Back in the Game

Wow! It's been quite a while since I've had the chance to actually sit down and write something out here. A lot of changes have been going on in my life over the last six months and the whirlwind has finally calmed down. I decided to get out of the software consulting business and back into enterprise development at a local corporation. I left NuSoft in July and went to work immediately following that over at Quixtar (the North American division of Amway). It's been a great experience for me thus far and an opportunity to get back to doing what I love - designing and building software. My role at NuSoft was transforming into a position focused on managing client relationships and mentoring younger consultants. While I love doing both of these things it left less and less time for me to focus on my passion - designing and building software.

So now I'm back to doing what I love best and wow have we been busy. Over the Labor Day holiday this year we launched a new website dedicated to one of our new product lines, Simply Nutrilite. Hot on the heels of that we went right to work on a major revision of the flagship Quixtar site. I was responsible for a lot of the development work on the shopping cart and checkout process for both sites. Leveraging my experience with Ajax we gave the entire ordering process a much more interactive user experience. I'm pleased at the results and based on the feedback we've been receiving from our independent business owners at this year's Achievers conference so are they. The new design really gives the site a fresh, appealing look. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Speaking of the Achievers conference, I'm sitting here in my hotel room in sunny Hollywood, Florida writing this post. It's been great having the opportunity this week to chat with our independent business owners and get some feedback and suggestions for the site. I believe the best way to improve any piece of software is to sit down and really talk to the people who use it on a regular basis. You need to be willing to take some honest criticism and use this feedback to really improve the product. My cohorts and I have recorded nearly seven pages of notes based on our conversations this week and I look forward to putting some of these suggestions into action on the site.

As I write I'm also staging up a couple of VPCs to continue my evaluation of Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. We are taking a hard look at using Commerce Server for some future projects and I'm always interested at getting to the next release of Visual Studio as soon as possible :). I'll be doing some writing on both products as I continue to work with them. I'm also trying to get on the docket for an upcoming West Michigan .Net User Group meeting to discuss some of the new features in VS2008 in the first quarter of 2008 so watch for that as well.

Things are happening at Spout

We recently did a major overhaul of the user interface at www.spout.com. Exciting changes to many of the site features are hot on the heels of this ui upgrade.

New place same great information

Well, they shutdown the old blogs.sagestone.net server where I was hosting my blog. What really sucks is they didn't give us a chance to grab our posts off the thing before they decided to decommision it.

So here I am now giving the blogger service a try. I'll be re-publishing some of the more useful posts related to .Net development and Community Server from my old site so stay tuned. I have several projects winding down in the near future and some vacation time coming up so I'm going to be more active posting for a while.