No, it’s not Jenny’s phone number.  Nor is it the social security number of that guy who is always advertising his identity theft protection services on TV and radio.  They are actually the numbers of two United States Patents which were issued to me and my friend and co-worker Tom Paasche last month for inventing a “System and method for managing recurring orders in a computer network” … better known to us all as Ditto Delivery.

It all started way back in 1998 when I was working on an application called “Standing Order Program”.  At the time, I was a mainframe developer (COBOL, CICS, DB2) but I had been playing around with HTML and ASP and thought it would be cool if I could move SOP to the web.  So I wrote a simple web app which would allow Distributors (that’s what they were called back then) to perform inquiries on their SOP profiles.  I then launched this new web app on what was our only internet site at the time: the Amway Business Network (ABN).  Does anyone remember that website?  Anyway, it was a great learning experience and it opened up a whole new world for me as a computer programmer.  Since then, I’ve never looked back…  

A few month later, I was approached about joining a group (more like an army) of people who were in the process a developing a brand new ecommerce website for the Amway business.  It was to use cutting-edge technology and offer IBOs (the newly christened name for Distributors) a fully functional website where they could shop, place and track orders, manage their business, and even check the weather, latest news headlines, and sports scores. Oh, and this is where I come in, it also needed to have an application where people could create and manage recurring orders.  So together with Tom Paasche, we began to brainstorm ideas for an even cooler version of the SOP application.  But what good is a cool application without an equally cool name?  Unable to come up with anything decent, it was actually Tom’s boss at the time Mick Griffin who, off the top of his head, suggested “Ditto! …. Ditto Delivery!”.  The rest is history and on 9/1/99 Quixtar.com was born.  

It’s been almost 9 years now since Quixtar and Ditto Delivery were launched and since that time both have undergone some major facelifts. Thanks in part to a lot of great suggestions from folks like you – so keep them coming!  While I no longer actively work on the Ditto application, having moved on to things like Personalized Health, Time Defiance Skin Assessment, Simply Nutrilite, etc., I do check in on it every now an then.  Like they say – you never forget your first.     

So there you have it, the real history behind Ditto Delivery.  Or as Paul Harvey would say: "And now you know…the rest of the story."  

 

Recently I was asked to be a part of the Silverlight TAP program with Microsoft.  I’ve always enjoyed working with new technologies, especially those that help visualize data and improve the development process for the User Interface layer, and so I signed up.

So what is Silverlight?  And what is TAP?  And what use does it have to our customers? 

Silverlight is a relatively new technology released by Microsoft that brings the power of their new Presentation Foundation to the browser user.  Some people refer to it as being akin to “Flash”, and I would agree that this is a good basis to begin a discussion about the technology.   Like Flash, Silverlight exists in the browser as a plug-in, and downloads application bits to begin execution.   However, my experience with the technology shows that it has gone a long way beyond this by providing a set of tools and structured programming languages (C# and Visual Basic.NET) that allow you to create manageable applications using tried and true programming techniques and patterns.

The Microsoft TAP (Technology Adoption Program) for Silverlight was Quixtar’s opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the next version of Silverlight, and have a say on what features we feel are important.  This directly influences how Microsoft proceeds with the technology, and is a great way to leverage our experiences and feed them back into their development pipeline.

What does it mean to you as a Quixtar Customer or IBO?   I believe this is where Silverlight can bring great new interactive applications to the user, through the browser.  Today, most everything we do centers around traditional web based applications based on HTML, ASPX, and Javascript.  These are powerful mechanisms to bring disconnected applications and functionality to you.  Silverlight, however, lets us take this a lot farther, and bring the power of rich desktop applications to you, still through your browser (be it Safari, FireFox, Internet Explorer, and others).    It does so in a standardized way, so it is not just a “Flash” animation, but truly a standardized rich application experience that is intuitive and easy to navigate.  We foresee bringing faster and better visualizations of the LOS Tree, Product Browsers, and other business tools that are difficult to represent with HTML alone.

 If you’re a developer, I’d suggest you take a look at the latest release of the Expression Studio tools, particularly “Blend” and start learning what you can about XAML (pronounced ZAML).  XAML makes great strides in making the formatting of the Presentation Layer for desktop apps and rich client apps a declarative exercise rather than a programming one.  Data bindings, animations, control placement, and custom paths may all be built out using this technology.  Additionally, Silverlight is supported by a structured, well defined, high level programming language: C# (or Visual Basic.NET).  Event Handlers, UI Threading, Data Binding Processes, Click Handlers, Delegates, and all the new goodies like Lambda Expressions, LINQ, and protocol bindings are all available to you in Silverlight. 

In the future, you’ll be seeing a lot more Silverlight mixed into the Amway experience, and that is going to make a better experience for our users.  Better ways of navigating content, placing orders, and reviewing LOS trees will all be greatly improved by the new Silverlight Experience. 

Want to learn more?  Start Here:  http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/overview/default.aspx

 

As promised in my previous post, the webinar I participated in with Tealeaf is now posted and I've included it below. 

Enjoy!

 

Hello, all.  I'm a long time reader, first time poster here.  

When you live in West Michigan and it's the middle of January, you start trying to dream up ways to get out of the frozen tundra and go somewhere warm and sunny.  Fortunately for me, I was offered a great opportunity to do exactly that.  Internet Retailer asked Quixtar to send someone down to speak at their inaugural Web Design Conference in Miami, Florida.  When we looked at calendars and availability, I was the big winner!  (David Prescott is still slightly jealous, I think, as he was one of the potential candidates.)

Beside the fact I could escape winter for a few days, it was also a fantastic opportunity.  I would get to see what some of the other industry-leading websites were up to and hear first-hand what they learned in their recent redesign initiatives.  Usability testing was an underlying theme of nearly every session.  Without a solid usability testing strategy, a website can suffer from not evolving fast enough or just making the wrong design decisions in general.  If you aren't evolving and adapting to meet your customers' habits and practices, you will lose their business.  It is becoming more important than ever for websites like Quixtar to understand how our customers are using the website so we can evolve appropriately and enrich the Quixtar experience.  One method of looking at usability is to collect user behavior data as customers browse and use the website.  This is the topic about which I was asked to speak.  My session was entitled "The Role of Real Time Data in Better Site Design and Usability."  It was a joint session with Geoff Galat, Vice President, Marketing & Product Strategy, from Tealeaf Technology.  Here was our session's abstract:

"Tracking customers' movement as they navigate a retail web site and capturing the information in a real-time database can give a merchant valuable insight into understanding shopping behavior and troubleshooting performance problems. By analyzing individual site visits, merchants can react more quickly to performance problems such as slow loading pages and broken links. Access to real-time user data can also help merchants improve customer service and implement a better site design. This session will help retailers understand how to capture visitor data in real time and how timely analysis of the information can yield better performance."

Geoff started things off with an excellent overview of the benefits of capturing user behavior data.  He punctuated the fact that companies need to understand this data by showing some pretty staggering statistics.  For instance, 42% of consumers that experience problems on websites abandon the session and go elsewhere.  That's an enormous percentage!  Quixtar is unique in one respect because there aren't any other websites our IBOs can go to if we inconvenience them.  Those affected users are forced to deal with the inefficiencies or errors that could arise at times on the website.  It is our job to alleviate those occurrences to make the experience at Quixtar.com as easy, convenient and reliable as possible.  But just how can we utilize user behavior data to do this?  That's where my portion of the presentation picks up.

I followed Geoff with a case-study, explaining what we here at Quixtar are doing with user behavior data collected by Tealeaf.  We have learned a lot about how our customers use the website.  And we've been able to alleviate some nagging inefficiencies that were unclear to us before implementing Tealeaf.  If you'd like to see and hear more, stay tuned.  There will be a webinar available for public viewing in the next 7 days.  I promise to post it here when it is available.

Once my session was over, it was time to head home, back to where the ice and snow reign over the land.  It was hard to leave sunny Miami, but I was ready to get home to my family.  And after about 7 hours of delays and two planes, I did just that.

Well, there seems to be quite a buzz in the IT industry about UCC (Unified Communications & Collaboration).  What is UCC?  Well, that depends on who you ask.  What you will typically find is a vision of consolidation of most of your communications channels into a single interface (as much as possible).

In my limited research around this area, I have learned that people communicate in very different ways.  If I were to email my dad, it’s likely that I might get a phone call back.  On the other hand, if I email your typical high school to college age individual it is far more likely that they will want to continue the discussion via text messaging or posting on each others facebook pages.

It can be a challenge to keep track of all of your communications options. With wikis, blogs, desk phones, cell phones, email, social networking sites, instant messaging, text messaging, face to face meetings, etc… Who can keep it all straight?

Well, there are a few vendors in this space with some really cool ideas.  They write software that, through a single interface, allows access to email, phones, instant messaging, document repositories…. You name it!  It’s actually very cool stuff.  I’ve viewed a few demonstrations that allow you to escalate an instant message conversation into a phone call with a mouse click or call your email system and have it read you your calendar. In one cool demo I just attended, the presenter called his email system and it read his recent email to him.  The presenter then, using only his cell phone, replied to the email via his voice and the email system sent his reply as a voice attachment. I was blown away!  The presenter was Swedish and English is his second language.  When the system encountered an email in Swedish, it was able to read it back to him in his native tongue.  He also told his email system he was running 10 minutes late for a meeting and it sent an email notification to the attendees. OK… that part sounds like an enabler ;-)

So, what forms of communication do you use to grow your business?  Do you prefer face to face or facebook to facebook?  Maybe when you flip open your cell phone you actually talk into it… Or, perhaps you find yourself texting your business contacts instead?  Do you follow up via an email or a voice mail?  The more I dive into everything that is UCC, I find myself truly amazed and excited about the future of communication and the role IT has an opportunity to play.

There are a lot of pieces to the proposal for Quixtar's implementation of Web 2.0.  In that design are several key infrastructure upgrades which need to come first to provide the foundation for new Web 2.0 applications.  What I am talking about is a complete refresh of our Telecom infrastructure that makes up our DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).

With so many people using the Internet today, most people are familiar with the concept of a DMZ.  For those who are not so familiar, there is a really good explanation on Wikipedia that you can check out, it even has some really nice pictures.  Our actual architecture is much more complicated, but the same basic principles apply.

So why replace all this equipment?  Hasn't it been doing a good job?  The answer is that it has served us very well over the years and could continue to serve us for many, many years to come.  So why do it?  Well, let's look at this a different way.  Let's consider our DMZ to be a lot like that old reliable TV that you have had for ages.  Personally, I do have one of those TVs and it does the job.  I can plug it into my DIRECTV receiver to get cable.  My kids can play all their favorite Wii games.  I can use a DVR to record all my favorite shows and play them back at my convenience.  Basically, it works for all the functionality I need today.  That may be true, but there are things my reliable TV can't do and will not be able to provide me down the road.

My TV does not support HD and when 2009 rolls around I may have to purchase an expensive converter.  Yes, I know...the coupon is in the mail.  Have you gotten yours yet?  No, neither have I.  It looks like the battle for HD video format may be coming to a close...the winner is...Blu-ray!  Now that the price will likely come down even further, I may even buy one, but even at a cheaper price I will never get the wonderful picture quality Blu-ray has to offer...right, my TV doesn't support HD.  There is always the 27 inches, which has served me well, but sometimes it would be nice to have more for that big picture effect from a movie or feel more like your actual there at the Daytona 500 with the COT rushing by at over 188mph!  Any 17 or 88 fans out there?  I digress...  Anyway, the point is that even though my TV could continue to serve me well for years to come (knock on wood), there are things it just will not be able to do or will require duct tape (converter) to allow it to continue functioning.

So the time is right for us to upgrade our DMZ equipment.  Upgrades to our switches, firewalls, load balancer or other devices, will allow us to take advantage of many great new features and useful functionality that have emerged in the past several years.  Ultimately, that investment means we can do more for our IBOs!  Even though most of this is under the covers, we know the infrastructure foundations are critical and will be an important step in providing the best possible Web 2.0 applications possible.

So the redesigned Quixtar.com site has been up for roughly four months now.  By this time hopefully you've gotten accustomed to the new look and feel, the layout changes and to the new UI (user interface) as a whole.  As we move deeper into 2008 we'd love to hear your thoughts, good and bad, on the new design. Is it easier to use?  Do you like it aesthetically?  Is it helping improve your business?

This kind of feedback assists us in providing the best possible user experience.  And if 2008 is anything like last year we will be designing plenty of new pages (if not entire sites) that could benefit from such feedback. We'd love to hear from you.

 

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from me.  I wanted to follow up on a previous post regarding the Winter Scripting Games (a Microsoft event). 

Last year I participated in the 2007 Winter Scripting Games.  Well, in preparation for this year’s games, competitors from last year are being featured on Microsoft TechNet.  The only requirement was achieving a perfect score in at least one of the divisions.  Today, it was my turn to be featured: Microsoft TechNet

I’m going to try to get some of my co-workers involved this year.  For me the games were a fun way to encourage myself to learn some new skills (specifically Powershell) that I could apply in my day to day work here supporting the Quixtar business.  It’s also a great way to network with other IT professionals that face similar challenges in their quest to automate tasks in areas that they support.  I really enjoy events like this that bring people with similar backgrounds and interests together to work on a common task.  Adding the element of competition definitely makes it quite interesting as well.  

Wish me luck this year!!  The 2008 games run from 2/15 – 3/3!  It’s a good thing I’ve got a DVR.  I have a feeling I’ll be scripting instead of watching my shows for a couple of weeks!  ;-)

When the concept of a community corporate blog was being discussed a few of us in IT were charged with researching what software/solution would be best to use. A few other blogging employees were using browser based blogs such as Blogharbor, Blogger, Typepad and we had a home grown site for Robin's blog "The Real Quixtar Blog". They were all fragmented and organized on a page located off a link in our footer. Not the best plan but we were new to blogging. I dabbled a while myself in a blog called "Blinded by Scion" - musings of cheap, economical car purchases and home improvements. I had some fun with it for a while but alas I removed it from existence.

Jonathan Jespersen found a product called Community Server and it was determined that would be the best solution to our blogging software needs. It came with easy to set up admin tools, templates for different user themes and would work well with our server configuration. That was before I found out I would have to modify .Net master pages to change the look and feel of our individually designed blogs. Yeah, I work in IT but I'm a front end developer with a extensive background in graphic design not a .Net developer. So I took the same attitude when I went sky diving that one time and closed my eyes and jumped in head first. It took a while to figure out the mystery of .Net but I became good enough to do what I had to do. Nice to know David Snyder who designs most of the OZ themes kept challenging me. All in all Community Server has fit our needs quite well. Recent upgrades will make changing UI themes alot easier once I get JJ to install it! Just kidding...

The truth of the matter is, it seems a lot longer than a year since we launched. With all of the projects such as Simply Nutrilite, Quickhits and now with Web 2.0 coming up somehow the year did not fly by.

As I wrap up this post I'd like to thank some other folks who don't get mentioned but are an integral part of keeping the OZ doors open:

Jeff Bosch - Project Manager, for keeping us honest on deadlines and taking up point for us so we could keep our noses to the grindstone.

David Snyder - Web Designer, who graciously challenges us when we say "nope can't do that".

Doug Kelly - Web Design Consultant, charged with maintaining and constructing all new blogs and having to deal with me on a regular basis. 

Anna Bryce, Public Relation Lead - just back from maternity leave. Welcome back Anna!

Kate Pearsall, Public Relations Specialist - Who's been doing a great job keeping everything coordinated and making sure all the i's are dotted and such.

Well that's it, I'm off to the birthday party. Funny, never heard of a blog getting it's own b-day cake but what do I care, It's free cake!

As Steve mentioned in his last post, we're still around.  However, between Achievers, exams and the holidays I am still getting back into the swing of things.  Our frigid and brutal winter is not exactly inspiring us to much poetic prose either, but we'll manage.

That having been said, I wanted to give a quick update on an upcoming improvement to front end, client side performance for the Quixtar site.  As an architect, 95% of the time I'm concerned about performance on the back end and how the code will scale under load.  Unfortunately performance issues on the browser can result in (from the user's perspective) equally slow load times.  Our tests stress server side load but do not typically handle client side performance.  As an example, a page may be processed on our servers in less than a second but take upwards of eight seconds to render on a user's browser.  From the user's standpoint, it matters little if the server took eight seconds and rendering was one second - it's still the length of time they have to wait. 

One thing we discovered during testing (using, et. al., the YSlow addon to Firefox) was an enormous amount (35+) of separate javascript and CSS file loads on any given page.  This added a significant load time on the client for each page, but particularly the LOS area of the site.  We've got a prototype solution that is set to go live sometime in February that should reduce client side load times in the LOS by an average of four seconds.  It will affect virtually the entire site but the LOS is probably where it will be most noticeable because of the enormous amount of javascript/css required to render the LOS tree.

Anyways, hope you had great holidays and your weather is better than ours.  We'll keep you posted on any new developments as they become available. 

Over the past couple weeks, it may have seemed like the CodeReview bloggers dropped of the face of Ada.  ;)  The truth is that we are all still here...well most of us.  There has been a lot going on here at the Quixtar Spaulding facility ever since we came back for the new 2008 calendar year.  All the work at the office, much less the work we end up doing in the evenings at home can make it pretty easy for us to convince ourselves that we don't have the time to Blog.  Well, I have good news...that is going to change.

The CodeReview bloggers are in the process of a New Years resolution.  We are going to be committed to making sure the Posts keep coming and we do not get so distracted that CodeReview goes silent.  I am confident we will be successful in that commitment.  All the work going on in the business transformation will require that we communicate more often and more effectively than ever!  So it is very important, that we keep up the communication and even crank it up a notch!

One final note, I would like to say a fond farewell to fellow blogger Erik Toth.  Erik was always very passionate and committed to everything he was ever involved in.  Even though Erik has moved on to other opportunities (in warmer climate) we will not forget him and certainly wish him the very best!

 

Christmas is a great time of year.  Although for some IT departments on the web, it can certainly come with mixed feelings....

For any parents with little kids, you would most likely know about Webkinz.  Cute little stuffed animals that you can also register on www.webkinz.com in a virtual world and play games.  Well, all 3 of my kids love these stuffed animals.  They are always really excited to register them on the website.  Once they are registered, they receive all the virtual frills and features that go along with owning a Webkinz.

Unfortunately for my kids, the Webkinz website seems to have fallen victim to the mad rush.  Multitudes of kids trying to register and play with their new Christmas presents.  For the last 2 days, we have had a hard time getting into the website without an error (usually 500 error) .  I assume most of the problems were a result of the higher traffic volumes they are experiencing.  It was apparent that the IT staff was trying hard to figure out where all the bugs were occurring.   At times I could see debug tracing (used for troubleshooting) turned on, in what was likely an attempt to try and understand the problems.  I felt bad for the IT staff members who were clearly working during the holiday trying to fix the website. I could certainly relate.

It looks like Webkinz ran into a problem we had to solve years ago.  For Quixtar, we have 12 days out of the year, end of month, where the traffic volume on the Internet surges to peaks 3-4 times higher than any other day of the month.  In the early years after 1999, end of month was very painful, both for IBOs and Quixtar IT staff.  That was a tough lesson to learn.  However as a result of the early years, we have stepped up to the challenge and we are doing rather well these days.  We have spent a lot of time and money building a robust website that could manage those couple of high volume days every year.   The Webkinz website likely also only has a couple days out of the year (Dec 25, 26, 27... :) ...where demand is at its all time high.  I wish them luck as they tackle their current issues.  I suspect that next Christmas the experience on www.webkinz.com will improve over this year's Christmas holiday as they ferret out their problems.

A number of Quixtar IT staff will be working through the evening and until the early morning hours this Monday, December 31 to do what we can to make sure your website experience is a good one at end of month.  Even though, December is rarely one of our largest end of months...too much competition for New Years parties...we'll still be there to monitor the site.  So thanks to those in Quixtar IT who will be working at the office into the New Year to support the business!

This will likely be my last post for 2007, so I would also like to wish you all a Happy New Year! 

This was the very first Achievers I have ever attended.  It has been an experience I will certainly not forget.  It isn't because of the weather either...although going from sub freezing temperatures in Grand Rapids Michigan to 80's in Fort Lauderdale Florida is certainly memorable, what I am talking about is the opportunity to meet and talk to IBOs.

I worked at the eBusiness booth for Session 4 of the Expo.  This was the area to talk about the websites.  Not a surprise it may be filled with IT people, eh?  We spoke with hundreds of IBOs about what they thought of the websites.  We received a lot of positive feedback on the new changes to Quixtar.com and a lot of feedback on things we still need to do better.  It is good to hear affirmation that as a whole we are making positive changes for the websites, but it is equally, if not more important to keep getting feedback on what we can still do better that would help the IBOs businesses.

Learning more about how IBOs use the website, or would like to use the website is key.  An important factor is to understanding more about IBOs day to day or week to week activities.  What may be a minor amount of work for us to put in the website could save an IBO hours of work each week.  A new web report or a small feature change for example can have a huge impact.  That is one of the reasons why communicating with IBOs at events like Achievers and these blogs are so important.  Face to face and off line communication needs to continue all year long for us to make this the best business it can possibly be.

Yes I will miss the warm weather, but the passionate conversations with IBOs about the websites mean a whole lot more!

The calendar year of 2008 is still weeks away although I find myself already distracted with what projects await us for the next 12 months.  The high level goals of the business transformation will certainly still drive what we do for 2008 and many more years to come, but there is so much to do!

There are so many huge projects in the wings I know we will be busier than ever once January hits.  Not only will it be exciting to finally get working on them, but it will be exciting to start sharing some information on the blogs while we are working on them!  No doubt we will be able to get some great ideas and feedback during the project.  No doubt some blog comments could even get in the project(s) before they launch.  There has been a lot of communication in CodeReview and hopefully the reads and comments will only grow!

OK...I would suspect that most of the possible major projects we could work on for 2008 have already been outlined and proposed.  Although there is always room for a couple ad-hoc projects across the year.  Right now I am sitting in the Grand Rapids airport on my way to Session 4 of Achievers.  I am planning to have as many conversations as possible with IBOs and see what web initiatives they think would bring the biggest benefit to their efforts!  Since most IBOs will not be at this years Achiever's event, I would like to know from all our readers what you think our focus on the web should be for 2008?  As the new year starts we can look back at this blog post and see how on target the projects turn out to be with IBOs feelings in the last month of 2007.

 Well, the plane has started boarding, so I should wrap up.  I hope to see some IBOs at Achiever's who read CodeReview!
 

This past weekend I had the honor and opportunity to attend and work at Achievers session 2. I don't have a chance to meet and talk to our Business Owners very often so I was excited to discuss the new Quixtar redesign with them. On the bus traveling to the hotel from the airport I met some IBOs from Michigan. I told them that I was a Information Architect and worked on the new Quixtar redesign and then I proceeded to ask them what they thought of it. As I expected they had alot to say. Overall everyone was happy but had some concerns, some of which we (Quixtar IT) were already addressing. Our conversation ended as the site of the Ocean and our beautiful hotel peered into view.

As chance happened I kept running into the same group and continued our discussion. At dinner that night my collegue Nick McCullum and I went to the welcome dinner and I spotted the same group. We sat with them and continued the conversation from earlier. I gathered a lot of insight from a different perspective. I understand our business, but hearing how they do business and use the website was interesting. We discussed the new LOS Tree. One gentleman said when it launched he "hated it" but the more he used it he now "loves it". Its interesting how change one minute can cause frustration and the next enlightenment, human nature. I hated it when Sammy Hagar replaced David Lee Roth in Van Halen but now love that phase more than when Diamond Dave was in the band. OK, earth to David - stick to the point. The point is, as good as we are at our job interaction with our business owners is essential. You'll see lot of things change on our site. If it doesn't work then we'll fix it. Feedback is always appreciated and expected.

I'm glad I had a chance to see our business through their eyes and I hope to continue our discussion in the future.