Griffon Solutions - Startup Diary

About four years ago my partner Marie-Claude and I started developing some custom ASP.NET websites for small businesses.

The company name - Griffon Solutions - comes from a lovely little village in the Gaspesie region of Eastern Quebec called l'Anse-au-Griffon.

What began as a part-time effort on evenings and weekends slowly started to get a little more organized over time. Two years ago, before we moved to Australia, we registered the company in Quebec.

Our reason for coming back from the Lucky Country last year was to focus more on this company, with the eventual goal of having a fun and challenging full-time web solutions business (software and consulting services) that we could run from anywhere.

We'd love to have an "open source business" - not just by writing Open Source software but by transparently sharing what we're up to, and how we're going about it, and learning as much as possible from the web community as we go.

Website Redesign

We’ve just launched a redesign of our website, www.griffonsolutions.com. We had a couple of pages online before, but the site was put together very very quickly as a placeholder, and needed a lot more love. In fact I’ve always been reluctant to publicize it :) As the old saying goes, “the cobbler’s children run barefoot”, and we never made the time to fix up the site, until now.

As a result of this SharePoint blog, I was contacted by Mario Hernandez, at Designs Drive. Mario has been looking into SharePoint and wanted to know a bit more about the LDAP integration I’ve written about. After a few email conversations he was kind enough to volunteer some of his time to help us redesign our website.

Marie-Claude and I picked a graphic design template we were happy with, and then Mario worked hard to make sure it was transformed into valid Xhtml and CSS. We all felt it was important to adhere to web standards and avoid table layouts if at all possible. We’re very happy with the end result.

Thanks so much, Mario, for contributing your time and your knowledge to us!

I think this is an interesting trend, especially in tough economic times…Here we have a couple of guys working in Los Angeles and Quebec who have never met, trading their IT skills and time to each other online. I know we’re not the first ever to do this, but it shows how small the world is, and how many opportunities there are for people to collaborate and work together.

The Framework

Incidentally, our new website is built on a custom .NET web application framework I’ve been working on constantly for the last 5 years.

The framework has been very much a labour of love. Sometimes it has been very frustrating and dispiriting, while at (most) other times the work has been fascinating, challenging, and deeply educational.

I’m finishing up the architecture on it and aiming to release it this Autumn as supported Open Source (probably Apache 2). This means that other people can use it (even in proprietary software).

In plain English, the platform has two goals:

1. Provide a foundation of Enterprise-level capabilities to any .NET application.
2. Integrate with popular software, databases, and web services in a simple, stable, secure, and flexible way 

It is standards-based and fully multilingual right out of the box. It uses NHibernate so it can support most databases without any modification.

From a technical perspective I’m still nailing down the shipping features, but currently it includes all of the following:

• C# 3.0 / .NET 3.5 Framework
• Generic business Entities to model common web software concepts such as users, websites, documents, and web pages. These are implemented via interfaces so you should be able to integrate them with your existing code without much modification
• Common metadata and provider information for all Entities, such as Creator, Date Last Modified, and Data Source
• Basic LINQ querying for all Entities
• Entities can be exposed via a variety of formats including JSON and XML, or through web services (such as REST and SOAP) or web feeds (RSS and Atom)
• Full multilingualism down to the level of an individual piece of data
• N-tier codebase, using object oriented best practices
• NHibernate database-agnostic data storage
• log4Net for robust logging
• Application Integration layer to make it easier to consume and provide information from a wide variety of services, software, and other sources (such as RSS and Atom feeds)
• OAuth authentication for authenticating to web services such as YouTube or Google
• Some strongly typed web service managers and web controls to make it easy to use popular services like LinkedIn, Yahoo FireEagle, and Google
• Strongly-typed, standardized file access to a variety of file storage sources including Amazon S3, Http web servers, FTP servers, and Windows file systems
• Uses the .NET Provider Model (especially for Roles and Membership)
• Presentation layer with prebuilt base controls, pages, and master pages, as well as some server controls
• Includes basic website project with Robots.txt, Master Pages, sitemap, XRDS file, and Admin area to make it easy to start up and manage a new website

I’ve been using various versions of this framework in production since 2003 / 2004 so it is tested and stable (my current internal release number is 2.7), but it’s nowhere near where I eventually hope it can be, which is why I’m hoping to build a thriving community around it.

Right now I’m in talks with a group that wants to evaluate using it to integrate their software with a popular web messenging service. If you too would like to evaluate the framework around the Q3/ Q4 period, drop me an email (address below) and we can have a chat.

I’ll provide more updates on this framework during the summer, as it nears RTM.

The Future

Obviously there’s a lot going on. In the future, this blog will speak not just about SharePoint and related technologies, but about business and technology issues in general. I hope to learn as much as I share, and I hope above all that the blog remains interesting and that you enjoy reading it :)

Cheers,

Nick

P.S. You can always email me at nick@griffonsolutions.com. 

Ottawa SharePoint User Group – PerformancePoint

Yesterday’s Ottawa SharePoint User Group was a demonstration of Microsoft PerformancePoint, given by Microsoft Canada’s Olivier van Brandeghem. PerformancePoint is a Business Intelligence product that was built on top of SharePoint (MOSS Enterprise only).

Olivier began by explaining Microsoft’s strategy of making Business Intelligence available across the organization. He pointed out that the people who tend to see Key Performance Indicators and Dashboards are be the people who are least likely to act on them directly – so it is helpful to make these sorts of dashboards available as widely as possible. He argued that this form of Business Intelligence is collaborative or “democratized”.

In order to allow this, the technical complexities (of installing the BI product, managing it, producing OLAP cubes and other data sources, and making and deploying dashboards and reports) have to be reduced. This is a key goal of PerformancePoint, and Olivier therefore focused his demo on showing how easy it was to use.

As I mentioned, PerformancePoint was previously a standalone product. As of today, April 1 (International Conficker Day!), it can no longer be purchased separately – it is part of the SharePoint Enterprise Client Access License which means if you own Enterprise MOSS, you get PerformancePoint.

This is a huge win for clients who love the idea of dashboarding and BI but can’t afford even more software licensing in addition to their SharePoint fees. It also fits well into the Enterprise SharePoint space, which also provides basic KPIs, Excel Services, Forms Services, and the underappreciated Business Data Catalogue.

Additionally, Reporting Services can be bundled with SharePoint “natively”, so the Enterprise product fit is very good. PerformancePoint is also part of recent Microsoft moves from licensing by servers, to licensing by services. This is due to the Software+Services initiative I blogged about here.

So what exactly does PerformancePoint give you? Here’s a quick list:

• Scorecards
• Analytics
• Maps of business data
• Data Linked Images
• Search
• Advanced Filters
• Predictive KPIs (“You will come into some money”)
• Planning Data

One nice feature is the Central KPI management, where you can set the KPIs in one place and share them all over a portal.

Olivier also demonstrated how Visio diagrams can be connected to KPIs. The demonstration he showed was of a hospital, which was actually a very intuitive way of showing all these capabilities. The Visio diagram for instance was a map of hospital rooms showing infection rate, patient turnover, and other metrics, and the various rooms of the hospital turned red or yellow or green depending on the KPI result.

It seems easy for end users to create their own reports, using various templates. Olivier mentioned the use of MasterPages so there can be a level of consistency in the branding (Reporting Services, are you listening?).

Strategy Map scorecards are available. These are dynamic combinations of KPIs - almost like a workflow or flow chart - that give a more realistic flow of key business metrics. As an example, if you have some red KPIs at the beginning of a business process, your whole process might be flagged red or yellow; but if everything is alright except for a few optional business metrics that are red, your strategy map may still be Go Go Green.

PerformancePoint ships with some built-in web parts that allow ad-hoc KPI manipulation. Generally they provide Master-Detail views and some charting or rendering components such as pivot tables. Each allows export to Excel as you would expect, where you can drill down into even more detail or take the data offline. For more information on the native SharePoint Excel / BI offerings, check out this blog post from the Sydney User Group.

The Advanced Analytics tool called ProClarity also ships with PerformancePoint. Microsoft purchased these guys in 2006 with the goal of beefing up their Business Intelligence offering. ProClarity gives you open access to the OLAP cube to manipulate and report on data. Although the tool is separate in this version, in the next version it will be tightly integrated into the rest of the toolset.

PerformancePoint supports a variety of data sources, including Relational Databases, but the obvious source is an OLAP cube. In response to a question from the audience, Olivier stressed that the goal is not to require SQL Server Analytics, but any OLAP cube provider. Microsoft understands that companies that have made big investments in some other BI vendor, such as Cognos, won’t be willing to shift all their BI bits into another vendor, simply to get dashboarding. So their goal is simply to help surface the existing data into SharePoint.

Olivier also mentioned that Enterprise Project Management, the latest version of Microsoft Project Server, now uses OLAP cubes to help report on project metrics. Anybody using PerformancePoint and EPM therefore should spend just a bit of time putting these metrics to use.

One thing that startled me a bit was the licensing discussion. Olivier mentioned that you can mix Standard and Enterprise User CALs. To be honest this recommendation has tended to vary depending on who you talked to at Microsoft. Sometimes Microsoft representatives say no, everybody in the organization has to use Enterprise CALs if anybody does; other times the response is yes, you can mix them up as long as they are tracked somehow. An official FAQ seems to imply the latter. In any case with dedicated Site Collections it’s pretty easy to lock down functionality to a select few so this is achievable in SharePoint.

The tight integration of PerformancePoint with SharePoint is part of a growing trend I mentioned a couple of years ago. More and more products will end up on top of, or talking to, the SharePoint stack. This is the whole point of having a platform. We can expect much more evidence of this in the next release.