Talbott Crowell's Development Blog

I will be speaking at Code Camp at CTDOTNET (Connecticut .Net Developers Group) today on the topic Silverlight as a front end to Excel Services. 

 

My slides are available for download here:

Everybody is familiar with the trend to outsource customer service.  John Timmer wrote an article on ars technica called "Study: outsourcing can lead to plummeting customer loyalty" which details some of the results from this trend.

 

From my own experience with United Airlines and a number of other companies, I have found it very frustrating that clearing up problems that used to be so easy to solve before has now become so difficult.  But I don't think it is necessarily the fault of the folks in India taking the calls.  It appears that before the switch to the Indian customer service call center that United Airlines had people answering the phones in the USA had a fully connected computer terminal with the authority to fix problems.  Now, the outsoucing companies appear to have a semi-connected terminal that has limited capabilities and very little authority to solve problems.  So all they can do is say, I'm sorry but I don't have the ability to do that...

 

It appears the cost cutting is two-fold.  First of all, use low cost people to answer the phones. Second of all, give them limited abiltity to make the customer happy saving cost by reducing solutions that cost the company money.  The poor folks in India have become wipping boys for frustrated customers (no fault of their own). 

 

We recently spent 100,000 mileage points on 4 tickets from Boston to Redding, California (with a layover in San Francisco).  When confirming the flight, it appears that they didn't reserve a spot for our small dog (which goes under the seat) and there was no alloted "pet" space on the leg from San Francisco to Redding.  So we asked if we could change the flight to Boston to San Francisco (keeping part of the flight), so we could drive the rest of the way 5 hours and still reach our destination.  From United Airlines point of view, that is the same points spent plus 8 free seats which is less fuel cost to them plus more seats available for them to sell (4 seats from San Francisco to Redding and 4 seats back from Redding to SFO).  Well they want to charge $400 to make the change which will save them money!  There is nothing they can do to help us.  We are not asking for anything for free, just something fair.  It appears that either their systems are either so locked down, or their process is so rigid, that they have completely lost the sence of what customer service is.  The outsorcing company appears to have their hands tied, but there is no way to speak to someone at United Airlines that can help.  The airline business is in such a nightmare state that they can do whatever they want, but wow we are loosing customer loyalty fast!

 

Have you had any bad experiences with outsourcing?

Enterprise Library (EntLib for short) has become a standard for developing business applications in .Net.  EntLib was initially released in Jan 2005 and combined a bunch of Application Blocks.  Application Blocks were chunks of reusable code that helped developers accomlish common aspects of an application design such as database access, caching, security, and logging, without rewriting it for every application.  By using the application blocks and EntLib, your apps have a well tested infrastructure for those common aspects.

 

EntLib evolved from v1 to v4 with an update approximatly one per year.  Version 1.0 has been deprecated, Version 2.0 was rewriten to leverage .NET 2.0 framework.  For example the Configuration Application Block went away and instead EntLib 2.0 uses the native .NET 2.0 Framework configuration functionality.  Version 3.1 added the Validation Application Block and the Policy Injection Application Block and was released a year ago and was targeted for .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0  (.NET 3.0 is required for the WCF functionality).

 

Here is a table of EntLib evolution:

 

Ent Lib Version	.NET Version	Visual Studio	New Features
EntLib 1.0 - Jan 2005	.NET 1.1	VS 2003	bundled application blocks (Data Access, Caching, Exception Handling, Logging, Security, Crypto, Config)
EntLib 2.0 - Jan 2006	.NET 2.0	VS 2005	Config app block goes away (leverages .NET 2.0 Framework config), mostly internal changes
EntLib 3.1 - May 2007	.NET 2.0 or 3.0	VS 2005	Validation Block, Policy Injection Block, improvements to Data Access, etc...
EntLib 4.0 - May 2008	.NET 3.5	VS 2008	Unity App Block, WMI 2.0 support, pluggable Cache Manager

 

What's different about this release?  For starters v4 requires .NET 3.5 which means you will be using Visual Studio 2008.  Also, v4 now integrates the Unity Application Block (Unity).  Unity supports two key design patterns: Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) .  This can help application architects and designers implement loosly coupled dependencies which simplifies application code.

 

Mike Walker blogged about this release also.  He has links to hands on labs, etc...

Of course the best source for more information about this release is the MSDN Patterns & Practices site for EntLib 4.0. 

Excel Services is a component of MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) that brings the capabilities of Excel to the server side.  In the past, customers and programmers that wished to add Excel calculation logic to the server needed to use ActiveX and COM to instantiate Excel's Application object.  This unfortunately was not an ideal model for a scalable server-side enterprise application and required a few tricks to make it perform and scale well.   With Excel Services, much of the functionality of Excel's client application is brought to the server and can run in the context of MOSS which is highly scalable.  Some Excel features like macros and VBA code are not supported on Excel Services (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms496823.aspx).  But many of these limitations can be overcome using Excel Services User-Defined Functions which can be written in VB.NET or C#.

 

My company, ThirdM.com, was enlisted to build a demonstration of the power and flexibility of Excel Services by Elliott Ichimura and Bob Daniels of Microsoft.  In this scenario, Litware, a professional services company, needs a project planning application built on Excel to work with their customers to decide on those three important factors in every project: duration, deliverables, and fees (also known as schedule, scope, and resources).   Litware, like many companies use Excel to do many business calculations and ad-hoc analysis.  This is Litware's what-if scenario for project planning:

 

   

To see the full spreadsheet click here. Litware has all of the project planning logic in Excel and does not want to reproduce this logic in C# or some other programming language, since it may change.  Also, the people who need to change the business logic are not programmers. 

 

In order to be more agile, Litware has chosen to leverage Excel Services to host the business logic.  Programmers were brought in to build a flashy UI on top of the Excel logic using Silverlight 2.0 and Web Services.  The Excel spreadsheet is exposed though Excel Web Services which allows the business users to update their logic without the need to change the UI.   

 

 

Click here to view the full Silverlight and Excel Services demo.  Click on the deliverables bar to change the deliverables.  Drag on the Duration bar to change the duration of the project (make it longer and shorter).  Drag the fee bar to the left to change the fee scaling which will deselect deliverables based on an prioritization logic expressing in Excel.  Toggle between Extranet and Intranet view to see what Litware will see for profit and use the Rates button to offer a discounted rate which will reduce the fees but also reduce the profit. 

 

This Silverlight demo uses Excel Services as a backend to recalculate the logic.  A copy of the spreadsheet is kept alive in a session for each user.  When the user clicks "Save" the session copy saves back to the SharePoint document library that hosts the business logic.

One thing I have done on my Windows Mobile device (Motorola Q) to have a better universal access experience is to save a copy of my email when sending it from my mobile device and sync my sent items folder.  What this accomplishes is the ability to see reply's to email in Outlook that I made on my mobile device and vice versa.  The reason I sought this solution was that when I replied to emails on my cell phone, it was not recording the replies in Outlook, and sometimes I didn't remember if I had replied to someone. 

 

By doing both "save a copy" and "sync sent items" you get the ability in Outlook to see the "Replied To" icon in your Inbox.  I'm using Outlook 2007 but it probably also works in Outlook 2003.  Also when you open the email in Outlook, the top bar above the "From/To" header has a message "You replied on xx/xx/xxxx 00:00 AM/PM" which is clickable to "Find related messages".  This is great because I can send an email on my mobile device and at a later date on my computer bring the reply up easily from my Inbox without searching manualy through my Sent Mail folder.

 

Here are the steps I use to accomplish this integration: