Archive for July 4th, 2008

There’s nothing better than examples of how something was implemented so you can copy it. JOPX on SharePoint 2007 has a bunch of links to other posts (which we copied below) for examples.

• How We Did It – Tag Driven Information Architecture using MOSS 2007 for the New Zealand Ministry of Transport
• BinaryWave Sonar – Component Level Performance Measurement Tool for SharePoint – How We Did It
• How We Did It: Building a News Workbench on MOSS 2007 for Microsoft’s Corporate Intranet Portal
• How we did it: Australia National Native Title Tribunal website – advanced web content management
• Tomoye Ecco and SharePoint Integration – How We Did It and What We Will Do Next
• How We Did It: blueKiwi SharePoint Connector and OfficeAssistant
• How We Did It: Integrating Telligent Community Server Evolution 2008 with SharePoint Server 2007
• How We Did It: Connectbeam Spotlight Connect for SharePoint
• How We Did It: Christian Children’s Fund extranet powered by SharePoint

So Sam’s Club is now selling milk and orange juice in these new squarish Frankensteinian bottles. The problem is these new containers don’t have any spouts, so spills are almost inevitable. The reason behind this new packaging makeover is green. Green as in cash and green as in eco-friendly. Supposedly, these square containers are easier and quicker to ship. The result is less fuel, less money, less carbon footprint. Unfortunately, this is isn’t form follows function. It’s more like form follows shipment.

There’s still the fundamental usability problem of spilled milk and orange juice. The invention of spouts go back hundreds may be even thousands of years. I mean half of the Greek statues I studied in Art History was of a naked person pouring wine from pitchers. And yes, these pitchers all had spouts on them. Last I heard, Sam’s Club is launching a marketing campaign to teach consumers to tilt the bottle and not pour it. Tell this to a six year old kid who wants milk and cookies and their moms who have to clean up after them. I think the money that Sam’s Club saved on shipping these new bottles will go to a marketing and user adoption campaign, at least initially. It remains to be seen if you can teach an old dog new tricks. May be the dog has no choice if the choice is green and the company is Sam’s Club who’s also part of Walmart’s evil empire. That’s the inconvenient truth.