Ideas that worked and those that haven’t (yet)

Over the past year, I’ve released a few development techniques into the wild, not knowing if they would return to bite me or flourish. I’m happy to report that I’ve yet to be bitten. Here are the techniques that are starting to flourish:

• Hybrid CDT – I’m aware of this technique being deployed in at least 5 customer sites so far with great success.
• ProjectValidationRule – To my knowledge this is being used in 3 customer sites so far and I’ve already been getting enhancement requests which is a good sign.
• Using JQuery and Ajax in your site – To be honest, this technique shows a pretty basic pattern so knowing if my post spurred you to action or you came up with it on your own is difficult to say but I’m personally aware of 6 sites which use this or a variation and I’ve see a couple of very impressive uses of Ajax to implement things like inline form expansion to facilitate the entry of CDT data instead of using the standard popup. I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more examples of this approach over the coming months, including in the base Extranet product. I’m looking forward to the Ajax-driven choosers in Extranet 5.7, for example.

I also blogged about a couple of experiments I was trying which, unfortunately have yet to work out. They are:

• Modules and Solution support in Process Studio – For those of you unfamiliar with this feature, it was released as a “technology preview” in Extranet 5.6 (which basically means it hasn’t been verified to work in all cases). The goal of this feature is to allow you to be able to categorize your workflow elements into different modules and to define Solutions which are comprised of those modules. When you build a configuration update, you can select which solutions to include. It’s an exciting idea because, when it works, it will allow you to manage separate release schedules for each of your solutions that coexist in a single site. I gave it a try on a recent project and was able to identify a few issues which makes it unusable in its current version. This effort was useful though because we were able to both identify the issues and, through practice, suggest to the Engineering team the short list of fixes that would be required before it can be tried again. I’m still very excited about this feature and will definitely give it a go again when the few critical issues have been addressed.
• Object Model documentation approaches – I’ve blogged about various data modeling techniques as well as the importance of establishing your data model as early in the project as possible. One of the challenges in getting a model implemented is how to review the object model design before making the investment to actually implementing. I explored various tools using a few key evaluation objectives and eventually settle on two open source tools: StarUML and Doxygen. I was very pleased with the results when used as an initial design tool but less pleased with the fact that it wasn’t integrated into the overall implementation process. What was required was round-trip-engineering support. Once designed, it would be great to then auto-create or update the Project Types, Custom Data Types and Activity types in the development store. It would be equally nice to also publish the implemented model back into StarUML. I can see how both could be accomplished but failed to find the time to make it happen. I still use this technique for initial model design and review but it becomes too costly to maintain once development is underway. One day, I hope to find the time to add round-trip support. In the meantime, the Applications team is doing some promising work to be able to generate eType reference pages in real time. I like this approach because those reference pages are always accurate. The downside is that the model needs to actually be implemented before those pages will work and reviewing a design after implementing seems a bit counterintuitive. The value in that technique dramatically increases after the model has been reviewed and implemented for real.

There are a couple of other techniques which I hope will be useful but have not heard about since released into the wild:

• Extranet to Extranet Single Sign-On. I’d love to hear if you have put this technique into practice.
• Script Editor Update – One of me earliest posts, It’s been fun to stumble upon customer sites where this has been put into practice. It wasn’t perfect by any means and I still have the list of improvements some of you have suggested and hope to implement them some day. I verify that it works on Extranet 5.6 and if it doesn’t publish a new version. If you already know if it does, please let me know.

So, no real failures but a couple of experiments that need more time to mature and a couple that haven’t flourished…yet. The efforts that flourished are enough for me to want to keep throwing ideas your way. If you find them useful (or even if you don’t), let me know. I’d love the feedback.

Cheers!