While defining our plan for Atlas’ quest for world domination we decided it was time to bite the bullet and become Microsoft Gold Partners.  We love Microsoft, they form the backbone of our business and we enjoy using (most) of their products.  So we set off…

To become a Gold partner it was first necessary to obtain a Certified partner level, so that’s where we began and this is the story.  You would think that as Microsoft profits heavily and relies strongly on the marketing efforts of the partners involved with the Microsoft partnership programme, it would be in Microsoft’s interests to plaster details of how organisations can partner with them all over the Internet.  Alas this is not the case.  Step one of partnership enrolment involves opening the Pandora’s box of evil that is enrolment in the Microsoft Partner portal.  Like all of Microsoft’s portals this of course requires a valid Hotmail account, no OpenID authentication here I’m afraid.  One other point worthy of note, don’t try to use any browser other than Internet Explorer.

That’s right, fire up Internet Explorer, you’ll need it. And the fun doesn’t end there, even using Internet Explorer the Partner Portal is clunky, poorly laid out, crashes if you wave your cursor angrily at it and relies heavily on pop-up windows for navigation. How very nineties Microsoft.

So we got stuck in to the partner portal, and after staring blankly at the computer screen for an hour, the confusion started to lift and I found myself making sense of the process. According to Microsoft points mean prizes, or in this case, a Microsoft Certified Partnership. The programme is based on an elaborate points system. Performing various tasks, such as obtaining customer referrals, testing our bespoke software to ensure compatibility with Windows 7, and putting our employees through Microsoft’s MCTS exams would each earn us points. A customer referral was 3 points, Windows 7 accreditation was 30 points, and so on. 50 points were required to become a certified partner, and a whopping 120 points required for gold.

That’s easy I thought.  I’ll fire off 10 customer reference requests, test one of our Windows form applications for compatibility with Windows 7, and we’ll have 60 points.  I diligently started to fire off customer referral requests to our client base.  I then started the long process for Windows 7 accreditation, a process so boring, backwards and painfully crap that it’s almost worthy of a separate blog post.  Instead I’ll just leave a link to the Windows 7 qualification “portal” here and leave you to your own conclusions – http://winqual.microsoft.com/.  For good measure I put one of our team through an MCTS exam to bump our points well over the amount required.  I chose our CTO Dean for this task as he has the nickname “passmaster” due to his inability to fail exams.  He kept up with his namesake and passed the exam with ease.  Interestingly though, he spotted a chap enter the exam room, and in 10 minutes nail a Microsoft MCTS exam and make a quick exit.  Now Dean is good but even he took 50 minutes.  The reason he needed 50 minutes was due to the lengthly nature of the exam questions, one question can span the length of an A4 page and this takes time to read and digest properly.  After Dean passed his exam the examiner raised the subject of the man who had superhuman reading skills and pointed out rather nonchalantly that people regularly turn up and ace Microsoft exams in 15 minutes.  The exam hosts clearly know that people are cheating by memorising the answers but frankly they’re not paid enough to care.

Anyway I digress, we were finished!  Two weeks on and over 60 points finally notched up.  However our celebrations swiftly came to an end when we spotted something was amiss.  The Microsoft Partner Portal loudly proclaimed it was time for us to sign a Partner agreement and cross Microsoft’s palm with silver.  Unfortunately every time we clicked the Upgrade Now button an error appeared.  A quick call to Microsoft confirmed that we had unwittingly began the process of acquiring our partnership during a transitional phase  where the requirements for a Microsoft partnership were changing.  Not to worry though we were told, a week later the Upgrade Now button would begin working again and we could use our points to upgrade to the all new silver partnership programme.  Unfortunately this was a lie, after the switchover our points were deleted and replaced with a new completely unrelated system.  The certified partner level was now renamed to silver, and we required:

• Two members of staff with an MCP each (we only had one)
• One member of staff having passed the Microsoft Licensing Online Assessment (this was new)
• Three references for each of the Microsoft competencies we wanted to apply for (competencies are sub divisions of the overall silver accreditation and we could reuse what we already had)
• One Windows 7 compatible product

Victory had been snatched from us at the last moment but I was determined to continue given we had already invested so much time and money.  We stuck another one of our elite coding squad through the Microsoft exam (he spotted another person cheating during his exam) and I took the Microsoft Licensing Online Assessment.

Finally we could pay Microsoft the fee, which for those of you not in the know is £1,374 + VAT for silver certification, we still don’t know how much gold certification is but presume it is more.  We waited excitedly for an e-mail to be informed what we could expect to receive in return for our money but once again were left to find out for ourselves.  Hell, we didn’t even know where to obtain our Microsoft partner logo from (the answer in case you’re wondering is http://www.partnerlogobuilder.com/).  All the work we had put in had ended with an anti-climax.

Clearly there are a number of problems with the process, not least of which are:

• Without signing into the partner portal using Internet Explorer it’s simply not possible to locate a simple overview of what is required to become a silver partner.  Equally as important, our customers cannot see and understand what we have been through to become partners
• The pricing for the certification is also a well-kept secret
• Customer references that we have requested are not vetted by Microsoft in any way.  We could easily have created 10 e-mail addresses and falsified our references
• The exams Microsoft request their partners take are clearly being undermined by a number of people and of course the organisations that host the exams
• It is incredibly difficult to find out what it is exactly that Microsoft partners receive for their hard work and cash by signing up to the partner programme
• There is little to no support from Microsoft representatives during the process.  Most front line support reps don’t have the knowledge to assist with the most basic of enquiries.  Tweets and e mails to Microsoft are replied to up to a week later.  They also insist on responding to my Hotmail account even when I e-mail them from my work e-mail account
• Following successful completion of the programme and following payment no information is provided on what we can expect to receive as part of the Microsoft programme.  The benefits are ridiculously difficult to locate and understand

More important than all of the above, not a single one of our customers understands the hoops we have jumped through and what it means for them to be working with a Microsoft Silver partner.  There’s really little to no business value added for them as there’s simply no information on the Internet detailing why organisations should work with Microsoft partners over non-partners.  So I’m left wondering has the process been a waste of time, and the answer is a resounding yes.  All we’ve been given is this logo:

And this rather natty plaque

For now we’ll stick with the silver partner until Microsoft proves to us, and our customers, there’s a good enough reason to jump through more hoops and pay them more money for a gold certification.

It must be noted that these tests were carried out on clean installs of each operating system and may not entirely reflect the performance when a machine is slightly older with more applications installed.

As you can see above Windows 7 is clearly the better performer, but only just. PC Mag have stated however that these tests were run on a machine built back when XP was the main OS and these tests are purely for people thinking of upgrading their existing XP installs.

For the full list of tests and their results you can view the PC Mag article here.

Microsoft’s general manager for IE, Amy Bazdukas, let the world know that the folks over at Microsoft do feel our pain. “Friends don’t let friends use IE6″ she said.

She stated that they were doing all they could to push IE6 back and get more people using the latest version of IE. “It’s certainly part of our approach to consumers to get them to upgrade to IE8″

Don’t get your hopes up though, Microsoft won’t be ditching IE6 any time soon, they plan to stop all support for it in 2014, at the same time it cuts all ties with the XP operating system. When asked why she thought there are still so many people using IE6 (40% of IE users are using 6, more than both versions 7 and she mentioned piracy in countries such as India and China. “There’s a reluctance [among people using counterfeit Windows] to use Automatic Updates. Rather than download updates, often the solution to problems is to re-image the machine using the pirated, pre-XP SP2 counterfeit. That also helps to drive the persistence of IE6″ she added.

So while Microsoft are aware of our pain and as much as they would like to help us out the situation will remain the same for another 5 years! You can join the fight so stop supporting IE6 at http://idroppedie6.com/

We now advise our customers that support for IE6 is an unnecessary expense that they can do without. We get around providing IE6 support by displaying a warning on our websites (including this site) that is displayed only if the visitor is using IE6.

Show your support now for dropping IE6 support by signing up here:

http://idroppedie6.com/

When we attempted to upload the HTTP module for some reason it simply wouldn’t fire and therefore our URL rewriting didn’t work.

After some furious Googling we came across the solution to this problem. Here’s the steps we took:

- Load up IIS management console
- Load properties for the affected site
- Open the Home Directory tab
- Click the application configuration button
- Click the Insert button and enter a path to the file that we wish to process requests. In this case the file is c:windowsmicrosoft.netframeworkv2.0.50727aspnet_isapi.dll
- Untick the option to check that file exists
- Click OK on all of the screens and close out of the management console

Your URLs will now be rendered accordingly using your HTTP module. Not simple but at least you know how!

It’s designed to be a personal storage place where you collect clips, URLs and information from around the Web (imagine a web based version of OneNote).  But it’s more than just a static collection like One Note or your browser favourites — it makes the information dynamic and allows you to structure and analyse it to make it more meaningful.

For instance, imagine you’re looking for a place to live using rightmove.com.  You create a new Thumbtack collection and map addresses and build charts to compare costs using Thumbtack gadgets.  We undertook this process using rightmove.com to see if ThumbTack was of any use or was simply another meaningless application.

To start with we performed a search on RightMove, and from here proceeded to take properties that we liked the look of and pasted them in to our ThumbTack instance.  Unfortunately this seemingly simple process turned in to a nightmare and while we understand that ThumbTack is still beta we hoped that we would have an overall positive reaction but simply couldn’t overcome the wide range of bugs, bad interface design and ill thought out features that we discovered such as:

• The short how-to guide for the use of ThumbTack is a snippit like a snippit you would copy and paste in to ThumbTack if you already knew how to use it!  It would be much better if this information could be viewed on a simple web page.
• We couldn’t CTRL+V information in to ThumbTack using FireFox for security reasons (interestingly this feature worked on IE8 which we were eventually forced to use, more on that further down)
• After pasting in a new snippit into ThumbTack it wasn’t immediately obvious how to save this new item.  We hoped that simply clicking new would save the existing snippit, or better still there would be a big SAVE button!  It turns out that you have to use the close button in the top right hand corner to save a snippit.  Deduct one point for a lack of user interface intuitivity.
• Half way through our session we were unceremoniously removed from the application with a warning that stated “There was an error with your Thumbtack authorization. For your safety, please sign back in”.  At this stage our level of irritation was such that we nearly called it a day but decided to persevere.  I’m glad we did because fortunately ThumbTack had saved all of our existing data.  However we were then logged out again!  This time we decide to change tactics and start using Internet Explorer 8 instead of FireFox in the hope that ThumbTack would play nice.  It didn’t and we found ourselves having to log back in at least half a dozen times.
• There was no obvious way in which to delete a snippit of information, again, frustrating.

With our five selected properties saved in to ThumbTack (in between being logged out and logging back in numerous times!) we then thought we’d try out one of the gadgets.  The Address Gadget took our fancy, which uses Microsoft Maps in order to plot the addresses in each ThumbTack snippet based we presume on the address that is entered in the snippit.  This didn’t work out so well.  Only one pin appeared on the map to represent one property, and with no further instructions on how the Address Gadget should work we had no choice but to call it a day for the ThumbTack Gadgets.

Address Gadget

As a final push we thought we’d publish the ThumbTack we had created for you good people to take a look at.  Once again the interface to perform even this, the most simple of tasks, was not intuitive.  We clicked the publish button expecting something to happen and nothing did.  It was only when we then clicked the Publish this collection text that a URL was then generated.

Publish - User Interface Fail

Most shocking of all we then decided to check the published URL to make sure it had worked only to be presented with the following warning:

The second Publish fail

Why the heck are the developers at Microsoft Live Labs not testing their application on the latest versions of Internet Explorer?  We can’t think of one good reason.  Arguably the most important step for software development is the actual testing of the application, and Beta or not this should not be left to the end users.  Especially those who you hope will be early adopters and spread positive encouragement for the new application.

So what do we think of ThumbTack?  Overall it’s not a bad idea.  It’s obviously a demonstration of the new technologies such as WPF that Microsoft is showing off to everybody and this is reflected in the new concepts in web development that this application demonstrates.   Unfortunately the bugs assisted by a poorly designed interface let this application down in such a huge way that currently we would dream of recommending it to our worst enemies.

Now we understand that this is a beta application, but so are most of Google’s applications.  Unlike Microsoft, Google appear to have a quality assurance and bug testing department.  We have of course encountered errors with Google’s software, it’s just software after all.  However not the showstoppers that were presented to us by Microsoft’s ThumbTack.

Don’t take our word for it, why not try it for yourself? – http://livelabs.com/thumbtack/ (you’ll need a Microsoft Live Passport if you haven’t one already).

Fortunately with the new free Microsoft Office Outlook Connector you can view and manage your Hotmail in Outlook. Manage your Hotmail contacts in Outlook or vice versa — the Connector will keep them synched up when you make changes.

You’ll also be able to use Outlook 2007 features like Instant Search and access your information offline.

The Connector also enables you to link your Windows Live Calendar and Outlook calendar — making it easier for you to keep on schedule.

Download it now for Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003.

Let’s cover the major features you would expect of any browser here and see how IE8 shapes up against the competition.

Security

Is IE8 more secure than FireFox and Chrome?  Unfortunately not.  Within a few days of release it was hacked and regardless of the brash claims Steve Ballmer makes about IE8 having security that “no other browser can match” unfortunately no browser is 100% safe.  Alas IE8 is no exception however it is more secure than IE7.

Features

On the surface of it IE8 does have some powerful new features.  The only problem is that the majority of these are already available in other younger browsers such as FireFox and Google Chrome.  For example IE8 provides InPrivate browsing — which allows you to browse without leaving any trace of your searches or pages viewed.  Chrome offered this functionality from the moment it hit the shelves in Beta!

Add-ins called Accelerators help you to find associated info for the page you’re looking at without opening another tab; while tabbed groups open colour-coded related tabs so you can see at a glance all the pages you’ve got open on a particular topic.  Unfortunately for Microsoft this functionality and much more is easily replicated using the multitude of free plug ins available for FireFox via https://addons.mozilla.org/

In terms of features IE8 does not bring anything new to the table.  Microsoft have simply caught up with the competition.

Cross browser compatibility

I could write pages on the daily struggle we have here at Atlas ensuring that websites work cross browser.  It sucks us of our time and energy leaving less time for actual feature development when we’re creating web applications.  The sooner the big browser players bash their heads together and come up with a way forward for compliance across all browsers we’re stuck with this problem, but how does IE8 shape up against its predecessors in this regard?

It’s easy to tell that at the very least Microsoft have given cross browser compatibility some thought in this version of IE.  IE8 provides an IE7 compatibility mode that you can quickly enable if the page you’re viewing doesn’t render as you would expect.  Developers also have the ability to specify the rendering engine that IE8 should use by inserting a very simple meta tag in their pages.  This makes ensuring your pages appear as you wish them too a little easier – more information can be found here - http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx

To summarise

You’ll be pleased to hear that IE8 is better than IE7. However it is very unlikely in our opinion that IE8 is going to see a slow down in the marketplace share that Microsoft are losing in the browser wars.

For Atlas the release of IE8 is yet another reason for people to move away from IE6.  We’ve seen a consistant decline in the use of IE6 over the last few years, and as an organisation we have decided that when IE6 use is under 12% we will advise our customers not to cater for IE6 on any new web development projects with very few exceptions.

Why not download a copy of IE8 and make your own opinion?  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

1) The file upload limit is 50 megabytes, so don’t go thinking about uploading your latest home movie
2) Adverts are scattered around the site, irritating but manageable

http://skydrive.live.com/

Live SkyDrive