Just wanted to get the word out that my corporate website, Chariot Enterprises, now has a section dedicated to the FAA’s Advanced Qualification Program (AQP) for training aircrew and associated support personnel.  There is currently a paper summarizing AQP and another discussing the various aspects of costing out an AQP development effort.  I trust that those interested in this program will find the site useful and of assistance in their AQP development efforts. 

Quote of the Day:
When all else fails, read the instructions.
--Cahn's Axiom
also known as RTFM (Read The F'in Manual)

Mircrosoft’s® Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC09) kicks off next Monday (July 13th) in New Orleans.  Rumor is that there will be demonstrations of both Office Web and Office 2010 Beta as well as an announcement of Windows 7’s release to manufacturing (RTM).  If you lead a boring life in the office, Office 2010 could bring some "excitment" to it:  

Quote of the Day:
For Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
--William Shakespeare

Found a great video that very clearly demonstrates just how easy it is to create and edit your public facing website built with the FREE Microsoft® Office Live Small Business system.  As Microsoft® says, “Your Office Live Small Business Web site should have a unique look that reflects your business needs. This video shows you how to customize your header, create a color scheme, and add a gradient site background to unify your overall site look and feel. You'll also learn to customize the layout and add an image to the background of a page.”

For additional videos on how to use Office Live Small Business, click here. 

Quote of the Day:
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
--Mark Twain, 19th-century American humorist, author and journalist

Haven't been out here much the past 2 months or so as we've been busy gearing up for the 2009 Hurricane Season down in FL.  Our local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) has been busy with training, Hurricane Exercises (HUREXs), and supporting local community events.  I've been working to develop a MS Office Live Small Business application to support CERT in managing personnel and equipment resources as well as financial expenditures and Emergency Management taskings during a disaster.

However, today I came across a nice video from Microsoft on how businesses can use Office 2007 (specifically Excel and Office Live Workspaces) to increase their productivity and understanding of their business data: Pump Up Productivity with Office 2007.

Don't have the time or the know-how to do it? That's why we're here - visit us at Chariot Enterprises to see how we can help!

Quote of the Day:
Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.
--Ludwig van Beethoven

Ran across an excellent presentation by Microsoft’s Business Division President Stephen Elop that shows what we might see in terms of information technology within the next 10 years:

Video: Future Vision Montage

A lot of this technology is undergoing testing at Microsoft’s Office Labs and you can “play” with some of these items – for example:

• Canvas for OneNote - a different way to sort through and work with your OneNote content. Canvas for OneNote gives you the ability to spread out your pages across a canvas for alternate navigation, editing, and organization.
• Chart Advisor - a faster way to get the best chart for your data. Chart Advisor provides improved options to generate better presentation and visuals for your data.
• pptPlex - add some “zoom” to your presentations. By transforming your PowerPoint presentation into a zoom-able canvas, pptPlex expands the ways you can display your slides.
• StickySorter - an easier way to organize brainstorms. StickySorter offers idea generation and organizing tools designed to save you time and improve your results.

Quote of the Day:
Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing for something.
--Wilson Mizner

Yesterday, I was trying come up with a method to present a better visual representation of task status and progress for a client on their SharePoint site.  I ran across an article on “Creating a Dashboard (Bar Chart) in SharePoint” by Pam Davis.  While I found her approach compelling, I thought it to be a quite involved process.  Then, in the comments to her blog posting, I noticed an entry by Christophe Humbert who “claimed” to have a much simpler approach.  This intrigued me as I had first heard that name just last week during Mark Miller’s online presentation on Dashboards to the New York SharePoint Users Group.

Christophe’s approach uses calculated columns to write HTML and then exposes the graphics using a Java script embedded into a Content Editor Web Part that’s hidden at the bottom of the SharePoint list.  In another blog, he explains how to use color coding in SharePoint lists and gives examples of using traffic lights, the default SharePoint KPI Indicators, font colors, and/or background colors.  It seemed simple enough, so I gave it a shot using his default SharePoint KPI indicators.  Very easy to use and it worked great, except my KPI Indicators did not sequence correctly and, in one case, did not even appear – the dreaded red X on the image.  Exploring why this was occurring led me to a plethora of SharePoint KPI indicators that I didn’t even know existed Out of the Box (OOTB):

Name/Extension	-0	-1	-2
kpidefault
kpidefaultlarge
kpidefaultnormal
kpidefaultnormallarge
kpipepperalarm
kpipepperalarmlarge
kpipeppers
kpipepperslarge
kpiryg

You can even use the KPI trend arrows:

Name/Extension	-0	-1	-2	-3	-4
kpitrend

You can find all the SharePoint “Out of the Box” graphics at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\Template\IMAGES. 

If you read Christophe’s blog on Using Color Coding in SharePoint Lists, you’ll notice that he uses a formula to calculate the SharePoint default KPI Indicator indices of 0, 1 or 2 (not being familiar with the formula he used, I mistakenly thought he was calculating indices of 1, 2, 3 and that’s what I put into my initial formula which I had converted to an IF statement - that’s why my initial attempt failed leading me to my discovery of the variety of KPI Indicators above).  After experimenting with his approach, my client’s pages now look like this: 

Above chart’s Task Progress is computed by comparing %Complete with the %Time Completed. 

Above chart’s Progress is computed as the %Complete. 

For information on the Progress Bars shown above, see another of Christophe’s blogs.  My thanks to both Pam Davis & Christophe Humbert for helping me help a client!

Quote of the Day:
Women like silent men. They think they're listening.
--Marcel Archard

Ran across Vedant's Blog : Getting to know SharePoint Online this morning which has some excellent background material on Microsoft’s SharePoint Online which is part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).  If you’re interested in just general information on BPOS or, more specifically, SharePoint Online, I highly recommend this informative article.  That’s it for today, time to get ready for the Super Bowl!

Quote of the Day:
"To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
      --Theodore Roosevelt

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,BPOS

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the Business Applications within Office Live are nothing more than an adaptation of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).  This is also true of the free Office Live WorkSpaces.  Why do I mention this?   Well, given this tidbit of information, you now know that when you’re having problems with your Office Live “backend” or don’t know how to use web parts, etc., you can search for WSS information on a particular topic to supplement the sometimes “thin” or non-existent information in the Office Live documentation.  On that note, I offer the following:

Alex, over on SharePoint Coding, had an excellent blog yesterday on planning SharePoint sites.  While his thrust was towards Enterprise WSS sites, his suggestions surely apply towards designing your Office Live Business Applications and Workspaces layout.  He also provides a link to a cool Visio add-in (called a Visio stencil) that provides Visio users with SharePoint unique symbols to use in designing your site layout.

I also ran across a blog item from last year by Paisano, on American Pai, that gives a nice overview of some of the different components that you can use within your Office Live Business Applications and/or WorkSpaces:

• Announcements: A place where important Company/Department news and announcements can go.

• Calendar: All company events and activities go into this public calendar. Holidays are usually added as well.

• Contacts: Centralize all your contact information a public address book - information on employees, vendors, partners, clients, etc.

• Tasks: Action items and the people who are assigned to get them done.

• Projects: Show basic tracking information for your project tasks, most importantly, a timeline layout, or Gant chart.

• Wiki: A place to generate ideas for those important projects you’ve got on your plate.

• Blog: Link your blog of news updates or for project status updates to your internal or external web site; such as I’ve done here.

• Message Board: If you need a good old-fashioned message forum then here it is.

• Image Library: Place all your authorized images, logo’s, etc in one central location for easy access by your team.

• Forms Library: Likewise, maintain all official forms and templates in the forms library.

• Shared Documents: You can create centralized depositories for all your company documents and files.

• Surveys: This is an excellent way to take company polls on any subject matter.

• Meeting Workspace: This powerful feature assists you with setting up meetings – a place where document decisions are made, tasks assigned and tracked, agenda notes stored, and online discussions can be held.

• RSS Feeds/Alerts: Stay on top of changes within your “virtual” office by using RSS feeds and email alerts.

He also talks about the seamless integration between Outlook (especially version 2007) and your WSS (read Office Live) site.  You should check every list on your site, under the “Actions” menu to see if there’s a “Connect to Outlook” link.  Paisano also has links to additional articles and videos on WSS – most have direct applicability towards improving and helping you with your Office Live “back-end”.

Finally, I had friend recently ask me about not being able to edit an Excel spreadsheet that resides in one of our Community Emergency Response Team’s (CERT) document libraries within our “virtual” office environment.  As users begin migrating from older Microsoft Office versions to Office 2007, you just might run across an error described as "'Edit Document' requires a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible application".  Try this link to get assistance on how to get that feature running again.

That’s it for today, hope you have a Great Day!

Beginning January 26th, the Microsoft Partner Program will make available an on-demand webcast of the Office Live Small Business Web Seminar Series.  Here’s the information:

Series Description

Series Parts

Part: 1 Microsoft Office Live Small Business: What It's All About
This seminar will introduce the user to Office Live Small Business and uncover many of the technological benefits that are available within it. They will learn to navigate the user interface & the workspace that is created upon activation.

Part: 2 Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Creating a Basic Website
This seminar will look at the steps needed to get a webpage for your business up and running. It will focus on creating a brand and an image and optimizing your site to give your customers the best possible browsing experience. Included in the topics will be: generating compelling visual interest & using HTML.

Part: 3 Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Marketing Tools
This seminar will key in on some of the current marketing trends to help your business gain a foothold in the e-commerce world. E-mail marketing and search engine marketing will be highlighted using AdManager and building up a customer database.

Part: 4 Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Reporting
In this class, the focus will be on understanding & using reports to building a statistical analysis for the purpose of increasing your website usage and increasing viewers and referrals. Also included will be a discussion about key performance indicators and meeting realistic goals.

Part: 5 Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Business Applications
This seminar will key in on developing workspaces as well as some of the additional applications available within Office Live such as Project Manager Contact Manager and Email integration. Also included in the discussion will be using document libraries and lists to give custom applications more savvy.

Part: 6 Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Adding Video Using SilverLight
This course will continue with the advanced web techniques to include Silverlight as a multimedia solution. The use of HD and cross-platform .NET based interactive applications will be discussed as well.

You can view this information and register for all the classes at ISV Innovation: Microsoft Office Live Small Business Web Seminar Series.  I believe that you’ll need to be a registered Microsoft Partner to view these on-demand web seminars.

There are so many offerings coming along within the “Cloud” that it’s tough to sort out exactly what you get with each offering.  Today, I hope to shed some light on the differences between several of Microsoft’s recent offerings:

First is Office Live Workspace.  This is a FREE offering that allows an individual, organization, or company to invite others to view, comment on, and edit documents in a password protected-workspace, online (in the “cloud”).  As the Microsoft promotion says, “Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta is your online place to store and share documents. When you have multiple people involved in a project or planning an event, Office Live Workspace makes it easy. You can share documents, coordinate schedules, and manage to-do lists in your own password-protected online workspace. It’s a great way to keep everyone actively involved – whether they’re next door or on the next continent.”

“How can it help my business?”, you might ask.  Well, let’s say that you’re an estate planner, for example, working out of your home.  You’ve completed a workup of your client’s plan and you now need to review it with them.  With Office Live Workspace, you simply create a workspace for that client’s document(s), share the workspace with them (which generates an email detailing how to access the workspace), and let them review the details or work collaboratively with them over the phone.  You’ve saved either yourself, your clients, or both, a trip to a mutually agreed upon meeting place, gotten your work accomplished, and are ready to meet with another client immediately following this meeting.  That’s what using technology in your business is all about – doing things more efficiently and timely, freeing you to expand your business.  If you’re interested in more details about Office Live Workspace, view some of the online demos.  The main, and only, thrust of Office Live Workspace is document sharing, otherwise known as collaboration.

Next is Office Live Small Business.  In a nutshell, this is your “virtual office.”  It is a combination of offerings that starts out FREE and gradually escalates in services and cost.  At the FREE end, you get a public-facing web site (with 500 MB of Web site storage and easy-to-use design templates), domain name (free the first year then $14.95/year thereafter), Business E-mail (with 100 company-branded email accounts using Outlook Web Access which can also be integrated into your desktop Outlook), Contact Manager (a sort of lightweight Business Contact Manager for managing sales opportunities, contact information, and tracking customer interactions), Business Applications (for managing your business with Document Manager, Project Manager, and Workspaces), and 5 FREE business users.  As you begin to grow your business, you can add additional services, at additional cost, such as E-mail marketing, E-commerce, Keyword Advertising, Additional Storage, and Additional Users.  You can see the pricing scale here. 

As your estate planning business begins to grow, you’d step up from Office Live Workspace to Office Live Small Business in order to have a public presence on the internet while still having the ability to collaborate with your clients in a password-protected online space.  In addition, you now have the ability to manage your business – emails, financial data, contacts, etc. from virtually anywhere without having to return to the office to access critical information on your computer.  Furthermore, Office Live Small Business has a really slick feature that allows you to expose selected business information from your password-protected site out to your public site – things like upcoming events calendars, client lists, business statistics, etc.  And, all of it interfaces nicely with your desktop Office Outlook program and the rest of your Office Suite.

At the top end of the Microsoft “cloud scale” is Microsoft Online Services.  Here, you can get Microsoft Exchange Online (a hosted enterprise messaging solution – $10.00/user/month), Microsoft SharePoint Online (a hosted enterprise-collaboration solution – $7.25/user/month), Microsoft Office Live Meeting (a hosted Web conferencing solution – $4.50/user/month), Microsoft Office Communications Online (a hosted instant messaging and presence solution - $2.50/user/month), any combination of these services, or all of them - called Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS - $15/user/month).  BPOS has minimum purchase requirement of 5 users.  All service purchases have to be made through a Microsoft Partner.  You can get additional information on Microsoft’s Online Services here.

By now, your estate planning business has really taken off and you’re managing a staff of several estate planners along with an office staff.  In order to maintain the office efficiencies you saw using Office Live Small Business, you need to assess how best to implement enterprise software into your operation.  Do you expand your staff (and expenses) by hiring an IT staff or do you let Microsoft host your systems while you serve as the IT administrator?  Some possible options are explained here.

Finally, I see that Microsoft is getting ready to announce its Office Web Applications release - lightweight versions of Office productivity software, delivered through your browser.  Another offering “in the cloud.”

While I have been an almost original user of the Office Live Small Business resources (an Office Live web site, Office Live Premium User, and the recently released Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)), this past weekend I came across several initiatives that will allow me to take my efforts to a new level:

• The Office Live Small Business Partner program allows an individual or company experienced with Office Live tools to join the "Microsoft® Office Live Small Business Designer & Developer Community."  There, you can market your business in one or more of several categories: Web Designer, Custom Developer, Training Specialist, Services Specialist, Business Solution, or Marketing Services. In addition, you can "receive 18 months of three (3) free add-ons (10 users, 2GB app storage, 1GB Web storage) to your Office Live Small Business account (Approximate Retail Value, US$519.30)."  I highly recommend any designers/developers that are trying to increase their business to check this program out.
• Once you've completed signing up for that program, then it's time to reap the rewards of your efforts by advertising Microsoft's Office Live program.  They have an affiliate program for all their approved developers that pays you for leads to Office Live.  The program is connected with Commission Junction.  Unfortunately, I've dropped the original link that gets you from the Office Live Small Business Partner program to the affiliate program.  I'll keep looking for it and when I get it, I'll post it here.  Once your Office Live Small Business Partner application is approved, you can then place affiliated Office Live advertisements onto your web site.  Each click and/or lead will generate you some additional income.

Ran across some very good articles on SharePoint:

Lessons We've Learned: 7 Tips for Team Web Sites

Tips and Tricks - Using Wikis in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Tips and Tricks - Using Blogs in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

SharePoint Integration "Good, Better, Best" white paper

Spent a very long and frustrating day yesterday, trying to create, edit, and post that AQP blog below.  Lots of problems with the Windows Live Spaces blogging interface.  Then, at the very end, I noticed the link for Windows Live Writer (Beta).  Downloaded it, cleaned up the article in about 3 minutes, and wham, posted it!  Gosh, quite a difference this tool makes - and, it's got lots of neat add-ins!

 From the FAA's AQP Advisory Circular (AC120-54), here's a quick review of AQP concepts and terminology

AQP is a systematic methodology for developing the content of training programs for air carrier crewmembers and dispatchers.

AQP replaces programmed hours with proficiency-based training and evaluation derived from a detailed job task analysis that includes crew/team resource management (CRM/TRM).

AQP incorporates data-driven quality control processes for validating and maintaining the effectiveness of curriculum content. AQP provides an alternate method of qualifying and certifying, if required, pilots, flight engineers, aircraft dispatchers, instructors, evaluators, and other operations personnel subject to the training and evaluation requirements of 14 CFR parts 121 and 135. 

AQP encourages innovation in the methods and technology that are used during instruction and evaluation, and efficient management of training systems.

The goal of AQP is to achieve the highest possible standard of individual and crew performance. A leading objective of AQP is to provide effective training that will enhance professional qualifications to a level above the present standards that are provided in parts 121 and 135.

AQP consists of three curricula:

• Indoctrination (Indoc) - for new hires and upgrades (First Officers (FO), Captains (CA), and Instructor/Evaluators (I/E))
• Qualification (Qual) - basic airplane qualification within a specific fleet
• Continuing Qualification (CQ) - annual proficiency recertification in both the simulator and airplane

Training "gates" within each curricula include:

• Systems Validation (SV) - a written/oral assessment of knowledge
• Procedures Validation (PV) - an assessment of ability to perform required procedures in a procedures trainer
• First Look (FL) - annual assessment of performance on select, non-prebriefed maneuvers (CQ only) in a simulator
• Maneuvers Validation (MV) - an assessment of ability to perform required maneuvers in a simulator
• Line Operational Evaluation (LOE) - an assessment of ability to perform in a line operational situation in a simulator
• Line Check (LC) - an assessment of ability to perform as a qualified crew member in a line situation

AQP consists of five phases:

• Phase I - Application
• Phase II - Curriculum Development consisting of:
• Phase III - Small Group Tryouts (Implementation) - to validate training courseware and curriculum
• Phase IV - Initial Operations - lasts two years for each curricula within each fleet
• Phase V - Continuing Operations - upon completion of each Phase IV

There are two primary databases that support an AQP:

• Program Audit Database (PADB) - the master AQP documents and databases
• Performance/Proficiency Database (PPDB) - This de-identified information represents the results of an individual’s ability to successfully demonstrate the performance objectives of each curriculum. This information is captured during validation and evaluation gates as a crew member progresses through an AQP curriculum. This data is collected from each crew member’s performance and is stored in aggregate in the PPDB. This data is used to analyze training programs and/or groups of participants, not for tracking individual accomplishment. Successful collection and analysis of this data will identify and correct problems, validate AQP curriculums, and identify developing trends.

• Aviation training under the FAA's Advanced Qualification Program, or AQP
• Applying Business Intelligence (BI) concepts and technologies to the analysis and reporting of aviation training data - what I might call "Training Intelligence", or TI
• Exploring the utility of SharePoint Server 2007 and Services 3.0 with emphasis on its BI dashboard capabilities and its usefulness in an Office Live website.