The Awards are overseen by the IAVA, an organization of more than 550 members of leading visual arts professionals who work in media, advertising and marketing firms. The entries are judged on their creative work against a standard of excellence based on the previous Communicator Awards. This year thousands of companies entered the competition.

“The pool of entries we received for this year’s Communicator Awards serves as a true testament to the innovative ideas and capabilities of communications and marketing professionals around the world,” said Linda Day, Executive Director of the IAVA, in a press release. “Each year our entrants continue to amaze by reinventing the ways we communicate and market in an ever-changing industry,” she added.

The IAVA granted blue-infinity a Gold Communicator Award (Award of Excellence) for its work on Vacheron Constantin’s site “Treasures of Singapore” in the Fashion websites category.

blue-infinity’s second prize was the Silver Communicator Award (Award of Distinction) for the Clinique La Prairie’s new site in the Health Care Services websites category. 

About The Communicator Awards

The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program recognizing big ideas in marketing and communications. Founded nearly two decades ago, The Communicator Awards receives over 6,000 entries from companies and agencies of all sizes, making it one of the largest awards of its kind in the world. For more information go to http://www.communicatorawards.com/ or http://www.iavisarts.org.

No it’s not a method; it’s an approach. It isn’t only used in development, like Scrum; it can also be used for business management and for running analyses.

In his blog, Jurgen Appelo attempted to create a list of those Agile practices, some of which can be controversial. We might not agree with all of them but he does deserve credit for creating the list nonetheless.

Among those practices, two can be successfully combined to handle business requirements in an Agile organisation: User stories and Behaviour Driven Development.

User Stories

A user story is a short sentence describing a business requirement from the product owner’s perspective. It’s an easy and fully understandable way to share information from the business to the development team.

Mike Cohn, one of the first signatory of the Agile Manifesto, suggested that the user story be written in the following format:

   As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>

The type of user (or role) and the goal are mandatory. The reason field is optional if the reason is indeed obvious.

To create a useful user story, one of the best practices is to ensure that it will consider the INVEST principles. A user story should:

• be Independent
• be Negotiable
• be Valuable
• be Estimable
• be Small
• have Tests

Creating tests is mandatory. Acceptance tests must be described to consider a user story has been properly created.

We can create useful and readable acceptance tests with the Gherkin syntax used in BDD.

Behaviour-driven development

BDD is software development technique devised by Dan North. We are only interested in the way requirements are written for BDD. It’s called the Gherkin syntax.

“Gherkin […] is a business readable, domain specific language created especially for behavior descriptions. It gives you the ability to remove logic details from behavior tests.” (https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/wiki/Gherkin)

To write a requirement with the Gherkin syntax, we should use the following pattern:

• Given a context
• And additional information of context (optional)
• When a specific action is performed
• Then an expected result
• And additional information or expected result (optional)

Use this pattern to describe main behaviours of a user story.

Here is an example:

“As a manager, I want to display all guarantee contracts for clients I’m allowed to manage.”

In this case acceptance tests will describe what happens when the case succeeds and what happens when it fails.

A guarantee contract exists when:

• Given a manager
• And he has at least one guarantee contract among selected clients
• When loading the Guarantee page
• Then the guarantee list displays all retrieved guarantee contracts 
• And the sum of the Amount column is displayed under it

A guarantee contract doesn’t exist when:

• Given a manager
• And he doesn’t have any guarantee contract among selected clients
• When loading the Guarantee page
• Then the guaranty list is empty
• And the message “No data available for this query” is displayed

Conclusion

Using user stories and  acceptance tests written with the Gherkin syntax leads to team discussions and  prevents product owners or business analysts from producing heavy and hard to read (not to mention hard to maintain) requirement documents.

Since one of the most important points of agile practices is “communication,” easing this dialogue between stakeholders will save a lot of time and will increase the added value of implemented features.

Further reading:

• Mike Cohn blog : http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com
• Jurgen Appelo blog : http://www.noop.nl
• “User stories applied” by Mike Cohn, publisher Addison-Wesley Professional

The Web Marketing Association announced that blue-infinity has been granted two awards in this year’s Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards.

Both awards, “2012 Outstanding Website” and “2012 Best Fashion or Beauty Website,”  are for work done for Vacheron Constantin in the lead-up to the Salon internationale de la haute horlogerie.

Here, the luxury watchmaker presented three new models in the collection “Métiers d’Art – Les Univers Infinis” and for “The Malte Collection” all of which were presented at the event.

blue-infinity conceived, designed and developed mini-sites for these collections, each highlighting the collection’s graphic universe through multimedia: full-screen videos and photo slideshows and their unique attributes.

The IAC looks at the best Internet advertising over 96 industries and nine online formats and aim to honour excellence in online advertising.

A special dedicated team at Vacheron Constantin is in charge of dealing with the special orders, from the design all the way to the production of the beautiful unique and completely customised timepieces.

The watchmaking company wanted to present and highlight:

• A completely tailor-made service
• A service that perpetuated its traditions
• A service that highlighted Vacheron Constantin’s know-how

After an introduction video on the site, customers are invited to explore the service and its various aspects via five sections illustrated by a full-screen slideshow. The animations are entirely generated via HTML and Javascript technologies, which make them viewable on an iPad.

The project is still evolving and will feature new elements that will create a relationship between the client and the dedicated team.

The mini-website is accessible from the main menu on the Vacheron Constantin website, or directly using this URL: http://www.vacheron-constantin.com/en/atelier-cabinotiers-custom-watches.

When I mention Open Source to almost anyone other than a computer expert, it’s likely that the response will be: “What’s Open Source?”

To try and put it in simple words, Open Source software is free and generally available on the internet. It is also normally distributed with its underlying code, or source code, which a knowledgeable programmer can read and modify to meet specific business needs; unlike commercial software that is sold only in a compiled executable version.

Nowadays many people are giving HTML5 a shot instead of Flex because they think it’s the technology that is going to stick, but it may still be too early to switch. Most of them don’t pay much attention to the fact that, at the time this post is being written, fewer than 5 percent of browsers support HTML5. A simple search on the internet will give you several reasons to reconsider, or at least think twice, before going ahead with HTML5 as an alternative to Flex. This will most definitely change in the next couple of years, but even then it is likely that we go through  a few HTML5 iterations before it is widely supported.

I am a believer that a war between the technologies should never occur. Anyone who rules out one of the technologies is not necessarily doing you a disservice, but, as for any project, the pros and cons should always be considered. There will always be the argument to use Flex for several reasons, such as the code is much nicer, and it has far better object-oriented and pattern support.

Flex is far from dead. There are many well-known developers committed to taking Flex to the next level, including Adobe’s engineers. There’s even a JavaScript compiler for Flex on the verge of being released to the public (Falcon JS). Adobe is also very committed to its AIR compiler for mobile phone applications. So even if you can’t run your Flex code on a browser you can compile it as an app and run it on a mobile device and on your desktop.

Many people are apprehensive about Open Source, but you will find Open Source in plenty of places and being used in many very successful projects.

So whether you choose to use Flex or any other technology, make sure your decision will be the one to cater best for your needs: the best RIA (Rich internet Application) available for your timeline and budget.

To determine the rankings, HKP, a consulting firm specializing in HR benchmarking, used a questionnaire covering general human resource topics such as compensation, benefits, workplace wellness, flexibility of working hours, professional training, equal opportunity, and more.

Click here to read the article.

Although it is preferable to design for the main two to three kinds (desktops, mobile phones, tablets) because use-cases vary considerably according to the context of use, budgets don’t always allocate for this to happen. So if the kind of project you’re working on allows it, you may consider adopting a responsive design approach.

Responsive design is a term that Ethan Marcotte* developed to describe a design that responds according to the medium that is used to view it. It isn’t a matter of just making the layout flexible as we use to do, but it is more about creating a fluid grid on which images and text behave appropriately. For example, instead of scaling down an image to the point where it loses its relevance, the trick is to hide or reveal portion of an image as you minimize the screen size. It is also about reordering and re-stacking navigation items and boxes of content on the flexible grid instead of scaling everything down. You can achieve this using a flexible grid-based layout, context-aware images and media queries (CSS3 module) to style the pages according to specific rules.

Here are some examples:
http://bostonglobe.com/
http://colly.com/
http://foodsense.is/

This technique works in most modern browsers (Safari (desktop, iPhone, iPad), Chrome, Internet Explorer (8+), Opera) and unsurprisingly degrades in other browsers, such as IE7 and under.

To find out more about this topic:
http://filamentgroup.com/lab/responsive_images_experimenting_with_context_aware_image_sizing/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design

Reference:
*Ethan Marcotte is a Web Designer and Developer based in Boston

Between five to 10 people promptly gather around the whiteboard every morning and give updates on their work, raise flags when they are blocked or when they need help… who is to say that agile projects are chaotic?

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a long-term project that has been managed in an “agile” way, and have discovered many pros and some cons along the way. The biggest success, from my perspective at least, is to see how easily you can implement a user-centered design approach into an agile development environment if a few factors come together:

• There is a general understanding amongst the team members that producing a usable and pleasing product is a top priority.
• The analysis phase is not skipped in the process and time is allowed to really understand the business rules, users and their context of use.
• The user experience (UX) always works one or two sprints ahead while verifying work done in the previous one and discussing implementation questions for the current one.

Below is a diagram I created that illustrates the last point and explains how UX and development collaborate across the sprints:

Here is a summary of how the project has been going so far (from my perspective) and what tools we have used along the way:

At the very beginning, the UX, Functional and Technical track had to define what their approaches would be and how they would interact with each other. Since we came from different companies, we also had to get to know one another. What this meant for me was to explain what “UX” was all about – e.g. not just delivering graphical templates, and, yes, I do need to be involved in Functional workshops as well! This set the framework for the “blueprint” phase of the project.

During this phase, I had the opportunity to spend time with users in different countries, interviewing and observing them in their working environment. Based on these visits, I created “personas and scenarios” in Visio, which I shared with the team and then hung up on the wall. They were quite lively because I had been allowed to take pictures and had created “photo stories” about their daily tasks. The goal was to promote a common understanding about the conditions and context of work, and for the development team to feel more “connected” to the actual end users.

I used Axure for the wireframes, a tool that allows you to create a clickable prototype and to simulate rich internet applications in a realistic way. This has been instrumental since our early discussions with the different stakeholders and has also allowed us to conduct usability tests early on. Sharing these wires online has also been a big plus, especially since they are quite alive and have evolved constantly over time.  

Since this application was the first of several in the same family, it was important to clearly define user interface  guidelines. Initially, I created these standards and rules in a wiki. However, I quickly realized that those pages were hardly ever consulted (except by myself). So I switched tactics and included specifications on navigation, buttons, tables, forms, error messages and alerts as an appendix to the wireframes. Having everything in one place is definitely easier for the team and gives more visibility to the UI standards.

As this is an Agile project, there are no functional specifications but only “stories.” The stories have been created and reviewed in JIRA (Greenhopper), as are the bugs and enhancements. I must say that this is the point I (and I think most of my colleagues) have had some issues with. The stories were often too short and out of context to see the bigger picture. There is still room for improvement in terms of refining the method and the tool used. It would be helpful to take greater care in describing the “epics” (above the stories), and structuring the information in a logical way – which is not alphabetical or even by business value!

As to my daily update: “Working on new functionality for next release, will give demo today at 14h00 – no major blocking points!”

The company has a history of surviving crises in the IT sector. With the management’s 360 degree vision and the consultants’ ability to address a broad range of information technology challenges, blue-infinity has continued to expand (most recently into Asia), and now has more than 300 specialists working in Digital Marketing, User Experience, Mobile, Rich Internet Applications, Microsoft, J2EE, SAP, Infrastructure management, and many more.

Click here to read the original article in French, and to find out what Pierre Aebischer, Managing Partner and Founder of blue-infinity, told Market.

As with any new main product there’s a wealth of online information. So here’s a quick introduction to the product to help you to get oriented amidst that mass of information, and to quickly become a CRM-expert for the next pub-quiz/game-show you attend! Some useful references are provided at the end.

This, then, is the ABC of CRM.

A – The Application

CRM 2011 is available in both “on premises” and “online” flavours. You can buy the software and install it on your own servers using a local active directory for authentication or you can consume it “in the cloud” based on a software-as-a-service (SAAS) model in which you pay per user per month. Cloud authentication is based on Windows Live accounts and can be as cheap as CHF 9.80 a month.

The SAAS route is one that Microsoft has been pushing heavily and prospective customers can sign up in about 30 seconds for a free 30 day trial with no string attached.

For both “on premises” and “online” versions you can interact with the CRM through your browser (currently limited to IE 7 and above only) or via a client install which adds CRM functionality to MS Outlook. 

With the Outlook component users can work with all of the CRM data via an extra set of folders and can “track” emails, contacts and appointments directly from their inboxes, so no new interface or tool to learn. The CRM provides a special interface rendered for mobile phones, and Microsoft also recently released an iPad tablet app.

B – Out of the Box

Out of the box, the solution is pretty flexible. It comes with a large number of existing data objects (called “entities”) for things like contacts, the companies they work for, marketing campaigns, notes, documents, templates for document generation, etc.:  All the sorts of things you’d expect from a system that aims to track people and organisations and your company’s interactions with them.

Charting, reporting and dashboards are nicely done (based on SSRS) with in-built editors for users to construct their own personal ad-hoc reports. They can then use these reports to navigate and filter data (for example, by clicking on a pie chart area to “drill down” tabular data).

CRM Dashboard

The CRM provides its own security management tools – users belong to security roles and are mapped into business units that control what data they can access and what they can do with that data. It provides a very fine (and fiddly) granularity for access control and the security applies throughout the system – from what field appear on web pages, to the data used in reports, and any data that is exported.

Integration with MS Office allows exporting of static or “dynamic” data to Excel (in which the data is refreshed from the CRM each time Excel is opened), generation of MS Word documents from templates stored in the CRM, and strong MS Outlook cooperation for users to keep their emails, contacts and calendar appointments in-sync.

The solution includes a workflow engine for automating key business processes or providing wizard step-by-step prompts for data capture and processing, and there’s a scheduling engine for allocating resources and individuals based on set rules.

Perhaps the most interesting feature (to developers) is that there are extensive in-built tools for customising the solution and a full API for interacting with the platform from your own code.

C – Customising

One of the strongest elements of the CRM 2011 is the ease of customising it. In fact, Microsoft pitches it as an xRM solution (anything relationship management) because you could (in theory) customise it completely away from contact management to model any data that is involved in relationships.

These are the levels of customisation available:

1. Individual users themselves can personalise the interface, changing the language to one of the 41 language packs available, building their own reports or dashboards and constructing and saving their own queries.
2. The administrator-level tools to build new interfaces, to modify existing ones, to create new data types and their attributes in the system, to create new relationships (one to one, one to many etc.), and to package up these changes as a “solution” file for redeployment is also included within the tool without having to write a single line of code. Very quickly an “out of the box” CRM can be “pimped up” to suit specific data needs.
3. Javascript, which can access client-side and server-side data, can be hooked into these out of the box modifications to provide greater control.
4. A large number of third-party development companies, and Microsoft itself, provide pre-built solutions to adapt the CRM for extra needs – these are found on the Microsoft Market Place. Many of these are free and solutions exist, for example, for adapting the CRM for an NGO, health portfolio or a wealth management company. With the NGO plug-in, for instance, the CRM can manage pledges, donations, volunteers and projects.
5. Finally, code can be written against the API web services that the CRM exposes to interact with the xRM “engine” at its lowest level. In essence, you could chuck away the provided CRM interface completely and build your own application using the xRM core only.

CRM Customisation

Conclusion

Microsoft has invested significant time and effort in the product and has a well-defined road map for its future. The company is releasing regular rollups every three months that add new functionality (such as Twitter-style following feeds), and CRM is likely to remain a strong contender as a base upon which other solutions can be built quickly and cheaply.

References

http://crm.dynamics.com/fr-ch – Swiss CRM home page.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/ – Microsoft CRM team blog.
http://www.xrmvirtual.com/ – xRM user group.
https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/ – Microsoft Dynamics Community online.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/dynamics.aspx#tab1 – CRM Certifications.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24004 – CRM 2011 SDK.