Passageways

Not Just Another Project...

noreply@blogger.com (Stephanie Scott) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:53:00 +0000

How often do you have an opportunity to positively affect everyone in your organization with a new software project? When Pacific Continental Bank signed up with Passageways, their project manager, Suzy May, Corporate E-Communications Coordinator said from the beginning, she wanted this project to be different. The results have been very good and worth sharing with you.

Top Five ways to jumpstart a successful portal implementation:

Have organizational goals for this project. Pacific Continental identified increased efficiency in processes and communication, organize documents and forms as their primary goals for the project. Suzy wanted to accomplish these goals while having fun!
Carefully identify your project team. Suzy identified a project team with a wide-reach throughout their bank to help ensure their portal reflects the needs of their entire organization when they go live.
Get your project team involved. Summer Camp is the theme of Pacific Continental’s project team. They even have fishing hats for all members of the team!
Communicate the project to your managers early. While they are still in the early stages of implementation, about 20% of their employees have been introduced to the portal project.
Say “Yes!” Too often, Suzy has to say “No, our current intranet can’t support that request.” Suzy is asking for and incorporating input from employees on what they want and need in the portal.

Good stuff…Great fun….Can’t beat that, right?

What is your success mantra? C’mon, post your comments below and share some of YOUR silver bullets…

Stephanie Scott, Implementation Specialist

Moline, Illinois - A Passageways Portal Hotbed!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Prickel) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:38:00 +0000

The City of Moline, Illinois is located in the heart of the Midwest, nestled between the banks of the Mississippi and Rock River in Rock Island County, Illinois. Home to 43,768 people, Moline is a relatively small town - with a thirst for Passageways intranet portal! With the signing of Deere Employees CU ($324 million in assets), Passageways now has three customers in Moline - DHCU ($346 million in assets) and IH Mississippi Valley CU round out the list.

IH Mississippi Valley CU was the first of the three to join Passageways in October of 2003, becoming Passageways' first external customer! Making sure that first customer had an outstanding experience with us (as we do with every customer) has benefited us, as they have been a great reference for a number of potential customers, especially DHCU and Deere Employees CU.

Special thanks goes out to IH Mississippi Valley CU for taking a chance with Passageways 5 and a half years ago!

Passageways firmly believes in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. One of the prime tenets of NPS is the benefit you reap from making customers into promoters. Passageways has consistently ranked high on our annual NPS surveys. The reason why we all believe in this is evident right here in Moline!

What has happened in Moline has happened before. Bethpage CU, Bellco CU and OTS portals' were all purchased within 12 months of each other by consulting with the OTS team which is a Tech CUSO on OSI platform.

Passageways penetration in Hawaii has a very similar story. Two credit unions, Aloha Pacific FCU and HawaiiUSA CU, worked closely together on their portal projects and both decided on Passageways. Recently, California Coast CU merged with First Future CU and both credit unions had Passageways as their portal platform and this made their integration plans simpler.

And of course, when Summit CU merged with Great Wisconsin CU, they had the choice between Passageways (Summit’s old provider)and Sharepoint (Great Wisconsin’s old provider). The decision was made to give up on Sharepoint for a Passageways portal as the future portal platform at the merged entity!

Many such stories…same idea!

Ben Prickel,
Marketing Associate

10 things your intranet portal team should understand. Seriously!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Prickel) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:18:00 +0000

There should be one AND ONLY ONE organizational portal. This may be obvious but is worth reiterating here.
Your Senior Management team should be completely sold on the idea of an Intranet portal, as an ongoing commitment and not just the upfront commitment.
Portal software is almost a commodity by now, so choose your vendor based on services, best practices, support etc.
Successful portals should automate some workflows and improve some processes otherwise employees look right through another pretty application which does not do anything for them.
Your portal should provide employees quick access to the information they need to become more effective and productive in their role.get their input.
Portal should be built such that publishing is easy and not too permission heavy. You want people contributing, not shying away.
Work with a vendor that has a track record of continued success.successful portal implementation is like an art.you either have huge success or you create a ghost town.
The portal should support "single sign-on"; that is, with a single user id and password each user can access most of the applications and data that she or he is allowed to use.
Organizations should plan for integration with core systems and other existing software, even if it is a second phase.
Portal landing page should be well discussed and should be flexible- one size does not fit all when it comes to the landing page.

Open Source

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:39:00 +0000

"Hey look! A bandwagon! Let's jump on it!" No, that's not why Passageways has started an open source project. The reality is that we just wanted to deliver more.

It was pointed out at PowWOW that any company who has happy customers has a sales force equivalent to the sum of its users. For Passageways, we strive to have all 28,000+ of you telling everyone you see how much you enjoy working with us. If we take that same mentality, and apply it more directly to our platform, you come up with open source.

Over the years we've created some modules that might be for demo purposes, or that add some small, but useful functionality to your portal. Things like our RSS Module, or the Rolodex Module. The problem was that we didn't have a good place to host them and keep them up to date. That changed when we started preparing for this year's PowWOW where we planned to actually code with the developers present. We needed to put that code somewhere people could get to it after the conference. That place, is Microsoft's CodePlex, an open source community like SourceForge, but aimed at .NET development.

CodePlex gives us source control, including integration with TFS. It lets us track issues. They let us add developers, like you, to our project so that we can collaborate on the project, they even provide us with a forum to collaborate on. The benefit to you is that

You get to see our code, which is a great way to learn how to develop your own modules to run on the portal
You get free stuff. Stuff that's helpful or stuff that's fun, and stuff that Matt makes in his free time will probably find it's way up there too. We already have one customer who has shared a Yahtzee module (thanks Sean!) for you to enjoy.
You get to own it. Since it's open source, that means you can add a feature at any time. If you find a bug, you can fix it right now.

So if you're a developer, a portal admin, an advanced user, or just a portal enthusiast you need to go to our project at http://www.codeplex.com/passageways/. For those who have something to contribute, or want to get their hands on the source code, just drop Passageways a line and we'll get you set up post haste!

Follow Up:
One "missing" feature is the ability get email notifications of new discussions or changes to the CodePlex site. Fear not! There is an RSS feed, and using a tool like RSSFWD you can take that RSS feed and have any updates sent right to your inbox.

PowWOW is less than a month away!

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Prickel) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:22:00 +0000

Here at Passageways we are in the final stages of preparation for PowWOW, our annual users conference, to be held May 7-9 at the W Hotel in Chicago. We currently have over 100 attendees signed up and are nailing down some final details on the conference. We are very excited about this year's agenda, which includes two keynote speakers, Randy Harrington, CEO and Tisha Oehmen, CMO of Extreme Arts & Sciences kicking things off on Thursday morning. The agenda also includes over 10 hours of educational sessions, over 3 hours of Best Practices and multiple guest speakers including Randy Karnes, CEO of CU Answers, Ken Burnett, Training Director at Bank of American Fork and Thad Hutcheson, Chief Technology Officer at T Bank. If you haven't signed up yet click here to register, but hurry the deadline is April 16!

Passageways Annual Christmas Party

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Prickel) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:52:00 +0000

The annual Passageways Christmas party was Tuesday evening and as a first-time attendee I thought I would share my thoughts about the celebration. Held at a local steakhouse, the evening was filled with holiday cheer as well as feelings of accomplishment as 2007 was another great year of growth for Passageways. In addition to adding 35 new customers, we also grew internally with 7 new employees. Passageways also garnered its second industry best practices award in two years from CU Journal. With such a positive atmosphere the evening was enjoyed by all, and will certainly serve as a springboard to propel Passageways into a prosperous and fruitful 2008!

Happy Holidays form everyone here at Passageways, and thanks for making 2007 another year to remember!

Ben Prickel - Marketing Associate

Active Directory to the Rescue

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:16:00 +0000

We're wrapping up the 3.3.0.0 release of Enterprise Instant Messenger and I wanted to share some knowledge I gained about Active Directory while looking in to how an organization might deploy the new client to hundreds of computers.

Some history: For the first release in some cases, admins went around to each machine and stepped through the client installer. Passageways employees even helped out in this process for some of the larger jobs. While I do love talking to and spending time with our outstanding customers, I'm very glad I wasn't around back then. I myself have worked almost exclusively in the web world for a while and I am not a network administrator so I have never really had to worry about how new applications get distributed inside an organization. That being said, if this article seems rudimentary I apologize, but hopefully it will offer some value to some of the folks out there.

Here at Passageways I was working with a network admin who had set up a group policy to run a VB Script file when a user logged in. This file essentially took a copy of the installed client folder, and copied it to each computer on the network. This got us most of the way there, so I added a few lines to install the registry keys, make a shortcut on the desktop, and moved the variables an admin may wish to change to the top where they're easier to see. Great!

The downside to this first option is that the installer never gets run, so there isn't an entry in the Add/Remove Programs list under the control panel, so removing the EIM Client it is a manual task. Our Dev Lead, Matt, then pointed me at msiexec. Msiexec is a command line utility that will run an MSI file. Our client installer happens to be a glorified MSI file, so this works well. Using this method is our best practice since it will ensure that users have the latest version of the EIM Client. In fact, we plan to ship the EIM server with a batch file for your use with the following line in it:

msiexec /i "\\network\path\to\eim.msi" EIM_INPUT_SERVERNAMEORIP="MyEimServer" EIM_INPUT_STANDARDPORT=1111 EIM_INPUT_TRUSTEDPORT=2222 EIM_INPUT_USETRUSTEDPORT=true INSTALLDIR="%PROGRAMFILES%\Passageways\Enterprise Instant Messenger" ALLUSERS="" /qn

This line installs the Client to the Program Files directory using ports 1111, 2222, and the server of MyEimServer. It does this even for users who do not have admin rights to their machine, and the /qn option means it does it behind the scenes without the user ever having to lift a finger.

Now there's still one more option combining the power of msiexec and Active Directory that may be of interest to you. AD lets you "Publish" installers through the Add/Remove Programs console under the Add New Programs section. To do so, you'll want to first transform the MSI, effectively modifying the MSI with the properties we set when calling msiexec above. Then, once you've got an MSI customized for your organization, follow these steps to publish the installer to your users (steps modified from Visio Deployment):

On the Start menu, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
In the console tree, right-click the domain or organizational unit for which you want to set the Group Policy.
Click Properties, and then click the Group Policy tab.
Under Computer Configuration or User Configuration, open Software Settings.
Right-click the Software Installation node, and then click Properties.
In the Software Installation Properties dialog box, click the General tab, and then browse to the location of transformed installer you've created.
In the New Packages section, select Publish.
This specifies that when you add the MSI, by default you want it published with standard package properties.
In the Installation User Interface Options section, specify what level of information the user will see during installation. Select one of the following options:

Basic: Displays minimal information when users install the EIM Client. This installs the client in unattended mode and requires no user interface. This setting corresponds to the /qb- command line option of msiexec.
Maximum: Displays all installation messages and screens during the installation of the EIM Client.

Click OK.

The end result is that when your users log off, then log back in, they will now see the EIM Client in the list of applications they can install in the Add New Programs section. This method does not install the client for them, so it is a great option if you do not require your users to have EIM installed, or it may be a handy tutorial if you want to do a similar thing for another product.

EIM Hyperlinks

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:44:00 +0000

Yesterday we did our Sprint 1 Review for EIM v3.3.0.0. Among the features is the ability to launch a EIM conversation from a link. If you happen to be reading this and have EIM installed, click here to see what I mean. It works by using a registry entry to associate the pweim:// protocol with the client EXE file on your machine. We put in some extra magic via named pipes and .Net Remoting so that it doesn't open a new instance of the client if you already have one open, so it behaves pretty cleanly.

So that's all great and dandy, but what you're probably more interested in is how to create these links. It's really just a special URI, like any other link you might see such as http://www.passageways.com/ In this case, the protocol is http://, for the pweim link well replace that with pweim:// and then follow it up with the [only] command "startconversation". This will start EIM if it hasn't been started already, allow the user to log in, and then show the Send IM Dialog. So the most basic link looks like:

pweim://startconversation

Next, you may want to specify a user that this conversation will be started with. We do this by including the "username" key in the query string and specifying the username. The username can be found in the Portal on the User Profile page. So if I want to know Matt's username, I'd do a search of the Employee Directory for "Matt Magurany" and find his profile. I find that his username is "matt", so this link would look like:

pweim://startconversation?username=matt

Alternatively, I can use his userID which is a GUID. That link might look like this:

pweim://startconversation?userid=863e10fe-628c-42e7-a4e8-02be93e99aee

Lastly, you can also include a message that will appear in the message input area by using the "message" key in the query string, forming a link that looks like this:

pweim://startconversation?username=matt&message=Hello+Matt!

The great [but not officially supported] thing about this is you can put these links just about anywhere. You can roll your own custom module and have links to users that fire up EIM. You can put an EIM link in your email signature in Outlook. You can put it in a Word document, a PDF, or any other place you put a web link. If they do not have EIM they'll get a 404 Web Page not found error. Otherwise, if they click the link and have EIM installed they're on their way!

Welcoming New Clients from a Recent Acquisition

noreply@blogger.com (Paroon Chadha) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 22:17:00 +0000

It's always great to get a list of new clients where you can start over and start to learn their needs and expectations. Passageways recently acquired EBS and with that we got a lot of new clients who use the Instant Intranet Builder ( IIB ) product line we inherited.

We are busy making arrangements to welcome these clients into our fold, and start to work with these clients actively. I also want to congratulate Trumark Financial Credit Union for welcoming this news and becoming the early adopter, or lets just say, early beneficiary from this acquisition.

Personally, I feel this is another indicator on how portals will continue to thrive and intranet software will need to be upgraded at double speed to become more collaborative.

For the moment its a lot of discussions and some important meetings, so if you are in EBS client using IIB, be sure to expect us to reach out and get this transaction rolling!

Paroon Chadha
Co-Founder/VP
Passageways

Control Design

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:08:00 +0000

This past sprint has been a bit of a challenge for me since I undertook the creation of a new control. Some of you had noticed a performance issue with some of the controls we had been using from Telerik. These controls are great, they let you do all kinds of things like have images, expandable trees, and drag and drop. Unfortunately, all of that work is done on the end user's computer. That's fine and dandy when you're talking about a few dozen items in the control. But once you start to get around 300 or more, then things really start to bog down.

For Form Builder I set out to replace our UserChooser that relied heavily on Teklerik. I wanted to provide the same functionality, without the performance hit. It needed to load quickly, and there needed to be some visual cue if it was going to take a while to take an action. Matt was a big help throughout this process answering my questions and showing me how to set things up so we can reuse this code for other applications.

What I learned along the way is that control design is not for the weak hearted or those who like to write quick and dirty or "spaghetti" code. It takes an order of magnitude more planning that a normal web control or an ASP page. And you do your best to anticipate how someone else might use it, so you make it as flexible as you can without losing sight of the original goal you set out on. It's a balancing act, the kind where you have to juggle fire and tame lions all at the same time.

The end result is that you can now add a hierarchy of items from the source list, have a set of destination lists to add those items to, and include all the images you like. Oh, and it's pretty blazing fast for both loading and single item manipulation. It's also not tied to any one data set, so we could use this for anything and with a bit more polishing you should see it in the Portal FX in an upcoming patch!

Avoiding IIS Reset with mulitiple sites on the server

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Lail) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:13:00 +0000

I have been working on the hosted server of late and have found that no matter how careful I am, I usually need to do at least on reset to get a new theme or setting to go into effect. What I absolutely need is a way to restart the website I'm working on and not the whole IIS. Usually (after hours or what not), I bite the bullet and reset the whole service.

Yet recently I've been simply restarting the associated application pool with great success. I mean, IISReset is needed sometimes to release files/services holds. For instance, when changing themes in Passageways, the Passageways.config file will be blocked (by w3wp) as soon as a change has been saved and won't go into effect, sometimes for hours.

The biggest problem with IISReset (or shutting the IIS down, compiling, restarting it) is that the entire application will be shut down and restarted. Let’s not even look at the time involved, sometimes that can be enough to make me cringe in and of itself.

The workaround for this is to recycle the application pool for the IIS-website instead of restarting the entire IIS. The easiest way of doing this is to right-click on the application pool and the choose "recycle". The best part? It happens so fast that I don't even notice any service interruption for that single site (let alone the whole of IIS).

Marketing Update

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Prickel) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:39:00 +0000

The Passageways Marketing Department is keeping busy with multiple projects. Keep your eyes on the Passageways website as there have been, and will continue to be sweeping changes designed to simplify the process of finding information as well as improving the aesthetic value of the site.

Our conference schedule continues to fill up. We look forward to seeing you at the following conferences:

Symitar National Conference
DCI Annual Users Conference
Jack Henry & Associates National Conference
American Community Bankers Conference
BAI Conference

We are also beginning to plan for next year's Passageways PowWOW. There is some debate as to where to have the PowWOW and we could use your help in making this decision. We have narrowed it down to either Indianapolis or Chicago. Please email me at bprickel@passageways.com and let me know what your preference might be.

Form Builder Sprint 2

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 20:50:00 +0000

Today began another sprint. I always like to write at the beginning of this development cycle so that you know what our team is up to. Here's the skinny:

Product: Form Build (aka eForm Builder, aka eFormsBuilder)

Sprint start: 8/8/2007

Sprint end: 8/28/2007

Expected sprint review: 8/29/2007 mid-day

Unit Tests

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:13:00 +0000

Earlier this week at Passageways we added a new member to the development team, Rajini. She joins us from the great [big] state of Texas and will be working as our new Quality Assurance person. But since it's been about six months since we had a dedicated QA, the developers started to take matters into their own hands *cue scary 1950's horror music*!

It's not really all that scary, and the solution we came up with makes for higher quality code both short term and in the long term when doing regression testing. What we've added is unit testing. In the past we've done manual testing exclusively, meaning we have a slightly glorified MS Word Document and a tester reads the instructions as she follows along clicking around the portal. These still work great and we haven't abandoned them. The unit test is different because it can be automated, and thus doesn't require a human to be present.

At the moment we're utilizing the unit test feature of VisualStudio 2005 Team Edition. I like it a lot because it integrates nicely with my developer environment. I can attach to the asp.net process and use line breaks to see what's going on in the test and if my newly written code is going to pass or not. What's frustrating is that I can't get it to automatically attach when I run the tests in debug mode, so I have to be quick. Also, if I bail out of a debugged test half way, then I have to go clean up my web.config file so that I can run the tests again. So it's not without its own share of wonkiness, but nothing that can't be overcome by a little practice.

I will also add that unit tests, while still in the tedious category, are a lot more fun to write as a developer than a long step-by-step word document because it's actually code. Presently, we're using the unit tests to check input and output of methods relating to the API, so basically the public methods that ya'll can hook in to - yes, I said "ya'll". Side-effects of methods (such as changing an object property, interacting with the file system) are still being tested via manual tests.

Side-effects of working as an employee at Passageways are still untested, but seems to result in high intakes of caffeine ;-)

Portal Message Tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:52:00 +0000

In this tutorial we'll be covering how to use the PortalMessage web control from the Portal Framework (PortalFX). This little jewel is how we standardize the messages presented to users of the portal; everything from success messages to "Hey! Something blew up!" can be shown using the PortalMessage control. So let's get started.

Example of the PortalMessage control being used to show an error:

First, you'll want to add a reference to the file Passageways.WebControls.dll. If you're using VisualStudio you can simply right click on the References folder of your project, then click "Add Reference". Click the "Browse" tab and locate the file. Click "Ok" when you've got it selected.

Next, you'll want to declare the control in your .aspx page, to do that you'll need to register a TagPrefix so it knows where to get the control from:

<%@ Register TagPrefix="PW" Namespace="Passageways.WebControls" Assembly="Passageways.WebControls" %>

Then, go ahead and declare the PortalMessage control where you want it to be displayed in your .aspx page:

<pw:portalmessage id="myPortalMessage" runat="server"/>

In this case we're using the ID of myPortalMessage, and we will use it to set the properties of the control in our code-behind file. Speaking of properties, there are the usual web control properties available, but the one's we'll focus on are Text, Type, and Visible.

In your code-behind (your .aspx.cs file), you'll need a handle on the control you've just created, and it's a good chance that only these two pages need access to it, so we'll declare it as protected within the class block:

protected PortalMessage DocumentMsg;

Text is the verbiage you want to show to the user. In our example above, the Text property was set like so in the code-behind file (aspx.cs):

myPortalMessage.Text = "Another document with this same file name has already been uploaded for this product. Please try another file or change an existing document for this product.";

Type is used primarily to set the icon displayed to the user. You have four types that are part of the PortalMessageType class:

Error - used when something unexpected happened, often times this type is used when catching errors. The icon is a red square with an X in it. Your text will also be colored red.

Information - this message type is handy when you need to show some help such as how to format a phone number or birth date. The icon is a blue circle with a lower case "i" in the middle.

Success - typically we'll use this icon a lot when it's time for our performance review, "Look at all the success messages sir!" Actually this message is used a lot when a form was filled out and submitted successfully. The icon is a green circle with a check mark in the middle.

Warning - we see this message type when there's been some sort of error we've anticipated. As shown above in the example, the user has tried to upload a file that already exists, so we display a warning. If the upload had failed due to network issues we would have displayed an error because that behavior is unexpected. The icon for this message is the yellow triangle with an exclamation mark.

To set this property, you could do something like this:

myPortalMessage.Type = PortalMessageType.Warning;

Lastly there's the Visibility property. Lots of times I'll show a message to the user, then I want that message to go away when they leave the page, click cancel, or try to start over. I don't want to clear the text and type every time, leaving some trailing HTML elements, so instead I simply set the Visibility to do the job:

myPortalMessage.Visibility = true;

At this point you should have a clean message on your page looking like the example above. I would say that it's time to celebrate your PortalMessageType.Success, but we've been PortalMessageType.Warning you about too much of that at work :)

The Best Part

noreply@blogger.com (Will Read) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:01:00 +0000

As a software developer I had grown accustomed to being stuck in a cloth and metal box and only getting exposure to my fellow cube dwellers and my immediate supervisor. What drew me to my new post here at Passageways was the emphasis the company continues to put on all employees having direct contact with the customers. If I'm writing code, and I want to know how people will use a feature, I can go directly to those people and ask them right out, instead of getting a speculative interpretation.

Keeping with that mentality, I'm very excited about the inception of this blog and what it means for our customer-provider relationship. For me personally I look forward to sharing the ins an outs of our development process so that you can see how and where your participation steers our decisions. I'm also hoping that there will be time to show you how to better leverage the effort we put into our product from a coding point of view.

One last thing; we're currently in the design phase of our sprint (think of it as a sub-division of a project that lasts about a month). In the design phase, the features have been selected, but we are in the process of figuring out how we, as developers, will implement those features. Everything from what classes to make, to what colors and icons to use is part of this phase. This particular sprint is for our eForms Builder Module and has several bug fixes and one enhancement which is to make a copy of an existing form. If you have any strong opinions about how this feature should behave, now is the time to drop us a line!

Welcome!

noreply@blogger.com (Manan Relia) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:11:00 +0000

We @ Passageways have been talking about starting a blog for quite a while and now, at last, it is here. We hope that this will be a great place for you to learn what's new at Passageways.

Thus far, our interaction with each other has been somewhat limited. We hope that this blog will give us the opportunity interacte more and to share ideas with each other. Since this blog is for both of us, please feel free to post comments and suggestions.