Michael Assad's Blog

Microsoft's cloud computing environment has been released including the Azure operating system, .NET Services, and SQL Azure.

Agility allows you to add a little personalization to your site.

The name Agility comes from the flexibility of the platform to do lots of things that other CMS systems can't. 

Facebook recently made some big product roadmap announcements at the latest Facebook Developer Garage including the Open Graph API.

If you're working with Bing Maps, the Interactive SDK gives you a leg up on how to learn and code all of the features and functionality.

Facebook has announced a compelling new version of Facebook Connect that provides quicker setup and translations.

Delvinia Interactive and Edentity have won a WebAward for 'Outstanding Achievement in Web Development' in the 'Non-Profit Standard of Excellence' category for the Canadian Opera Company website.

Agility has been used to manage content embedded in Flash objects for a while. However, the Five Axis site is the first example of an Agility-managed site that is 100% Flash - navigation, content and all.

Novell launched Mono in 2004 as a platform for building and deploying .NET applications in Linux. MonoTouch is designed to extend that capability to iPhone development.

The WebKit web browser platform, made famous by the iPhone but also used on the Palm Pre, Symbian and Android phones, will now be coming to the BlackBerry.

My favourite line: 'First of all, I have to keep repeating that open source isn't gratis ("think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer").'

GigaOM, has a concise article on Google Chrome OS and a great discussion that follows.

Read product reviews from Agility customers.

Bing has released a toolkit and API for displaying search results on 404 (page not found) error pages.

This nifty utility allows you to place a talking avatar on your site to guide your visitors through the functionality and navigation.

Talk about thinking outside the box.  This is one of the coolest TV ads I've seen a while.  It provides instant value to the consumer while creating the perfect association with the product.

The Google Translator Toolkit combines automated translation with 'crowdsourcing' so actual people can review and edit machine generated translations.

Microsoft has released a toolkit that will simplify basic SEO tasks like making it easier to build a site index and robots.txt file.

I've recently joined Twitter and find it quite useful for staying on top of the latest tech news and for sparking ideas from my friends and colleagues.  Still haven't tried it?  See if TIME Magazine can convince you of its value.

We have posted an update to our site that includes a new and improved blog.

Just a reminder to the Agility developers and power users about how to set the Preview settings on a shared content list.  If the settings are not correct, the list and items in the list will not preview correctly.

Now that Agility CMS supports Amazon S3, we will start storing more and more data on this cloud storage environment.  Here are some useful tools to help access your S3 data.  You can use any of these tools alone or with your your Agility account.

How does Agility stack up against OpenText WCM (formally RedDot) - one of the most mature and best known content management systems?  According to Andre Gaulin, Director of Web Operations for Cineplex, very well.

CMS Wire picks up on the new features from the March launch of Agility.

Chad Auld, former core developer of Mambo and founder of Mambo fork project MiaCMS explains why the new CMS is better than its parent - and how the Mambo Foundation has some soul searching to do.

Display the fields that you want to see on your list and change the default sort column in under a minute.

IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and others are pushing a web services specification that will provide a standard way for applications to read data from any content management repository.

Open Text has formally announced the termination of the RedDot brand.  What does this mean for RedDot customers?  Hopefully no more than a little up sell pressure from the ECM vendor.

Great news for Earth Rangers, for Canada, and for the world!  The Toronto Region Conservation Authority won the bid in 2007 to host the international secretariat.

Agility has been listed on the Capterra catalog of software products.  Capterra is a leading source for information about technology vendors across a broad spectrum of categories.

CMS Wire is one of my favourite sources for CMS news.  They cover a very broad spectrum of all things content and social networking.  This month, they have continued to provide commentary on our monthly update process.

You may find a glitch in the Agility Rich Text Module content editor where you can't seem to enter an extra line feed between two paragraphs of text.  Here is the workaround:

The premise of the article is that usability is about more than simplicity, consistency and stability - it's about control.  Users are happiest when they are in control of the software and not the other way around.

In our Agility browser speed tests, FireFox comes out on top. FireFox 3 in particular is the best bet.

James Robertson from Step Two Designs in Australia posted a great article on CMS usability.

The staging and published modes in Agility are a great way to preview changes to the site before they go live.  However, as any Agility user knows, publishing content can sometimes take a few extra precious seconds that could be used for something more productive.

When a new web technology is introduced, I always take notice and try to learn as much about it as possible.  Being ahead of the curve on web technology is, after all, our business and competitive advantage.

CMS Watch has posted their trend analysis of Software as a Service Web Content Management (SaaS WCM) Vendors for 2009.  The report focuses on the top three SaaS WCM tools out there: Clickability, CrownPeak and OmniUpdate.  Of the three, the first two compete more directly with Agility.

CMS Critic has posted a good summary article about Agility:

This is good news for us as we continue to expand the reach of our hosted Agility CMS software.

For all those VPN connectors, this trick is amazing! Especially helpful for those of you on Vista:

Working day in and day out building online tools, technologies and websites makes the voting process seem extremely archaic.

It's now easier than ever to get set up and developing on the Microsoft ASP.NET Platform.

Our clients are asking for it and so is the public - "93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media..." - Boston Globe

Last week Scott Guthrie, the inventor of ASP.NET, announced that jQuery will be built into Visual Studio along with enhancements.

Microsoft has released some information about the latest version of their web platform and flagship development tool.

Another "why didn't I think of that?" moment brought to you by Nintendo.

For the past few months, I have been trying to reconcile our surge of business with the recent downturn in the economy.  My theory is that as the economy dips, advertising dollars go digital.

Google, Facebook and Myspace are all vying for ultimate friend-list supremecy with Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Availability.

Can you be sure that your application is going to be easy to maintain and will scale to meet demand?  Twitter probably thought so, but their Ruby on Rails site is proving difficult to manage.

This spring, Sprout and SpringWidgets help to bring widgets to Web pages and to the desktop.

The MySpace platform is now live.  Check out the top 10 applications as of Friday March 14, 2008.

The YouTube platform has been available for a few weeks now.  Developers from Clearspring, "the widget platform", have demonstrated how to use their tools to propogate YouTube videos.

KickApps has announced tighter integration with YouTube that will allow KickApps users to grab and post videos from YouTube.

All users of Microsoft Office can now use an software service tool provided by Microsoft to share documents with anyone on the Web.

One of the most painful parts of building multi-lingual Web sites is managing the translation of content.  Clay Tablet makes software to streamline this process that hooks into your content management system of choice.

The PartnerPoint FaceBook Application allows Microsoft Partners (and anyone on Facebook) to tap into the partner community via a discussion board, member directory, Microsoft news and more

The Dojo Javascript Toolkit provides javascript code to add funky animations to your Web sites and Web applications.

I'm all for using someone elses

Finally, my open source friends can't make fun of us for being locked out a Facebook development.  Microsoft and Facebook officially announce a partnership that ties the Facebook API to Microsoft development tools.  Best of all, it's free!  I guess $240 million dollars (of Microsoft investment money) still goes a long way.

I love it when we all get along.  It's especially cool when seemingly arch enemies get along.  Mono makes it possible to develop ASP.NET applications on Mac and deploy them on Linux.

Looking for a way to spice up your Web applications?  Getting demands from your users for more AJAX?  The Gaia AJAX Widgets might be for you.

Facebook Pages will provide businesses with a new home on the social Web.  They are really just Facebook groups that allow applications and friends.

After a hiatus of almost three years, Ad Lounge, a networking organization for Toronto communications professionals, returned with a sold-out launch party Oct. 2.   Edentity was there and Marketing Mag caught me!

Tony Burne from CMS Watch provides an excellent framework for deciding on a Content Management System.

By now, we all have about 20 email newsletters coming into our inbox every week.  Some are useful, some are annoying.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could choose what information we consume and when?

How can search engines properly index a site that uses AJAX to keep everything on one page?  This is a question that has plagued us since our first ASP.NET AJAX sites over a year ago.  Our good friend Nikhil at Microsoft has the answer - and it covers SilverLight too!

Another year, another Profit Hot 50 ranking.  This year, I was able to attend the annual GrowthCamp event that congratulates the years winners.  As hard as it was to take three days off from running the business, it was well worth it.

Being a Microsoft partner, we naturally lean toward Internet Explorer.  Over the past few years, we have cursed Firefox for its different (read standard) way of rendering HTML because of the added work of formatting sites for both it and IE 6, the clear leader of the day.  Now that the latest versions of both browsers are firmly in use, and Web techologies are changing, we are starting to realize that Internet Explorer is no longer the be-all-end-all.

Okay, it's a dated question, but one that still plagues many.  Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media - the fabled computer book publisher - posts this very concise definition.  I guess he's allowed to have the honours since he helped coin the phrase.

Microsoft is bringing sexy back with these fun Silverlight examples.

If you aren't one of millions of people spending too much time on Facebook, you've at least heard of it.  It has taken Canada by storm after rapid growth among the American University crowd.  Like any physical or virtual desitination that attracts eyeballs, marketers are taking notice.  Here's a few notes on how ASP.NET can help you capitalize on the latest social networking juggernaut.

The king of online retail is throwing its mighty brand name behind another Web services play.  Can they compete on the home turf of eBay, Google and Microsoft?

Contrary to my last post about Google, here is an excellent Google Web service.  Google Maplets allows you to place pins on the Google map to anything you can think of.  Obvious examples are things like gas stations, restaurants and hotels, but there are some other very creative examples popping up.

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web

I've been running Windows Vista on my home PC for about three months now, and I'm still waiting for the "Wow".  Sure, I can play my MP3s from any file folder that contains them and I can view PC content on my Xbox, but these features are more like "it's about time" than "Wow".

Is it me, or is the Google logo popping up way too much lately.  Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge Google fan.  But I also believe that a company should focus on what it does best.  In Google's case, that is clearly search (and search related things).  To me, anything Google does that stretches beyond their core search offering is awkward, boring and competing against much better alternatives.

Web-based applications are launching at an alarming rate.  We all hear about the new Google services, but for every Google Web application, there are 20 independent companies doing the same thing.

KickApps has a great concept:  Plug social networking and user generated content into your branded site.  Users can upload videos, create their own blogs, and interact with other users - all within an interface that mixes your brand with a Facebook/YouTube hybrid.

PollDaddy is a great new tool for adding polls anywhere on your site or blog in minutes.  I created this poll while I was waiting for people to gather for a meeting this morning.  Add polls to your Web site, Blogs, MySpace and more with ease!

Demofuse is the first non-Flash based demo / tutorial tool that I have seen and I really like it.  It uses overlays to highlight areas of a page and describe what's going on.  Demofuse is far less expensive than Flash for creating Web demos of either a site or an application.  Best of all, if you change the content of your site or application, your Demofuse demo automatically updates because it's completely decoupled.

Over the course of 20 days in May and June, the community of Webware.com users voted for its favorite Web applications. These are the results: the top 100 Web apps, 10 in each of 10 categories, determined by Webware readers and the fans of the sites that made the final cut.

Our Agility Content Management System falls under the 'Structured Publishing' paradigm according to Seth Gottlieb, a CM Professionals board member and authority on the topic.  This makes it ideal for applications where sites where the presentation is very customized or your content is being broadcast to different media such as Web, Mobile and Social Networking Widgets (e.g. Facebook applications).

When you think of Internet TV or video, the first site that jumps to mind is YouTube.  Rightly so given the huge number of movies and users that they have amassed.

This year's Mesh conference was another success.  Highlights included panel discussions with Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist and and Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch.