While hearing the announcement in PDC '05 for MS Expression and Visual Studio (Orcas) set of web designer IDEs  and playing with Office 12, I had mixed reactions. The positive was Expression and Orcas going full throttle with supporting XHTML and other web standards, at the same time introducing awesome new features that makes web development easy. My dissappointed was for lack of no such new standards support with the popular MS Web Designer product - MS Frontpage. I have been a fan of Frontpage even before MS bought the product and had built several websites using it. But over the last few years I was forced to switch to Visual Studio and other 3rd Party products as Frontpage was stagnating.  Also MS was confusing with two product streams - both aimed at doing Website Development.

Today all my fears and criticism was put to rest with the Announcement of Sharepoint Designer 2007 replacing MS Frontpage. Sharepoint Designer will be supporting all web standards including XHTML and full CSS compliance. In the same press release MS has clarified the position and the roles played by this new product and Expression Web Designer.

May MS Frontpage's soul RIP (Rest in Place)

Today MS also announced the final naming for Office "12" (Codename) as MS Office 2007 and the packaging, pricing of Office 2007. Thank god, they didn't name it "Office Vista"

IT and Computer Science Students doing their Engineering/Arts/Science Graduation courses can participate in a competition organized by KTS (Kani Thamizh Sangam) and Tamil Virtual University. It can be their final semester project but it should be in Tamil computing. The three best projects in 2006-07 will get cash prizes worth Rs.50,000. For details and application form, click here.

I feel the timing for this is very apt, as the commercial viability of Tamil Software projects is showing signs of finally picking up. OS vendors like Microsoft and Redhat are now supporting Tamil in many ways in their offerings. This week saw Tally (India's Leading Package Software) announcing availability of vernacular editions of its accounting software. For Tamil computing enthusiasts like me and others in INFITT and KTS this is great news - many have been working hard for last two decades for things like this to start happening and take computers to the masses in Tamilnadu. Though other commercial company’s will follow suit, in order to accelerate this trend and innovate in this it is very important to get the young minds excited and I believe this competition will certainly do that. My wishes to the organizers and the students.

In this connection KTS and TVU have organized a one day workshop – Tamil Computing Technology on February 25 at Meenakshi Sundararajan Engineering College. Topics include Tamil fonts and encoding, government initiatives in e-governance, tools and technologies, Microsoft's language applications, open source and job opportunities. Details can be had from http://www.kanithamizh.in/ or www.tamilvu.org. I have been invited to speak in the workshop panel on “Microsoft’s Language Applications” from 3:30PM to 4:15PM. See you there.

Yesterday I attended MSN - NDTV Party. The party was to celebrate 5th Anniversary of MSN in India and announcing the Sales Partnership between the two companies and the new India country manager for MSN India - Mr Jaspreet Bindra. Many industry and media stalwarts were also present.

The party was at Rampart Row, Kalaghoda of Mumbai – Kalaghoda seems to be an exclusive street full of party joints, restaurants and pubs. It was fun!.

Today I was a member in a panel discussion on “IT World – India’s Lead Sustainable”. The programme was part of Synapse ’05 organized by Department of Management Studies - School of Management, Pondicherry University in partnership with CII. I had the opportunity to share the dais with:

- Dr. Kuppu Swamy S, Dean- Ramanujam School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Pondicherry University
- Mr. Punit Dhandhania, VP - Strategy & Business Development, SPI Publisher services
- Mr. Subramanyan N K, Head - Banking & Financial Services, BirlaSoft
- Mr. Shankar Krishnamoorthy, VP - Aspire Systems

Though I had to spend a day (Started the day before from Chennai and stayed overnight for the next day morning programme) on travel for a 15 minute presentation, it was quite motivating to participate in the programme. I could get to listen to others from Industry and to the students.

I am normally very curious and interested in hearing from students (the Potential managers) as they come with a new perspective, a fresh approach and not clouded by industry experience. Even here the students had interesting questions on the Resource Utilization that is reported by IT Companies in their Quarterly results (For Example: INFY Recently reported 78%, will it become 100% ever?).  Then there was the usual question on India improving on the product space - I answered what I believe to be one of the reasons that is Indian’s are normally risk averse especially the urban Indian middle class (who presently dominate the IT Services Industry). Dr.T.Nambirajan from the faculty raised a relevant issue of depleting health condition of individuals working in IT due to work pressure and night shifts.

Nowadays as an audience I avoid attending these panel discussions as I believe you get very little useful information – because of the fact the time given to a speaker to express his views are very limited (< 15 mins). On top of it the organizers get many speakers, the moderator taking most of the time in re explaining what was already told, the first few speakers overshooting there time multifold, each speaker speaking the same point or rehashing what is known to everyone – like you don’t need a speaker to say that India’s Export Turnover in IT last year was $XY Billion the audience have assess to the same Nasscom/STPI report on the Internet. Hopefully today was different and the audience got some tiny bit useful information.  I suggested to the organizers the next time to improve things in their invite letters to panelists they can give a list of things that need not be covered – list of things/figures/backgrounds the audience already know. Also a template of the presentation format they are expecting from the speakers for 15 minutes.

I wish good luck to the students of the batch and thank the organizers for inviting me.

Download the Presentation I used it world - india's lead sustainable.ppt (172.5 KB)

Few Days back MS released Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2 Preview. Though RSS feeds, Tabbed Browsing, Improved Security are the highlights what I love about this release are the following:

• The super clean interface - beats FireFox hands down!
• Launch of the browser and loading of the page - being extremely fast
• Being more accurate in standards compliant, CSS friendly
• Finally a Print function that works as advertised
• All pop-up windows displaying the full path (URL)