Search giants like Google and Bing provide powerful features that allow you to do great things with search. But, do you know about the possibilities available with SharePoint search? We’ve pulled together 10 ways to help you make your SharePoint search shine. You might be surprised at all of the exciting new features available with SharePoint search. Our SharePoint Architect, Chaitu Madala, shares his insight on SharePoint's top features. Read the full article on CMSWire.com! 10 Features That Will Make Your SharePoint Search Shine Continue reading

Today, organizations still make far too many decisions on their website based on imperfect information, with no way to measure effectiveness. With proper data collection and analytics tools by way of A/B and/or multivariate testing, experiments can be a powerful way to help your organization make better, more informed decisions. In a recent Ironworks and Sitecore webinar, “Know What Works – How Testing Can Save You Time, Increase Conversion, and Improve Morale,” Geoff Harper of Ironworks and Peter Fogelsanger of Sitecore walked attendees through real-life scenarios on how A/B and multivariate testing can help your organization: Save time by building... Continue reading

The GPL and LGPL are both over 20 years old now. Open source developers are innovating new technologies and spawning successful software firms. Large enterprises and government agencies are considering how they should leverage open technologies to meet their needs. Come see Dennis Sharpe present live demos of Groovy, Freemarker, Liferay, Alfresco, and Spring MVC at the Richmond RJUG on May 18. Continue reading

Join us for the upcoming Richmond Mobile Monday Meetup: Mobile in 2011 - Panel Discussion WHEN: Monday, February 7th from 5:30pm – 7:00pm WHERE: Ironworks Headquarters (10900 Nuckols Road, Suite 400) WHAT: Leading the panel discussion will be moderator, Butch Sarma, Senior Marketing Director at Media General, Inc., Digital Media... Continue reading

A Discussion and Demonstration of Locally-Developed Mobile Applications Announcing the next Richmond Mobile Monday Meetup! Please join LucyPhone and Ironworks in a discussion about real-world use of mobile technology and the submission process to Apple and Google. WHEN: Monday, December 6th from 5:30pm – 7:00pm WHERE: Ironworks Headquarters (10900 Nuckols... Continue reading

Richmond Mobile Monday A discussion and demonstration of locally developed mobile applications Announcing the inaugural event of the Richmond chapter of Mobile Monday! Sponsored by Ironworks Consulting, please join GetLoaded and BlueShoe Mobile in a discussion about real world use of mobile technology and the submission process to Apple and... Continue reading

MobileMonday (MoMo) is an open community platform of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influential individuals fostering brand neutral cooperation and cross-border P2P business opportunities through live networking events to demo products, share ideas and discuss trends from both local and global markets. Continue reading

This week I’ve been comparing the URLs generated by a multitude of different search engines and finding patterns within them. We have some custom code that logs information about visits to any particular website on which we install the code. You may be interested in studying this data for several reasons: 1. See how much traffic your site has accumulated and from where (i.e. natural search engine, pay per click, etc.) 2. See what keyword terms users are typing in to reach your site 3. See where users drop off on your site. 4. Gain a better understanding of what... Continue reading

One of the biggest challenges of HTML developers, probably the biggest challenge is browser compatibility. At Ironworks, we’re often asked to produce pixel perfect representations of the original designs, in multiple browsers - especially IE6. In my experience using something like IE tester, or for IE7 and IE8 using the developer toolbar simulated versions aren’t always accurate. Some people go the route of using Adobe’s Browser Lab . If you need to be sure however, the best bet is to use the real thing. Microsoft makes it easy for you to do just that by offering many flavors of their... Continue reading

Sometimes it's good to take a step back and admire the small things in life. We all know the details matter, but we take so much for granted. Case in point: your alarm clock. What a boring gadget. It's sole purpose is to pull you from the depths of a cozy slumber, to absorb its weight in unfiltered hatred and well-aimed smacks to the sleep button. That poor little plastic guy doesn't get a lot of love. And I got no defense for that. Even now, an online glance shows me that these 'lil machines are still nothing but pure... Continue reading

Last week, I had the opportunity to go see film title design legend, Kyle Cooper. You may not know his name, but I'm sure you've seen his work. From the dark stylings of Se7en and Dawn of the Dead to the ultra technical work on Spiderman 1, 2 & 3 and The Incredible Hulk, this guy has come to redefine the title sequence. You can see his amazing demo reel on the ADCMW event page. So, it's not a huge secret that I'm on the board of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington, who hosted this event. I'll get... Continue reading

I’m working on an update to a legacy build process that I want to move to ant. When I got to my first test, “Does it do anything if I run it against a skeleton build.xml on this machine?”, I found my first error (warning, if you want to be pedantic). D:\BuildNG>ant Unable to locate tools.jar. Expected to find it in C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\tools.jar Buildfile: D:\BuildNG\build.xml help: [echo] Common build targets: [echo] jar - Builds testconsole.jar [echo] build - Same as clean+jar [echo] compile - Compiles TestConsole classes [echo] clean - Remove all *.class and testconsole.jar BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 0... Continue reading

Imagine standing in front of a wall of cubbies filled with parchment scrolls, and not being able to find the Tractatus you know exists in there. Or no – make that try to find the right health insurance claim form on your corporate intranet. Your predicament is as old as civilization itself. And content classification structures, including tools like metadata and taxonomy, were invented thousands of years ago to deal with it. But let’s say you want to build one of these taxonomy or metadata things yourself. You might first want to figure out what those terms mean – though... Continue reading

Most websites containing forms experience at least some sort of spam, whether it be through their contact us form, email sign-up list, or registration, etc. In order to combat these extraneous submissions, CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been successful in reducing the spam, yet at the expense of compromising conversions on your site. A case study was performed linking the effect of CAPTCHA on conversion rates. The study consisted of monitoring over 50 websites over a period of six months. The study showed that the mechanism was definitely effective in preventing SPAM,... Continue reading

One of my favorite feelings is when I stumble on a new language trick that I didn't know existed. It gives me the rush of figuring something else out, followed by the thrill of figuring out all the places I can use that new trick in the future. Often, those tricks are simply extensions of existing C# concepts. This is one of them. Consider the new C# feature in C# 3.0, object initializers. They allow properties to be set during construction time. The old way was something like this: Person p = new Person(); p.FirstName = "Casey"; p.LastName = "Liss";... Continue reading

As you build more large and complex reports with SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll want to consider optimization and performance tuning. I read a great article this week that highlights some of the key elements to keep in mind: http://sqlcat.com/technicalnotes/archive/2009/01/14/reporting-services-performance-optimizations.aspx. Analyze the purpose and size of your reports In many cases you’ll find that you do not need all the data fields that are returned in your reports. They may be fields that you thought you needed but never really used them or you may have duplicated certain pieces of data across different datasets. The first thing you’ll want to... Continue reading

The project management framework that one studies in order to take the PMP exam defines a very interesting and useful product artifact: the project charter. This document is supposed to be created during the Initiating phase of the project. In fact, it’s supposed to be the very first thing that one does; it’s intended to be an input into the organizational processes for selecting and approving the projects that the organization believes will provide the best return on investment. To the best of my recollection, I’ve never seen a real live project charter in the wild. Instead, it is replaced... Continue reading

I am Rob Huffstedtler, a senior architect within the Ironworks web solutions group. What that actually means differs from day to day, but it has recently included: coding, writing design documentation, making a grocery run for the office, doing the change control activities on a project, mentoring colleagues, helping put together the work breakdown structure for upcoming projects, cleaning up spills in the kitchen, writing a strategy document for an intranet, and trying to figure out why it’s so darn hard to get the thermostat adjusted properly for our side of the office. I’ve been messing with computers since I... Continue reading

As the year and the decade rapidly come to an end, many sites and publications are posting retrospectives, best of lists, worst of lists, and what to watch for in the coming year. I thought it would be interesting to go back ten years – to the beginning of the “aughts” – and list ten things we thought we knew. - "This dotcom investing frenzy is not a bubble. No way” - “AOL is so much better than CompuServe and Prodigy. Looks at all these disks I have for free hours!” - “The new Google search engine is cool. But... Continue reading

With all my talk about .NET lately, you probably think that’s all I know. Well, I’ve been working in .NET so much lately, it’s easy to write about. I do have many other languages that I love, such as Java, Perl, and my personal favorite JavaScript. JavaScript holds a special place in my heart. Specifically, it is one of the first languages that I really got a good grip on, and it’s the one that taught me the most about Object Oriented design. I remember when I mentioned my background with JavaScript in a .NET meeting when I first started... Continue reading

I'm a big fan of the jQuery javascript framework and also love some slick, animated dropdown navigation menus. But what about screen readers, what about people with javascript turned off? Typically, these sort of javascript-based DHTML dropdowns are not very usable or even accessible for certain users. And if your site navigation is not accessible, you're in big trouble. I've been using a 'Superfish' powered navigation for my current project. You can check out the Superfish project page here. Superfish takes a simple nested UL list and uses jQuery and CSS to turn it into a nice dropdown menu. Superfish... Continue reading

As discussed before, even the most experienced .NET developers may or may not know about every nuance of the language. There may be some things that have slipped through the cracks or that a particular developer just hasn't ever had a reason to see before. Some of these things seem trivial at first, but upon further inspection become extremely useful. Two examples, for me, are the Func<> and Action delegates. Each of these delegates have plenty of siblings--they come in 5 flavors each. These are all defined in the System namespace, and thus come "for free" in nearly every C#... Continue reading

I'm working on a citizen-facing, U.S. government portal in the early stages of becoming an archetype for e-Government services. I recently did a peer review to identify other sites that also: * Steward and present content from across organizations * Require close inter-organizational coordination for user authentication to deliver secure access to applications and data * Have to pull everyone involved up by the bootstraps to get the job done In a nutshell, here’s what I found. (For case studies, see my blog post at http://fritillaria.blogspot.com/2009/11/citizen-centric-portals.html.) Commitment to eGovernance Governments throughout the world are demonstrating growing commitment to the ideal... Continue reading

Even with all the outstanding UX resources online I still find myself gravitating to my books. There's just something reassuring about having a well-stocked UX reference shelf that I can physically touch with my fingertips. I started collecting in 2000 - mostly UX reference, but I do have some fun oddballs. In 2007 I had the pleasure of curating a vast UX reference collection for the e-commerce division of a former Fortune 500 retailer. Overall, my personal collection is fairly eclectic and utilitarian (I might write about it in more detail in another post). At the moment I have 43... Continue reading