It’s been a busy few weeks since the Heroes Happen {Here} event here in Toronto where we launched the latest release of our IRIS Process Live product for VSTS 2008.  This release has been generating a lot of excitement amongst those looking to increase their productivity with VSTS.  IRIS Process Live (IPL) is a collection of client and server extensions that enable VSTS to guide the execution of your projects based on your process of choice.  IPL is methodology neutral so it allows you to bring any process definition (MSF, RUP, agile, in-house) into your VSTS enactment environment and automatically create the necessary work items and relationships to help you get going.  The following are some of the features of IRIS Process Live.

IPL extends the project creation wizard to allow you to select the process definition and process patterns that you want to use for your project.

IPL extends the project creation wizard to allow you to select which process elements you want to instantiate in your project.

IPL work items automatically contain the necessary guidance for you to get started.

IPL work items are automatically linked together based on their process relationships.

IPL work items automatically contain links to relevant guidance and process guidance items.

IPL automatically performs work item state changes based on their process relationships.

IPL automatically sends users notifications when their work items are ready to be started or have been updated.

IPL allows you to create additional work items from the process definition at any time during project execution.

IPL allows you to add or remove additional process definitions and practices during project execution.

IPL contains process related reports that can be used for process improvement or governance related initiatives.

More information about IRIS Process Live is available at http://www.osellus.com/IRIS-PL.

You can use this link to register for the joint Microsoft-Osellus Webinar on software development governance. Omid is going to be talking about a lot of things that we have been able to achieve with the collaboration between the osellus process toolset/service offerings and the VSTS integrated ALM.

Here is a preview of what we will be talking about:

Effective governance aligns your software development investment with your business strategy. By ensuring continuous traceability of software development activities, governance leads to enhanced customer satisfaction and compliance with internal and external policies.

While most organizations use some measure of implicit governance, the full potential of a governance framework can be realized by taking three practical and explicit measures. The software development processes in the organization need to be selected and tailored in a manner that supports organization’s business goals. These processes need to be enforced in a streamlined manner. And, they need to be monitored to ensure corrective actions are taken in a timely manner.

In this webinar we outline a practical approach to establish software development governance in an automated yet flexible manner. We will discuss how the business objectives, standards and control mechanisms in the organization should be mapped to process elements such a roles, activities and work products that guide practitioners in a non-intrusive manner. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and the IRIS process automation suite from Osellus will be used to demonstrate implementation of an effective governance framework in real-world scenarios.

I am pleased to announce the availability of IRIS Process Central Sandbox. This is an online process community to promote discussions on process improvements through collaborative input. Its goal is to bring together process modelers, process consumers, and other stakeholders to freely share information on existing processes and create new process mash-ups.

To facilitate these discussions, we have included several processes on sandbox including MSF for CMMI, OpenUP, and Agile. Where possible, we have provided variety of formats for each process as well as enactment templates.

You can participate by providing your feedback through blogs, discussions boards or modifying the content of the processes. We are eager to get your feedback and will make every effort to ensure that IRIS Process Central Sandbox becomes a valuable asset to you and your organization. Click IRIS Process Central Sandbox to access the sandbox.

IRIS Process Central Sandbox demonstrates how IRIS Process Central which is included as part of IRIS Process Author can help an organization improve their process tailoring in a collaborative environment.

It is our strong belief that through awareness and involvement of process community, there is a great chance of increasing adaptation of processes across the organization. We feel that IRIS Process Central is an important step towards this goal.

We are looking forward to the community participation in IRIS Process Central Sandbox or any suggestions regarding IRIS Process Central product.

David had this to say (quite disdainfully ) about my theorizing about getting data out of Jazz into MS Excel and MS Project:

Instead of a one-way data transfer from Jazz to Microsoft documents, I think a much more useful exercise would be to extend MS Office to make it Jazz aware. This would allow the Office applications to behave as Jazz clients much like Microsoft and others have done for VSTS. Without Jazz awareness, I feel that these other applications would be limited to reporting functions and be of little use to the project management community.

I see this more as an exercise in extending MS Office (or your application of choice) rather than extending Jazz and can understand why IBM would be looking for partners to provide such a solution for their customers.

Point is good. Point taken. I am doing precisely what Negin was complaining about - missing the project management perspective and looking at it from the developer’s perspective - but I did fool myself for a bit there that I had the answer signed, sealed and delivered.

The project manager would rather work directly from inside MS Excel, MS Project and interfaces she is familiar with - and it is far fetched to expect non-developer stake-holders to log into a Jazz client/web client and export into Project or report into Excel.

Also, Work Item information (for example) could be changing frequently and direct integration into MS Excel and MS Project provides an opportunity to refresh statuses and other work item information directly from inside a report that the project manager has open compared to having to export repeatedly from inside a Jazz client each time.

Not to fear. As with the Jazz-based solution I outlined yesterday, I have a similarly vague outline of how to do this - atleast for Excel:

As mentioned in my previous post, we already have a way to get the data off the Jazz server.

Microsoft has made it equally easy to develop applications that target the Office ecosystem through VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office - currently VSTO 2005). This means that we have application level add-in support for Office system applications like MS Excel.

Through VSTO, I can write a plug-in for Excel that puts a Jazz toolbar/ribbon in Excel and interfaces directly with the service interface of the Jazz Server to get the raw data required off Jazz. This VSTO plugin would then take care of the business logic of putting together and rendering different reports and charts based on pre-defined queries by leveraging the runtime support in MS Excel that VSTO allows.

Reverting to the developer perspective for a bit, VSTO is installed as an add-on on Visual Studio and provides very nice design-time support - just like Win-Forms controls. Makes it that much easier to develop these plug-ins.

Depending on the needs, in case we find that the Jazz service interface is too ‘raw’ for consumption, another option would be to have the Excel VSTO plug-in interact with the Jazz server through a custom Jazz service-plugin that takes care of sending the Excel plug-in well filtered and formatted data. This has some obvious advantages but in my opinion, has the decisive disadvantage of mandatorily requiring a Jazz server side plug-in without which the nice MS Excel plugin we developed will not work.

The part I am not sure about is how to implement a similar VSTO plug-in for MS Project. If I remember correctly, VSTO doesn’t offer support for MS Project development. I could be wrong.

Browsing the VSTO site is becoming a pain right now because I am on a train back to Toronto that has wifi access on board - but connectivity is sporadic at best. I’ll check up a little later and update this post. If it does have support, that’s that.
If not, a plugin can be written directly against the MS Project SDK to achieve our end.

[Update] There seem to be a couple of options for developing MS Project plugins:

• The version of VSTO that comes integrated with Visual Studio 2008 (currently in beta) has support for creating MS Project plug-ins.
• I guess you can create a COM add-in for MS Project using the MS Project SDK I mentioned above but that would be something to consider only if I couldn’t use VSTO.

Last week was pretty busy and I can remember only bits and pieces of it- sort of like Memento without the anterograde amnesia. I digress but it’s one of my favorite movies and I recently watched it again - and was looking for a way to bring it up - even if completely irrelevant :). So there!

One of the things I do remember from last week was attending the Jazz sessions on the 23rd and then the BoF session on 25th at CASCON’07

There were quite a few of us Ossies at Cascon (see Kamal’s post) and I think we all agreed that Jazz and Team Concert were a pretty impressive debut effort by IBM in the ALM space - though crippled by the lack of certain features and perhaps by the potentially dangerous mislabeling of a group of disjointed policies as “process” (a word and space held dear at Osellus :)).

While we didn’t get a chance to sit down and discuss our observations after cascon, we all took away strong observations from our respective perspectives. I can get started on what I really liked and also the large gaps I see in these offerings - but that’s not the reason I am posting this on a weekend when I could be flipping through channels.

I just read Negin’s post regarding the lack of project mgmt. support in Team Concert and I thought I would quickly respond to it before returning to another re-run.

I know exactly where she is coming from and understand this is a pretty important requirement once you get down to actually using Team Concert/Jazz in a real environment.

However, given that Jazz is built on the Eclipse platform, I see this as a job for an extension (or extensions) built on top of Jazz instead of as an inherent deficiency in Jazz. A couple of us had a chance to talk to Kartik Kanakasabesan, the product manager on Jazz at their booth at cascon and he said as much - it’s something that can be built by the community - possibly by somebody who is more qualified to build such extensions.

Hypothetically, with knowledge of the high-level architecture of Jazz and Eclipse, here are what ingredients I would need to build a MS Project or MS Excel Export concoction:

A way to extend Jazz by adding my own services or wrap Jazz services to get data off the Jazz server:
Jazz is built on the plugin-based architecture of Eclipse and has exposed extension-points both on the client side and the service side (Both of which are Equinox OSGi based). These extension points are in addition to the Jazz services themselves that are exposed as part of the service interface (and also have corresponding siblings in the client library)

So, getting the data off the Jazz server to put into my MS Excel report or into MS Project is taken care off.

Getting the data into MS Project:
Negin’s point regarding getting the Work Items in the “process” heirarchy in JAZZ/Team Concert into MS Project or into any other PM tool for that matter is perhaps *the* most important practical fine-grained feature that will get JAZZ out of just the research community into a real project manager’s hands.

MS Project projects can be defined as XML and Microsoft has a well-defined schema for the XML definition.

So, if we mash up JAZZ’s Work Item related service interface API to get the data out and transform the data to a MS project XML, we are good to go!
I can’t get my jazz.net username/pwd to work for some reason so am vaguely referring above to the “Work Item related service API” - I would have preferred to use the right nomenclature.

Getting the data into MS Excel
Getting the data into Excel is similarly not a problem technically.
A server side plugin that the Jazz team calls a ‘common’ plug-in can be built that provides the generic functionality of being able to export data in the Excel format. This plug-in has to be written in Java of course considering this is the Eclipse platform - therefore it can leverage one of the many libraries openly available for reading/writing to the OLE 2 Compound Document Format which includes the MS Excel (XLS) and MS Word (DOC) formats.

The one I rely on usually for similar purposes is Apache’s POI but the choice might depend on the specifics we want to achieve.

I would then build a Jazz service plug-in that wraps the business logic of generating the specific reports we want to output in the Excel format. This service plug-in would get the data using Jazz’s service interface, mash the data up into different types of reports and then output them into spreadsheets using the generic ‘common’ plugin I mentioned above.

A Jazz client plug-in that provides a way to trigger the service plug-in for generation of specific reports or export into MS-Project would be the last step.

I have used Negin’s specific complaints above to demonstrate a hypothetical and technical answer. However, MS Project and MS Excel are but two formats. Formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) can be just as easily supported. These formats will become increasingly prominent given the adoption of ODF based tooling such as Open Office by governments, educational institutions and SMEs - especially since these are the same organizations that might end up as primary Jazz customers.

Therefore, building such extensions to provide an interface to the project management tooling world is technically not an issue. The real work will be to intelligently define what reports one would want that can leverage such extensions. Negin and others like her who have invaluable years of project management experience are best suited to answer that question!

Notice to Jazz developers: Feel free to tell me how you would do it - or to correct gaps in my understanding.

So Negin….when do you want me to get started on this?

A sense of validation is always nice - especially when you are so far ahead of the curve. I was scanning through my Google Reader Link Blog recently and noticed the number of new applications being implemented in Flex/Flash and Apollo - Adobe’s desktop runtime for RIAs.

Microsoft recently joined the game officially with the launch of version 1 of it’s Silverlight rich interaction delivery platform and while it’s some way behind Flash/Flex as a platform, it’s gaining popularity too - and has a lot of things going for it (a topic for another post).

I want to focus on Adobe preview of a new product last week at the Photoshop World - Photoshop Express, which is an entry-level Photoshop branded product aimed at drawing customers into the world of Photoshop. What’s special about Photoshop Express is that it’s hosted and implemented using Flex (the development environment for Flash).

This is a continuation of Adobe’s recent focus on the hosted model - Adobe had put out a hosted video editing tool, Remix that has been available as part of the Photobucket tool-set for about 6 months. This video tool has other nearly identical avatars - it also exists as Adobe Premiere Express and is provided on Youtube as Youtube Remixer.

This is the best possible advertisement for the Flash platform’s power. As a developer, there is nothing that screams out a platform’s strength than a complex image/video processing software implemented in it! And there are more coming out everyday!

Flash/Flex has been rounding up some well known names in its corner. I am very impressed with the way Adobe has targeted and honed the direction of the Flex/Flash platform after it adopted Macromedia. The AIR platform (formerly known as Apollo) which has gained a lot of steam since it’s launch is another crucial step in that direction.

What direction is that? Flash is no more seen as the delivery tool of the infamous banner ads. It is now perceived as a serious platform for rich and complex application delivery used by the big boys of the internet and increasingly, the enterprise.

Which brings me to the sense of validation I was talking about - Long before Adobe and the others, Osellus was one of the first “serious” product companies to recognize the power and potential of Flash as a platform and employ it to develop a complex visual enterprise-class product. IRIS Process Author is an enterprise-class visual process management product currently being used by very qualified process groups in very large organizations - and its primary authoring interface is implemented in Flash and the IRIS Flash Framework!! We just happened to start 5 years ago and given our early start, we had to develop our own framework for implementing our Flash-based interface. I was involved in designing and guiding Process Author’s interface over the last few years and so felt the need to make sure Osellus’s foresight was recognized - at least in a blog posting :).

Other examples of companies waking up to the potential of Flex/Flash are Google and Salesforce.com which have been adding some Flash-based products and APIs to their catalogs.

Considering our strong enterprise focus as a company, I am especially peaked by the strong uptake of Salesforce.com’s Adobe Flex Toolkit for Apex. Apex (Salesforce AppExchange) is of course Salesforce’s applications marketplace and one of the first implementations of the SaaS model.

On the consumer-internet front, Google made available the Google Talk Gadget a few months ago which is a Flash implementation of Google Talk that can be added onto your Google Personalized Homepage. The gadget can be even be added to a blog or webpage so visitors can chat with you right there in the context of your blog. Best of all, I noticed that it has the “Call” button - so you can VoIP with your google talk contacts right there - no need for the desktop client! I chatted up a couple of friends and was pretty impressed with the implementation. The gadget has a lot of other features too - like being able to play youtube videos and recognizing picasa albums.
The reason I highlight the Google Talk gadget in particular is that I was hard pressed to find a difference in the user experience between the gadget and the Google Talk desktop application. Of course this is as much as ode to the Google developers as to the Flash platform itself.

I suspect we will see Google employing Flash more and more in their upcoming “betas”.

Another web app that I am really impressed with is Virtual Ubiquity’s Buzzword. VU is calling it “the first real word processor for the web”. It’s written in Flex 2 for Flash 9 and is extremely sophisticated and rich in features.

These are but a few of the examples out there in the enterprise and web 2.0 arenas. All in all, this trend indicates the exciting albeit late recognition of a trend that Osellus had woken up to sometime ago.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing more and more of Flash/Flex and Silverlight based RIAs delivered either in the web browser or in an Apollo like delivery model in the next year or two. I itch to articulate my p.o.v. on the Flash vs. Ajax pseudo-debate that’s been on for the last couple of years but that’s a whole new post.

I am keen to know which other enterprise level products have Flash based interfaces, APIs or atleast components. If you know of any, let me know! I would also be interested in knowing about early adopters of Flash in the enterprise along with Osellus or even perhaps before us!

IDC has released a new study that profiles ten relatively small, emerging software companies in Canada that it deems particularly worthy of note. These companies have overcome internal challenges, and have successfully contended with the ever-changing ICT industry, evolving regulations and standards, and large competitors with even larger marketing budgets. They have the potential to impact the ICT market in Canada and beyond.

We are listed as one of the ten companies !

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prCA20741607

There were 1548 attendees at the SEPG event this year. Most of them are involved in some kind of process - definition, management or improvement - activities in the organizations they represent. Many of the visitors to the Microsoft booth were already aware of advanced process-specific capabilities introduced by Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). This was a good opportunity for the partners in the VSTS eco-system to showcase their offerings in this area.

For Osellus this meant highlighting IRIS Process Author with its collaborative, enterprise-grade process architecting capabilities. The feedback received from visitors to the booth was a good validation of the single-minded focus we have in providing a team-based un-complicated way to author or tailor processes. Our methodology-agnostic approach means we support processes based on homegrown methodologies or well-known methodologies and frameworks such as MSF, RUP, Macroscope, EssUP, ITIL and others. To give you an idea of the change I noticed in this domain, I never once had to say that “one process does not fit all projects”! This is a given. All I had to do was show how this can be done in a low-cost, collaborative team based environment. Oh and by the way, using IRIS Process Author, the cost of creating VSTS Process Templates is almost zero as we support out-of-the-box generation of these templates ! I had a lot of questions on how these processes, once modeled are consumed. This was a good plug for me to show our second-generation enactment solution.

It seems that the days of a single monolithic dominant methodology are truly over as users realize that these printed tomes or published websites are relegated as shelf-ware by most practioners in real projects. This is where the second generation tooling offered by IRIS Process Live comes into play. We have offered the first generation of this tooling for a few years now, and based on the lessons learned we have made a significant change to this tooling. Offered with an underlying platform such as VSTS, we have sucessfully bridged the gap between the theory around process improvement pattern of author-enact-measure-improve with actual tool based implementations in real projects. This would also deliver on the promise of data-based process improvement initiatives as well as help interested organizations in areas such as project simulations, project forensics and skills and competency improvement initiatives. Watch this blog for more information on this area over the next few months…

Here are some pictures from the conference:

From left to right: Serge (Fujitsu), Eric (Ivar Jacobson), Kamal (Osellus), Juan (Personify Design), Ajoy (Microsoft), Clementino (Microsoft), Chandra (Osellus)

Kamal, Chandra

Osellus is getting ready to showcase its second generation process automation suite IRIS and other related offerings at the upcoming SEPG show in Austin.

We are sharing the Microsoft booth to demonstrate our latest collaborative offerings around Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System. There is a lot of theory (around process automation) going into practice with this next generation toolware and I am very excited to share this advancement of art with the process pioneers attending this conference.

Here are our coordinates at the show:

Event:  SEPG 2007
Date: March 26-28th
Location: Austin, Texas
Exhibit: 515 - Sharing the Microsoft booth

I will be blogging about the show but in case you are in Austin, do come and drop by to say Hi.