October had been a crazy month for me and November is no exception either. Been busy preparing a lot of demos for customers.

Just a placeholder for myself in view of the hectic schedule, I just found out that VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 CTP is out for public consumption.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655-93D0-4476-BDA4-94CF5F8D4814&displaylang=en#filelist

Will be back with more details after this week. Also will be posting about my experience on Windows 7 M3

For the first time, Microsoft have won 9 awards in the Computerworld Readers Choice awards . Since these awards were voted by customers, it’s a clear indication of the strength of Microsoft product offerings as well user acceptance and acknowledgement! Given below are the details of the award and the categories that Microsoft have won under:

• System Management Software (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)
• Application Server (Windows Server)
• IT Asset Management System (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)
• Identity Management (Active Directory)
• Patch Management (Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager)
• Content Filtering (ISA Server)
• Collaboration Platform (Exchange Server)
• Enterprise Content Management (SharePoint Server)
• Service Oriented Architecture (.NET Platform)

http://www.computerworld.com.my/rca/winners-list

Got the privilege of previewing Exabyte‘s new website design. First I look at the page is the Express drop down box, it reminds me of the DiGi website where a customer is given a chance to have a guided and simplified navigation path. Very good for first time customer to lead them to important info within the website

In marketing, nothing cant be more important than showcasing your awards and how proud you are with them

First on the menu bar right side, there is a picture link to the page showing visitors the numerous industry awards won by Exabytes. This menu bar also has a good design where they allocated some real estate to showcase other stuffs in future such as promotion or event.

underneath the Express drop down you also can have internal advertisement showing latest promotions, events and again awards you won.

Hot news is still there at the top and they added a Google search box

So I tried typing in ‘windows 2008′ as my search term to test whether this is a site search or a global search

As expected the results are from within Exabyte‘s website, and it is formatted nicely (some website redirects you to Google but this search stayed within Exabyte’s website)

The Google search box is definitely useful if the Express drop down fails to help the visitor. 

Exabytes also took into consideration that today more and more people buy LCS screen and normally with a decent graphics card, one can have 1200 X 800 resolution and above on their monitor. Their homepage can be fit nicely within my Thinkpad 1400 X 1200 screen resolution (show below)

Overall, the new website is every well designed with fast loading time (anything loaded more than 10seconds will turn me off), I spent about 5 minutes the first time I checked out this website and since this is a preview site, certain info are not there yet. However the main purpose now is to get people to provide feedback and here is it.

What are missing here are stuff like

1. RSS feed for people to subscribe to news and events. This is a Web 2.0 thing and a lot people subscribe to RSS feed via Windows Live.
2. Local content where instead of showing the ‘ang moh’ why not show pictures taken in corporate functions. This also shows Exabytes is very engaging with their customers.
3. A bit of inconsistency here, I saw the link to addthis.com where I can put Exabytes in social bookmark site i.e. Digg and Windows Live. This is something helpful but I would like to see it across the site.

As a faithful customer of Exabytes, I wish them all the best in launching of the website. No matter how nice is the design, one thing that delighted me all these while are their efficiency in providing support to me, which I believe is world class.

You probably remember Blizzard for its successful Warcraft, Starcarft and Diablo titles and when a video game company got onto pages of Businessweek magazine, they are on to something big. Blizzard recently merges with Activision (Mechwarrior came from this company) and becomes known as Activision Blizzard (announced at the end of 2007).

Inside the world of Blizzard