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I recently moved my blog over to michaelwparks.com. Hope to see you there :)

Atlanta Web Designers Group July meetup

Thursday evening I attended my first meetup of the Atlanta Web Designers held at the Portfolio Center on Bennett Street. The meetup was well attended with approximately 50 members. The main speaker was Brandon Eley who presented some great tips on incorporating marketing into the design process for your website. I picked up several valuable techniques that I will definitely use. For example the number one question to ask when building a Website is "What do you want your visitors to do?" Make sure it's clear on each landing page exactly what action you most want a visitor to take. Make it stand out. Brandon mentioned that often sites are designed around the company organization chart. But it is far more effective to design with verbs and adverbs that guide visitors to take whatever action you want them to take...like "Buy Something" or "Download a demo".

Volunteers were requested to submit a website for critque by Brandon and the group. I volunteered a website I've been supporting and in return received some valuable feedback (and a copy of Brandon's new book). I'm looking forward to the August meetup of AWDG.

Mobile Camp Atlanta at King Plow

Saturday, July 18th I attended Mobile Camp Atlanta 2009, an barcamp-style event held at the King Plow Center on Marietta Street. The topic of this unconference was development of applications for mobile platforms with most sessions focused on iphone. The King Plow center, a renovated plow factory (1902-1986) is a fantastic venue to host an event. Sponsors including Georgia Tech Research Institute provided a great breakfast spread with the best selection of fruit I've ever seen at any event. I appreciated the unconference hours, 8:30am until 12:30pm, so it was a good way to start off the weekend without taking up too much of the weekend. Perfect timing.

Web Entrepreneurs - The Next Wave

The July meetup of Atl Web Entrepreneurs was quite an event with around 110 attendees stuffed into the Hodges room in the Centergy Building at Tech Square. With so many warm bodies the Hodges room heated up to uncomfortable levels...which is another story in itself. The subject of the meetup was How Google Wave Changes Everything (or not)." In spite of the large crowd I managed to snag a great seat in the back next to a wall plug for my power cord. I spent my time divided between listening to presentations and following #awe posts on twitter. We saw a short demo of Wave, several presentations, and heard lively discussion about what wave is and isn't which I believe is yet to be determined. An unforgettable moment occurred half way through the meeting when @stephenfleming the new Vice Provost of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute showed up in shorts and t-shirt with fans from his garage to help cool down the room. Overall was a great meeting and I'm looking forward to the August meetup. July will be hard to beat.

Southern Fried Roadshow

Today I attended the June 2009 Southern Fried Roadshow at Microsoft Southeast Division Offices in Alpharetta, GA. This 1/2 day event (1-5pm) covered highlights from MIX, Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 3 and Windows Azure. I really wanted to see the Azure material but alas I couldn't make it through the prelims. Like most good productions they saved the sexy information (Azure) until the last part of the day. I was sitting there listening to a presentation on programming power settings in Windows 7...and decided to call it a day. I felt a little guilty getting up to leave early but when I turned around the guy sitting behind me was sound asleep :) Sure wish I could have heard the 411 on Azure...oh well. One day I'm sure Microsoft will catch up with Starbucks, Curry Honda customer service waiting room, and the store where I always buy tires (Midtown Tire on Ponce)...and provide WiFi to visitors!!!!!  With a little WiFi I would have easily waited until the Azure presentation started...but sitting there without access to the Internet is truely unbearable...sorry I'm just being honest. 

Sharepoint Saturday was a hit

On Saturday I attended a great event, Sharepoint Saturday, at Microsoft's offices located in Alpharetta, Ga. The weather was perfect yet the event was packed which I think says something positive about the growing popularity of Sharepoint. The event was free of charge with a number of sponsors paying the costs and top notch speakers many of whom flew or drove from out of town on their own dime to present sessions. There were so many great sessions going on simultaneously I had a difficult time choosing which to attend. The first one I attended had a long title, "Building the next Generation of Sharepoint Web Parts - how to leverage JQuery and Silverlight" presented by Phil Wicklund. Phil gave an easy to understand overview of JQuery along with some great tips for getting started...and demonstrated how to easily include JQuery in sharepoint web parts. Phil stressed checking out existing plugins first at http://plugins.jquery.com before writing anything from scratch in JQuery....good tip.  

I actually didn't stay for the 2nd half of Phil's presentation on Silverlight instead I moved over to Dux Raymond's talk on "5 Ways to Enhance Sharepoing Site Usability" where I caught 3 out of the 5 ways.  Sorry I didn't write them down I'm waiting on the slide deck. 

For the next set of sessions I split my time between Jason Storey "Building a Data Centric Portal in Sharepoint" where Jason demonstrated using the data view web part in Sharepoint Designer and "Integrating SQL Server 2005  Reporting Services with Sharepoint" where Chris Regan walked us through step by step the ardious task of installing and configuring reporting services and sharepoint to work together. Interesting that the reporting services configuration wizard sometimes "lies" to you and other times simply doesn't work without manual intervention...whew...it's going to be much tougher than I thought getting reporting services working with my sharepoint server but at least now I know. 

A nice deli box lunch was provided by one of the sponsors and I made the mistake of finding a shady spot in the beautiful outdoors to enjoy it. Which started me thinking what a great day it is and how much I would like to attend the Atlanta Dogwood Festival. I resolve to attend one more session before heading home and to the festival. 

For my last session I picked "Business Intelligence - Build a Dashboard with Excel Services and KPIs" by Jeremy Minich. In the past I've built a BI dashboard in Sharepoint without really understanding all of the steps and have struggled getting a couple of things to work so I thought I would benefit from seeing an expert walk through the process. And I was correct as Jeremy did an outstanding job explaining the various BI features in Sharepoint and demonstrated how to setup dashboards and KPI's step by step exactly what I needed to see. 

I missed a couple of sessions and the give-a-ways at the end of the day by leaving early but I still had a great time at Sharepoint Saturday and accomplished what I needed...a new burst of sharepoint inspiration as well as specific "how to" knowledge of new technologies and techniques.

Thanks to Microsoft and all the other sponsors,  speakers,  and volunteer's who made Sharepoint Saturday a success. I'm looking forward to the next one....and hoping for bad weather on event day.   

 

 

 

2009 Atlanta CodeCamp

The fifth Atlanta Codecamp was held at Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, GA on March 14th. Codecamp is always held on a Saturday and lasts all day....8am until 6pm. This year the weather in Atlanta cooperated...cold and rainy...so it wasn't too hard giving up my Saturday to attend. Highlights for me included the Doug Ware session about running Sharepoint server on Amazon Web Services, and other sessions on Intro to Azure, alternate membership providers for Sharepoint, and ASP.NET 4.0 Ajax. Even with the bad economy there was a pile of swag to give away at the end of the day. I was lucky enough to win a 5 lb book on Sharepoint 2007 development. Codecamp is a wonderful event attended by passionate coders who can't think of anything better than spending all day Saturday soaking up new knowledge and making new tech friends. Looking forward to next year. 

Health IT and the 2009 Stimulus Package

A Health IT TAG (Technology Association of Georgia) event was held on Thursday March 12th 7:30am until 9am and was well worth the $20 admission price.  A panel of experts provided insight into the stimulus and issues associated with Health IT. On the previous day (March 11th) I also attended a private lecture by a top Georgia Tech professor on the topic of Health care, Health IT, and specifically electronic medical records. These two meetings were both revelations to me that drove home the urgency of why we have to gain control over health care costs in the US and why it has to happen right now and the role played by health IT in our health care system. 

Highlights of the two meetings include: 

Health care costs have been rising much faster than inflation. Today they cost 2.5 trillion and by 2015 will cost 4 trillion, which is the entire GDP of Japan. The US pays far more for health care per person than any other industrial country and yet by all measures we are ranked between 23 and 30 in terms of outcome and quality. So we spend more and get less. Our system of health care can best be described as a complex adaptive system where the various agents attempt to optimize benefits for themselves often at odds with the other agents in the system. In other words nobody is in charge. 

While cost of administration is 30% in private health care insurers it is only 3% in medicare and even less in the Veterans Administration hospital system. 

Today the US government pays around 47% of health care in America and if you crank in tax breaks enjoyed by companies for paying private insurance premiums the government portion is even higher. 

Life expectancy is governed 40% by behavior (smoking, diet, exercise), 30% by genetics, 20% by environment, and 10% by health care delivery. Since the 1970's when life expectancy increased dramatically from 1900 until the mid 1970's average life expectancy has not increased significantly in spite of the inventions of modern medical technologies during this period. 

44,000 to 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical mistakes in hospitals. 

Medical knowledge doubles every eight years and there is no requirement for doctors to "keep up" even if it were possible to do so. 

The chance of a doctor prescribing the "best" treatment is 50% and in chronic care only 25% of patients are on the right treatment. 

75% of all health care is to treat chronic disease and 90% of medicare cost is treating chronic disease. Half of all chronic disease is preventable. 

Evidence based practice (EBP) promotes the collection, interpretation, and integration of valid, important and applicable patient-reported, clinician-observed, and research-derived evidence. The best available evidence, moderated by patient circumstances and preferences, is applied to improve the quality of clinical judgments and facilitate cost-effective care.

EBP represents a solution to the problem of prescribing wrong or less than optimal treatment for chronic illness, and provides a scientific basis for ordering tests...versus ordering tests just to save doctor time or as a defense against malpractice. 

The only way to achieve EBP is through the use of electronic medical records. Without electronic records the data to support EBP simply does not exist. 

It is this relationship between EBP, EMRs, and the subsequent improvement to diagnosis and treatment that was my ephiney during these two meetings. Now it all makes sense...the promanent role of Health IT particulary electronic medical records in the stimulus package. 

In other countries with far better healthcare at far lower cost than the USA, penetration of EMR systems is nearly 100% among physicians of all practice sizes. 

Healthcare is literally going to eat our economy if we don't do something to stop it beginning right now, today. Healthcare is the biggest threat to our economic well being in this century. And all evidence points to electroic medical records as a major piece of the solution. 

 

CloudForce Tour

Salesforce held the first 2009 CloudForce seminar in Atlanta at the Intercontential Hotel Buckhead on March 5th from 2:30 until 5pm with a reception from 5 until 6. I always enjoy catching up on the latest salesforce features and success stories as I'm a big admirer of Salesforce as an early entry into cloud computing and the success they have had. At this event I didn't really hear alot of new information. It was more of a refresher to remind Atlanta customers and potential customers of the value and opportunities available from the Salesforce platform. I get very excited about Force.com as a development platform along with appexchange to provide an easy vehicle for commericalizing applications. 

I do wish Force.com would reduce their monthly subscription fee to be more in line with other cloud application development platforms. But as always I get fired up hearing about the success of force.com from customers...who represent very large as well as very small companies. Which points to a major characteristic and advantage of cloud computing...the smallest company has access to the exact same technologies that are available to the very largest companies for creating innovation and value. 

As usual the reception from 5 to 6 was fantastic with free beer and wine and hot h'ordeurves. I love Salesforce receptions.    

The State of Python

Python Atlanta (PyAtl) got off to a great start in 2009 with their January meeting. Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundationand the author of the book "Python Web Programming", gave an informative and entertaining talk on the state of the Python community along with some good insight into the workings and objectives of the PSF. As an amusing sidenote Steve mentioned the reason he's in Atlanta this week teaching a workshop on Microsoft Sharepoint.  Another great presentation was given by Chris Johnson,  owner of Atlanta business ifPeople, on the Plone content-managment system. Plone is a python based CMS built on top of the Zope application server. As usual the pyatl meeting started at 7:30pm and was over by around 9:30pm. The meeting is held in a convenient venue the GTRI Food Processing Technology building on the edge of the Georgia Tech campus.