For those of you who enjoyed the web 2.0 - The Machine is using Us video posted on YouTube by Mike Wesch, a Kansas State Professor. He has added another video on information categorization - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM. At the same time he posted another video called A Vision of Students Today - which is an interesting look into Gen Y - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o. E

I am trying to create my own theme for the iMIS15 public view. All I did was copy the "C:\Program Files\ASI\iMIS15\iMIS_public\App_Themes\iMIS" folder and paste it into a new folder called "C:\Program Files\ASI\iMIS15\iMIS_public\App_Themes\CEDA". This way I could modify the style sheets as required, without affecting the iMIS theme.
I then went into the IIS iMISPublic virtual directory properties and went into the ASP.NET tab and clicked on "Edit Configuration". In the General tab, I modified the PublicSiteTheme to be "CEDA". In the Application tab I modified the "Page Theme Default" to also be "CEDA".

On October 2, Shannon and I attended the STC Austin presentation on Embedded Help by Paul Mueller, President of UserAid ("Delivering information when and where users need it").

Embedded Help systems seek this ideal: to answer users' questions without requiring them to ever ask for help, by making information available exactly when and where they need it. Users get the support they need without leaving the task they are working on. This presentation reviewed UI and technological strategies for embedding user assistance in both web and non-web user interfaces.

Does anyone have a way to set up the home page/dashboard for iMIS 15?

I'm not sure how to get to it now that none of the Framework pages are available.

I attended the e-learning SIG program for ASTD Austin last night, hosted by National Instruments and led by 360training. Working through all of the new social networking technologies that affect training, we only tackled half the list, so we're continuing next month! The biggest surprise to me was the power these technologies could bring for product marketing, beyond their great usefulness for training. Here are my ideas, based on what I heard:

This site has some great design patterns used by lots of the most popular websites.

http://www.welie.com/patterns/index.php

Here, by popular demand (well, one request, anyway), is an animated cursor based on the iMIS 15 icon. To install it, copy the iMIS15.ani.txt file to your windows\cursors folder. Take off the .txt extension. In Control Panel / Mouse / Pointers, Browse to this cursor for the "Busy" and "Working in Background" selections. Click Apply and you're done.

These are the TFS rules that Microsoft turns on for their development.

http://blogs.msdn.com/fxcop/archive/2007/08/09/what-rules-do-microsoft-have-turned-on-internally.aspx

Too good not to share: Free Usability Advice, from our friends at Expero. (See my prior blog entry.)

It's intended to provide short, general answers to broad topics about user-centered design. (They're considering adding a separate section to handle the non-usability questions, which do, of course, get submitted. Should be fun!)

This week several of us in InfoDev attended a 2-day seminar on Web Content Usability, taught by Expero, a local usability firm. Lots to say about that, but I'll start with the end, where we asked for and received a quick evaluation of usability issues with our new Helpsite. Here's what we got, in the order they were brainstormed: