resource out if you’re not already familiar with it!

Tags: Experts, Exchange

TMW’s Order Entry application leaves a little to be desired when it comes to the ability to optimize the appointment scheduling process.  The scheduling abilities in Order Entry are confusing and not intuitive.  It also doesn’t take into account any sort of ability to administer appointment workflow when multiple people are responsible for setting appointments.  Bison realized this gap and took matters into their own hands by developing a slick add on application they call the Appointment Queue (AQ) .  Trevor has written a nice blog entry detailing the application.

You can kind of get an idea of how the application works by reading through his blog entry, but after having seen it in action first hand with a demo he did for myself and our VP of operations, a simple screenshot doesn’t do it justice.   They have packed it full of a number of different features and best of all it is laid out in an intuitive fashion that is easy to understand.

The application is workflow driven, so you can setup one or more custom queues for customer service reps to work from. We want to be able to get creative on how we divide scheduling assignments up in addition to still leveraging the order information stored within TMW, which is exactly what this tool does.

Reps work from their specified queue(s) and set appointments making updates in the tool which feed back to TMW.  One really nice feature of the application is that it is setup to document the interactions that occur during the scheduling process, including exceptions such as not being able to get in touch with the appropriate party to make an appointment. It also shows statistics about receiving windows and feeds in notes and other data from TMW making it a truly integrated solution.

Bison is currently exploring avenues of making this application available to other TMWSuite users, so if you’re interested, it’s probably worth exploring some more.  It didn’t take me to long to figure out that Bison is a technology savvy trucking company with some bright IT talent!

After working with it for over two years, I can safely say that it is a very decent (and free) reporting solution for people running SQL Server.  For small to medium businesses who already own SQL, odds are with a little bit of experimentation, you can make reporting services work for you.

I keep observing more implementations with Reporting Services and even see it rolled out in some packaged applications as the reporting platform.  We just upgraded to the latest Great Plains build and they now have SQL Reporting Services canned reports you can deploy.

I got a call from one of the co-founders of the DotNetNuke platform today and they want to use a SQL Reporting Services Module I wrote to run their marketplace reporting.  I can attest from the traffic and interest in this piece of software alone that Reporting Services deployments are on an upward trend.

So if you asked me for a brain dump what SQL RS does well and what it can be better at, here’s the skinny.

The Pros of SQL RS

• Powered by web services & XML - The reports are published as Report Definition Language (RDL) files which are nothing more than XML documents describing the report.   You deploy these to a reporting services web services application.  Once there, you can use the canned web interface to access reports or you can integrate the reports into your applications or interface leveraging a control and the web service.  This gives the ultimate flexibility for how you want to present the reports contained in the reporting services repository. The diagram here gives a great visual on the reporting services architecture.

• Scheduling - Reporting Services includes a great scheduling mechanism for being able to schedule reports to be emailed or snapshot to a file share on a set schedule.  This is great for reports which you need to be distributed to a group of people on a timed basis.

• Exporting Capabilities - Perhaps one of the most used features of Reporting Services is the ability to export a report to a variety of formats.  You can export them as HTML, TIFF, PDF and even as Microsoft Excel.  This is great if a user wants to take a dataset returned in a report and do additional analysis, they can simply dump it to excel and go to town.

• Drilling & Linking - Reporting Services makes it easy to link reports together.  Say you have a grid of customers and the number of loads you hauled for that customer in a month and you had another report that showed the detail loads for a customer, you could link the customer ID in the summary report so that when clicked it drills to the detail report magically passing in the customer.  This allows seamless and intuitive navigation throughout the reports.

• Multiple Datasets & Sources - The ability to bring multiple queries into a single report so that a single report can contain data from a variety of sources is great.  The data source doesn’t even have to be SQL Server!

• Web Based - The canned interface is all web based which allows  you to publish reports to the web available for access everywhere.  If you have a desktop application you want to leverage the reports in, you can leverage the web service API to make that work as well.

• Free (sort of) - Can’t say enough about this one, if you are licensed on SQL 2000 or 2005, you already own this solution.

• Evolving - Do a Google sometime of SQL Reporting Services, it’s all over the place today and growing and evolving rapidly.  There are a ton of new features in the 2000 to 2005 build and the 2008 build is looking to follow right on that trend.  MS has put together a great starter kit which contains sample reports and good examples to get you started.

• Ad-Hoc - I put this here and on the flipside.  In SQL RS 2005 they added the ability to put a layer of abstraction on top of a data source which allows end-users to drag and drop objects to build reports on the fly using a web deployed tool called Report Builder.  I was very excited to see this feature released since ad-hoc analysis is typically a huge requirement for most reporting solutions.  You can read on to see why it’s also stated on the flipside.

• Canned Functions - There are a plethora of functions which you can leverage to format and manipulate data contained in a report.  Need something uppercase and trimmed and to do some math, no problem.

• Extensible - Need to execute some custom function to manipulate or format data?  Not a problem, you can extend a report by putting .NET code logic in the report to do just that.

The Flipside

• Lacks Advanced Features - Reporting Services is great for probably 90% of our reporting needs.  It does fall down in a few areas such as the graphing capabilities.  They exist, but if you wanted to generate more complex graphs that contain trend lines, multiple axis, etc., you will be hard pressed to do it. 

• Ad-Hoc - As mentioned, it’s on the flipside simply because it is a typical version 1.0 implementation.  It is great users can now build their own reports on the fly having the details for how this is done on the backend hidden from them, but it is weak.  They can only do the basics and the layout of the reports are pretty canned and not open to much customization.  This is probably good when users are just looking to query to get answers, but it does leave a lot to be desired by some power users.

• Visual Studio Report Creation - The main report designer is integrated in to Visual Studio.  This is great in that if you are a .NET developer, you’re intimately familiar with it, but if you are not, writing reports means you have somewhat of a learning curve since VS can be overwhelming.

• Interactivity - While it has gotten better in the latest release of SQL RS, the ability for users to start marking a report up has been crippled.  While they allow some sorts on the fly, doing things like re-arranging columns, conditional formatting, hiding data and other on the fly viewing functions are not available unless you open the report in the report builder or dump the data to excel and go from there.

• Loops - A traditional tricky condition that exists in non star schema designed data structures is the fact that loops exist within data.  That is you can take more than a single path to join tables together which offer different answers depending on which path you take.  How you handle loops is traditionally not of much concern until you try to enable ad-hoc analysis.  I’ve not seen an easy to use method for handling this in RS.

The bottom line is SQL RS is a rock solid and evolving solution.  I don’t regret one second our decision two years ago to standardize on it.  If you have SQL Server today and haven’t investigated it yet, I’d recommend checking it out.  This article doesn’t even talk about the sister solution of SQL Analysis Services…more to come on that when I get around to it.

Tags: DotNetNuke,, ModuleMasters,, SQL, Reporting,, SQL, Reporting, Services,, SQL, Server

XBAP is simply taking a .NET application and making it run in the browser.  In the olden days, you’d have to determine if you were going to write a desktop based application or a web application.  Web applications are not as robust and feature rich in the UI and presentation in addition to having many constraints being a stateless model, hence why most complex applications end up on the desktop.  That era is one step closer to being ushered out.  With XBAP, the gap that exists between web applications and full client applications is closing.

With the latest .NET application, you can simply write your feature rich application, and deploy it however you want.  You want it as a desktop application, no problem…or maybe you want it to run as a web application in the browser…again, no problem, that is the beauty of XBAP.

Of course there are some constraints with this model, for one, you have to have the .NET 3.5 framework on the client machine and it only works in IE…but this is a minor constraint for a majority of organizations since the .NET framework is largely deployed and growing everyday. 

You may be confused by all the hype that you have heard about the “flash killer” Silverlight released by Microsoft just recently.  Silverlight or (WPF/E Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) was introduced to enable feature rich data driven web applications.  The best way to differentiate Silverlight from XBAP is that Silverlight is basically a subset of the functionality contained within XBAP, which means XBAP is that much more powerful.  Chad Campbell did a great job summarizing the differences between XBAP and Silverlight in this post.

To give you an idea of some of the awesome things you can do, you can checkout the Woodgrove financial application demo that showcases the power of XBAP.  The capabilities of XBAP are all of those that you get in a full client application, however they run right in the browser. You get all the feature richness of a windows application.

Most people wonder what kind of paradigm shift this will cause when developing applications.  Business applications today are written to be client / server. That is all the data is stored in a centralized location and you have clients accessing the data and handling all of the UI (user interface). Many times these applications have robust desktop versions and slimmed down web versions…two totally separate development environments, code lines, etc. Now with .NET 3.5, the introduction of XAML and XBAP, you have the ability to develop a truly unified application, not splitting it due to the desired delivery methods.

While it sounds awesome, XBAP applications will be most powerful in intranet based environments where portability is not as large of a concern and control of the .NET framework distribution among a network can be done.  If you are designing an application for the masses, the scaled down Silverlight would be a better option, particularly if it needs to be run in a browser.

I know we will be rewriting some of our clunky web based applications using .NET 3.5 and deploying them as XBAP applications in addition to a few desktop apps we’d like to be able to deploy to the web.  Checkout xbap.org for more great information on XBAP!

Tags: XBAP, XAML, .NET, Silverlight