December already, and a few weeks since my last post, so here is a catchup. Things have been pretty busy for me, with a fair amount of travel chucked in.

I’ve been in Yorkshire for a visit or two, holding a follow up workshop for a report I submitted with the rest of a team looking at a web development project. It was great to work with the talented team at the client, although they’d had some challenges, they seemed to relish the opportunity to discuss their ideas and collborate a bit on what could be done. They were itching to get in there and make some changes, which we all have to hold rein on when we are keeping management in the loop.

I switched laptops just before my last visit, which caught me out a little when I heard with a few hours notice that I had to travel to Yorkshire. The really funky thing was my first go with personal area networks in Windows XP Pro. Me and my colleague had the same type of laptop, and with a good 10 minutes at the beginning of the day we were all paired up in Bluetooth, got TCP/IP running and a shared folder to collaborate. This made the rest of the day’s efforts in compiling our final report so much easier. Although Word 2003 doesn’t approach the levels of collaboration possible in Excel, having a shared file we could hand to each other in relay fashion was great. It was painless for a new bit of technology I’d never ever used before. And of course it also has built in WiFi, which was useful for popping on a local access point, firing up the vpn to the office and emailing our draft report to the company we were subcontracted to for proofing and checking.

I’ve also been in Glasgow, which although not as far was for Commerce Server 2002 and helping a team get up to speed. They were new to Commerce, but experienced in .NET  and Content Mangement Server. Spreading my visits over a few weeks was a bit twisty for my brain (which country am I in :)) but again a top team to work with. We had our inevitable hiccoughs and the lead up to my last visit was a bit challenging for them, but we unblocked the issues and it was encouraging to see how close they had got in problem solving. I’ve been there myself with Commerce in the past, the learning curve has a few cliffs in it.

Really good to get my teeth into .NET internet sites, both for the start of an online Commerce expedition, the other a huge online servicing system with massive throughput. Internet stuff for both, and top people in both organisations too even though one was Private sector and the other Public.