Tuesday, November 30, 2004

AudioVOX SMT5600 (Scoblephone) is available in the UK as the Orange SPV C500

For those of you that reading about the AudioVOX SMT5600 (aka the Scoblephone) that is invading Microsoft will be pleased to know that it's available as the Orange SPV C500 in the UK.

It's also worth checking out the website http://www.coolsmartphone.com who have a review of the phone.

There are two interesting features about this phone:

  • It runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition software for Smartphone and this includes the .Net Compact framework. This make it a lot easier to develop applications for it than for Nokia's (for example).
  • It [should] supports Windows Media Player 10 DRM. This means that it will supposedly work with Napster's subscription service. See below for update

Update: Looks like the UK version, the C500 from Orange, doesn't come with Windows Media Player 10. Microsoft need to get this sort of difference documented somewhere...it makes purchasing Smartphone technology more complicated than it should be. http://www.playsforsure.com doesn't help as it's firmly US focused.

posted by Steve Hurcombe at 13:55 3 comments

Sunday, November 28, 2004

Is SCORM doomed?

We've recently been asked by a client to provide a blended solution for a project - so I've been investigating the best options to support eLearning.

That's when I came across this interesting discussion (the fourth entry from greg is the meat of the discussion) about why the open source LMS ATutor doesn't support the SCORM run time environment (although it will import SCORM content).

It turns out that the recent accessibility legislation (WCAG) states that if JavaScript is used in an application then the application must also work with it turned off - something that SCORM cannot do. JavaScript is the key component that SCORM content uses for navigation and communication with the LMS.

The discussion also states that the SCORM specification cannot drop JavaScript support as that would render existing content obsolete.

If the navigation and sequencing of the content was removed from JavaScript, and into a portable XML format, then it would also make the exchanging of content much easier - something that I'm not so sure the large LMS vendors want to do.

posted by Steve Hurcombe at 20:44 0 comments

Friday, November 26, 2004

Giving the customer control

Yesterday one of our clients decided to stop using a supplier due to some issues that they had been having.

Nothing odd about that in itself, the interesting thing was how quickly that they could do it. Un-tick a couple of boxes and they no longer appeared in the catalogue - no more orders.

Try turning off a supplier in a conventional purchasing department, it could take weeks of emails and phone calls.

You won't find the feature in the sales literature - it's implied with the level of control clients get. If you can add suppliers at the tick of a box, they can be removed too. It's a powerful feature.

We give you the steering wheel, the accelerator - and the brakes!

posted by Steve Hurcombe at 11:45 0 comments

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Some real world unit tests

The documents that we produce (invoices, confirmation letters etc.) are based on Microsoft Word documents. They are built using the standard Microsoft Word mail merge fields. We then merge in data from the database to generate the document.

This is great because our clients can produce their own templates in tools they are familiar with!

We use the .Net components from Aspose to generate these documents as it is not recommended to use Word as a server side component - and they do this very well indeed.

One of the things that we wanted to do was import HTML formatted text into the Word template. Now it turns out that this is not straightforward and initially Aspose did not support it. So we wrote our own.

Recently we contributed our code for the HTML import to help get the functionality into the core component. During the exchange Roman sent over some of the unit tests that they use to test their components.

A couple of them are reproduced (with permission) below for your benefit:

 

 

[Test]

public void TestPlainTextAndWhitespace() {

    builder.InsertHtml("<body>\r\n" +

    "\tTest paragraph 1.\r\n" +

    "\t<!-- This contains white space which should be removed.-->\r\n" +

    "    Test paragraph 1.\r\n" +

    "</body>\r\n");

 

    // White space got converted into single space

    // at the end of each sentence like in MS Word.

 

    Assert.AreEqual("Test paragraph 1. Test paragraph 1. \x000c",builder.Doc.GetText());

}

 

[Test]

public void TestBoldNested() {

    builder.InsertHtml("<p>Normal1<b>Bold1<b>Bold2</b>Bold3</b>Normal2</p>");

    CheckRunBold(0, "Normal1", false);

    CheckRunBold(1, "Bold1", true);

    CheckRunBold(2, "Bold2", true);

    CheckRunBold(3, "Bold3", true);

    CheckRunBold(4, "Normal2", false);

}

 

As you can see they have collected several HTML fragments that they use to feed the HTML to Word conversion classes, then they check that the text comes back out as expected. They have over 350 test for their Word component alone. No wonder we've never had any problems with them...

 

Aspose.Word 1.9.5 Released

posted by Steve Hurcombe at 20:48 0 comments

Monday, November 15, 2004

eCommerce, what eCommerce?

I was chatting to a Ben Pike today, he works at one of our clients. He mentioned that their customers rarely ask about eCommerce!

I found this a little surprising, but then I suppose people are just not used to buying their training from a fully fledged eCommerce system.

Most people who buy over the Internet must have bought airline tickets from people like EasyJet et al, or books from Amazon.

So why not training courses?

This is just a small set of the features that you can expect:

  • Search the catalogue and book online, and I don't mean fill in a form and it will be emailed in. I mean make a real booking, just like you would if you booked a seat with EasyJet.
  • Transfer and cancel your bookings - again, I mean for real.
  • Report on your spend. Yes, find out where your budget has gone.

These are just the basics, wait till you get into employee self registration and reporting across multiple training suppliers.

Quanta Training are an excellent example: http://www.quanta.co.uk

posted by Steve Hurcombe at 22:00 0 comments

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Enterprise Study

Hello World,
If you have any questions about how training administration can help you or your organisation, please drop me a line at stevehurcombe@enterprisestudy.com.

Steve

posted by Steve Hurcombe at 22:29 0 comments