I get a LOT of emails from a variety of industry sites that I opted into, but I admit that many go unopened.  Well, this morning from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, I received one with the title "Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?"   Being chest deep in the planning stages of a few SharePoint intranet projects, it was worth the look and it paid off to help clarify some thoughts our team has been batting around.  Whether you are building a public website or an intranet, it does ...

Was a tough week for Adobe when both Steve Jobs and Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, both came out questioning various aspects of Flash.    Well, some disclosures are in order...Northridge is a Microsoft partner and we use a lot of their technology.  We also do a good bit of Flash development.    Both Jobs and Hachamovitch hit on the reliability, security, and performance issues of Flash.  Yes, there are some of those for sure, but there are certain t ...

Join Northridge’s Dottie Hodges and Eric Werner at the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) Nonprofit Technology Converence (NTC) this April 8-10, 2010  here in Atlanta!   We’ve helped develop two great sessions on the conference agenda, and would love to see you there.  We’re also going to be onsite for the whole conference so if you’d like to set up a time to chat, drop us an email. Here’s a quick glimpse into our sessions: Architecting Your Site For Search Engine Performance: And ...

In a previous post we introduced the Northridge SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle, which we identified as having five stages: Request, Standup, Adoption, Auditing, and Archiving. In this post we will focus on the second of these: standing up new SharePoint sites, one of the most common activities to take place in a SharePoint intranet, but also a key governance topic.   In that previous post, we briefly described the Standup stage this way: What is the actual process for standing up a n ...

As Northridge has developed various SharePoint-based business solutions for clients, and assisted clients in a consulting capacity with SharePoint strategy and governance, we have developed a model that we call the SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle. This model addresses one of the most important SharePoint governance concerns for perhaps the most important element of SharePoint-based solutions: the site. The model most frequently comes into play in an intranet or extranet context, but coul ...

Our own Atlanta is the host city for the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference this coming April.  Northridge needs your help BY FRIDAY to vote on our sessions for the agenda! Thousands of nonprofits and nonprofit technology professionals will gather in our fair city to share ideas, successes, and inspiration while many more will participate remotely via webcasts, webinars, and feeds.  We have a lot to share with conference goers, and think you will agree!  We have several sessions up for ...

2009 and 2010 will be remembered as the time when the words "search" and "Microsoft" became closely associated in the minds of enterprise technology customers, vendors, and developers. In addition to the consumer-facing splash Microsoft has achieved with the innovative Bing, Microsoft has also been making major investments in its search offerings to businesses, government entities, and non-profits--both through internal R&D and a key acquisition. In this post, I will b ...

On September 1, 2009 Microsoft announced the availability of a preview release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the latest in Microsoft's line of embedded/compact editions of the Windows operating system. This allows manufacturers of devices such as point-of-sale kiosks, point-of-service handhelds, and other thin client devices to preview the latest Windows advances, including "hundreds of feature packages based on latest innovations for Windows 7."   Prior to adopting the " ...

The world of analytics continues to evolve from basic traffic stats to more behavioral indicators. Well, enter the newest of analytics...Sentiment Analysis. With all of the user-participation online with ratings, comments, and so on, there is a wealth of "feelings" about brands and products online.  Some companies have begun to analyze this data to get a sense of how people feel about a movie, a product, or a company. While there is still some limitations about how the technology tr ...

A paradigm shift is underway for how .NET solution developers work with identity and authentication. The shift is not only in the tools and recommended design patterns for validating user identity (authentication) and managing role-based permissions for what a user is allowed to do (authorization). While many of the seeds and shoots for this change have been underway for some time, critical mass is near.   The paradigm shift is from a domain-based orientation to a claims-based orientation. ...