Francis Dion on Software Process

Best Wishes for 2007

Back to blogging after a little break!

2006 was both a fun and challenging year for me.

On the personal front, I turned 40 that year, which gave me an opportunity to reflect on life, health, family and all that usual stuff. After the expected mumbling on the "downward slope", "the beginning of the end" and similar thoughts, I got around to make significant changes in my lifestyle such as daily exercises and eating better. Striving for a better overall balance, I lost some extra pounds and I am happy to report that I've probably never been healthier of my entire life.

Good things happened on the business side also, with significant consulting and outsourcing contracts from companies like Bell Canada, AON and government agencies. This was also a fantastic year for xpertdoc, our client-reporting tool, with a very significant partnership established with Farm Credit Financial Partners inc. in the United States and new ties being established with Microsoft.

2007 promises to be even better, first with the launch of xpertdoc 2007, a complete overhaul of our flagship product that already takes advantage of the new capabilities just introduced in Microsoft Office 2007.

As far as new resolutions, one thing you can expect from me is more posts on Microsoft Office,  SharePoint and workflow services, technologies that are integral part of our business plan for the coming years.

Best wishes of health, happiness and prosperity to you and your loved ones!

Buy vs Build

Back when I was a corporate IT staffer, I used to hate arguments such as this one, confident in the belief (like everybody else in this business) that we could do better than anything that existed out there.

Now that I am a bit (ergh, quite a bit :-) more seasoned, my views on this topic have changed radically. Although one could point that this change of heart is more than a little self-serving considering that I am a supplier of a packaged client reporting solution, I must say that the following findings match perfectly what corporate clients I deal with are telling me with increasing conviction.

According to Gartner inc., buying packaged software (as opposed to building custom solutions) is now the dominant trend amongst corporate IT departments. Furthermore, “… build activities within organizations should be focused on quick and inexpensive ‘hits’, as well as projects that just cannot be purchased at any price”.

Here is a quick check-list to help decide whether to buy or build:

1. Can a proven, packaged solution be purchased?
2. What is the best use of development resources?
3. Does the solution or function add a competitive edge or advantage?

The last question is of particular interest to me. Contrary to what once was common wisdom, not all IT initiatives (not even most, actually) are a source of market differentiation and competitive advantage.  Therefore, businesses should focus their resources on what they do best, which is serving their customers, and leverage the R&D investments of specialized supplier for commoditized IT functions.

By the way, did I mentioned that automating the creation of business documents is a commoditized IT function in which we have invested significant R&D efforts? ;-)

Microsoft Partner Program

Process Academy is joining the Microsoft Office 2007 Touchdown Program. This program provides us access to early code, exclusive information and training from Microsoft, enabling us to assist our clients in taking advantage of Office 2007 new technologies:

• The new XML file format (DOCX)
• The new User Interface Extensibility Model
• Server Side Components

The next release of XpertDoc, code named XDX, will feature many of these new capabilities, confirming its status as the tool of choice for automating document creation business processes.

XpertBuildDoc 1.0.3

The version 1.0.3 of our free Add-in for documenting Visual Studio 2005 projects now supports Sandcastle Agust 2006 CTP.

It is available for download from www.processacademy.ca/Download/XpertBuildDoc.zip.

View the release notes, ask for support and suggest features from our Discussion Forum.

News Letter August 29, 2006

In this issue:

1. Announcements: XpertBuildDoc and XpertDoc Studio 2006 SR2
2. Did you know? Support by and for the community through our Forums
3. Tip: Printing large files
4. Coming up: Office 2007 and XpertDoc 10
5. Survey: What version of Microsoft Office are you using and what are your plans for 2007

Announcements: XpertBuildDoc and XpertDoc Studio 2006 SR2

Last week, we released a free utility for generating the documentation of Visual Studio 2005 projects.

• Read the news release.
• Visit our community forum.
• Download it now.

This week, we released XpertDoc Studio 2006 SR2. This incremental update to our Word Document Generator features Visual Studio integration and better interoperability with Microsoft Outlook.

• Check our Knowledge Base article for the detailed release notes.
• Visit our Download Center to request a demonstration license.
• Go to our Online Store to buy it today!

Did you know? Support by and for the community through our Forums

Our forums are seeing increased action these days and they are becoming the best place to look for information and support. While the Knowledge Base is where we put important announcements and other relevant articles, the Discussion Forum is where YOU can ask questions, post replies and submit feature requests. Be sure to visit them both often for we are committed to steadily increasing the wealth of information you can find there.

Tip: Printing large files

One of the key benefit of XpertDoc Studio is its ability to generate high volume documents very rapidly. How rapidly, do you ask? Well, we're talking about millions of pages per day.

When dealing with very large documents, one have to make sure they keep them to a reasonnable size so that they can be efficiently rendered and printed by Microsoft Word. Over the years, we and our clients have figured through experimentations that the "optimal" document size for maximizing printer output speed is between 5 and 10 thousand pages per documents. Depending on actual content, the size of those files might be between 50 to 100 megabytes.

One of our client recently brought to our attention a very odd behavior of the Microsoft Word printing engine. Printing the exact same (large) document sometimes took as little as 10 minutes and, at other time, would take as much as ... 10 hours!

It turns out that Word is at least 60 times more efficient in formatting and paginating a large document when it is first given the "opportunity" to load in memory the printer driver and/or its printing modules. After extensive testing we were able to isolate the following sequence of actions which "forced" Word to consistently complete printing at the fastest performance level:

1. Open MS-Word (empty, blank document)
2. Print this empty document on the target printer.
3. Without closing MS-Word, open a very large document.
4. Print it.

Watch our Knowledge Base in the coming weeks for the complete results of our performance analysis for printing very large Word documents.

Coming up: Office 2007 and XpertDoc 10

Microsoft is getting ready to ship the latest installment of its ubiquitous productivity suite, Office 2007. It is currently available (for evaluation purposes) as a Beta 2, with the production release scheduled for the end of 2006 / beginning of 2007. Amongst the new features included in this version, of particular interest are:

• A new compressed native format which significantly reduces (by more than 50%) documents file size.
• An improved user interface.
• More complete, robust and secured automation options.

We too are preparing for our next major release. Our plan is to launch XpertDoc Studio 2007 in time for the general availability of Microsoft Office 2007. Code-named XDX, the 10th version of our document generator will integrate all the technological advancements that we introduced in our XpertDoc Enterprise API as well as some new features geared at making life even easier for our larger corporate clients. Stay tune for further announcements!

Survey: What version of Microsoft Office are you using and what are your plans for 2007

As part of our continuous commitment to always serve you as best as possible, we are conducting a survey regarding your current and planned installation of Microsoft Office.

You can answer the survey online by going to our Discussion Forum where you will find two "polls":

Which version of Microsoft Word / Office are you currently using? and
When do you think you'll be upgrading to Microsoft Word/Office 2007?

You have to register as a member of the forum (it's free!) and log-in in order to cast your vote there. Alternatively, you can also send us you response by e-mail

Francis Dion
The Process Academy

102-1160 RUE LEVIS
LACHENAIE (QC)
CANADA J6W 5S6

North America (Toll-Free): 1-866-961-9111
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Blog: FrancisDion.Blogs.com
Web Site: www.ProcessAcademy.ca
XpertDoc: www.processacademy.ca/Products
Email: NewsLetter@ProcessAcademy.ca

Word Document Generator – New release available

XpertDoc Studio 2006 Service Release 2 is now available for download from our web site. It is an incremental update that straightens its position as the tool of choice for high-volume and/or complex Word Document production needs.

We are also readying ourselves for XpertDoc Studio 10 (code named XDX) which we expect to ship before the end of this year. A lot of exciting stuff coming up with this release and I can’t wait to let you know what we have in store for you (OK, my staff is begging me to wait so I’ll listen to them this time :-).

Turns out our little venture in the free software world is already having a positive yet unforeseen effect. XpertBuildDoc (I know, we’ve already confused some users between XpertDoc and XpertBuildDoc) is attracting people to our forums, which in turn is motivating us to monitor them more closely and to post ourselves there on a more regular basis. I just love these “virtuous circles” of positive feedback loops!

An Add-in for documenting Visual Studio 2005 Projects

Pretty cool stuff going at the Process Academy these days.

On Monday we released XpertBuildDoc, a Visual Studio 2005 Add-in that generates HTML Help documentation for C# and VB.Net projects. It is straightforward yet pretty slick graphical user interface and has many nifty features like multi-project selection and Visual Studio Console output. The story of why and how we came to release this product is a good example of the spirit of the team here and of what we stand for.

It all started when we needed to generate the documentation a custom release of our Enterprise XpertDoc API. The original version of our API was based on the DotNet Framework 1.1 and we very satisfied using the NDoc open source project. Unfortunately, NDoc will not support DotNet 2.0 framework on which our latest API release is based, so we needed to find an alternative.

Turns out that Microsoft had just released SandCastle, a command-line utility for documenting DotNet 2.0 projects. This still being an alpha release, we couldn’t find any wrapper to alleviate the inherent pain of a command-line interface.

Adversity being the mother of ingenuity, we rolled-up our sleeves and decided to (a) dream up exactly the tool we would have like to have readily available, (b) learn how to write Visual Studio 2005 Add-ins, (c) implement our “vision” as an Add-in and (d) make it available, free of charge, to the community of DotNet developers. All that in about… 2 business days! Now if that is not being an Agile company, I don’t know what is. :-)

Although we’re not expecting to build any kind of a business around this little tool, it was both a lot of fun and a very good learning experience.

Many thanks to Yannic (and Louis-Philippe also) for another job well done!

XpertDoc News

The last year or so has been extremely busy for us at the Academy. We've been doing consulting work in process improvement but most of our efforts went into the development of custom software solutions based on our powerful XpertDoc technology. This has allowed us to see our product from the most important of all perspectives: that of our customers and users.

Although the process consulting and custom development side of our business is still going strong, we have restructured our resources internally and I am happy to report excellent progress on the next releases of XpertDoc.

We're first going to release XpertDoc 8.6, which will be the last incremental improvement on the "8" family. Apart from some minor usability adjustments, XpertDoc 8.6 introduces a new licensing mechanism that will make it much easier to deploy your solutions on secured Web servers. We're at the final packaging stage for this release and you can expect it "very soon". :-)

Next comes XpertDoc 9 which marks a major step forward in the evolution of document generation technology. We are very excited about this one because it includes capabilities that we've been wanting - and that you've been asking - for some time, including 100% managed code DotNet templates and Java templates. I'll tell you more about it later. For now, just know that we're advanced enough in its development that we can commit to a full blown release in September of this year. Anyway, the team here is so thrilled that I couldn't retain it any longer even if I wanted to!