As a .mac user I recently received an email from Apple regarding their new MobileMe service (described here). The email states that MobileMe is happy on any Mac or PC. Any PC not running Internet Explorer 6 that is:

“To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 or later”.

We’ve been pushing our IE6 users to upgrade for some time now, but as you can see from our own statistics below even though the number of you using IE6 is falling it still represents a significant portion of usage:

Now it seems others are picking up Apple’s lead and are discontinuing IE6 support. 37 Signals announced last week that they would be phasing out support for IE6 from August 15 2008. Their main reason for doing this is because they believe they cannot deliver the user experience their customers deserve while still supporting IE6. Even though we agree with this wholeheartedly we feel they’ve missed the biggest reason about why you should not be using IE6: security.

As of June, 2008, Secunia, a company that publishes vulnerability and virus information on products, reports over 130 vulnerabilities in IE6, and 24 of them still aren’t fixed! Compare that to other browsers:

As you can see, anything is more secure than IE6 and we believe it’s our duty to get our users using the most secure browser they can, especially when it’s their own financial data that might be at risk.

Before we make a final decision on our own phase out of IE6 support we want to know what you guys think – would you mind if we stopped supporting IE6?

All of us at Xero want to say a big thank you and good luck to our two Summer of Code students, Balsam and Ryan. They’ve both been valuable members of the development team and I’m sure we’ll see more of them in the future.

Summer of Code is a great programme and it shows in the calibre of the students on offer. It’s not just about a summer job - it’s about getting some real world work experience and we hope to see Balsam and Ryan back next summer as graduates as well as a couple of Summer of Code newbies.

Ryan’s come a long way from having to rewrite his first project to presenting to the dev team all the stuff he’s done. One of Ryan’s claims to fame is the New Zealand map made up entirely of old Xero business cards.

Balsam’s been a great resource for the product team and has done a bunch of work on testing and analysis for the application and also for the service delivery team.

Balsam will be around for a bit longer - she’s doing her thesis on Xero with a presentation to the team at the end of this year.

We want to wish you good luck for 2008 at uni, and thanks for being part of the Xero team!

As part of the Wellington tech scene, we’re pleased to be involved in the Summer of Code 2.0 internship programme.

Summer of Code is based on a Google initiative where top IT university students are placed into IT start-ups and established businesses to work for the summer holidays.

It’s the second year that the Summer or Code has been run in New Zealand, and is organised by John Clegg from ProjectX.

The 20 host companies this year include Xero, Mindscape, Plan HQ, Trade Me and YouDo.

Our two interns are Ryan Chard and Balsam Al-Dabbagh. Both are final year undergrads at Victoria University – Ryan is completing a Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science and Balsam is finishing a Bachelor of Information Technology. Balsam is working in our product team in testing and business analysis, while Ryan is working as a junior developer.

This morning Alastair and I delivered our TechEd presentation. We had a moderate sized crowd (to be expected after TechFest last night) but everyone seemed to really enjoy the session. It was satisfying at the end of the session to get some great questions – always a good way to know that your message has got across.

Our session was entitled “Xero: Utilising Microsoft technologies to build a platform for a global SaaS offering”. And that pretty much encapsulates what we talked about. Alastair covered a lot of the business decisions we’ve made so far and answered a lot of the “what is Xero” kind of questions. I focused on our technology and development strategy. I think we had a pretty good balance between the two, which seemed to be appreciated by our audience (and came through in their questions).

Yesterday it was Kirk’s chance to shine. Kirk did a session in the daunting Sky City theatre on PowerShell - Microsoft’s new command line server administration tool. PowerShell is very cool and in many respects it’s about time we had a command line tool that matched the functionality of the GUI tools. It’s also nice to know we can use objects that we’re familiar with in .NET as opposed to VBScript. Kirk was great - it was definitely the funniest TechEd session I attended. Probably the funniest bit was when his fingerprint scanner kept alerting him, and he asked the audience whether anyone knew whether it could be turned off, a smart person in the front asked whether it could be turned off in PowerShell. I think Kirk owes that guy a coffee (probably the only time at TechEd an audience member got a round of applause!).

So that was Xero at TechEd! One of the themes at TechEd this year was about making a mark - and I think we’ve left one. We all had a great time up in Auckland and I’d like to thank Microsoft for inviting us to talk about ourselves.

Xero has arrived at TechEd 2007, Microsoft’s premier developer event. Most of our development team has made the trip to Auckland and we look like we’re ready to play a life size game of tic-tac-toe with our branded X and O shirts. It’s great to be here, Microsoft really knows how to put on an event, it’s incredibly well organised and a lot of fun.

Alastair, Kirk and I are presenting at TechEd this year so last night was the speakers dinner meet. Great to see so many familiar faces - New Zealand has such an interesting technology community and they’re all out in support of Microsoft, most of them presenting on some of the new cool technologies coming out soon.

First up this morning was the keynote presentation delivered by Michael Platt, Director Web Architecture, Microsoft Corporation and Lou Carbone, Founder of Experience Engineering. Here we got to see the two biggest themes Microsoft are pushing at this year’s TechEd - Software+Services and creating a great user experience.

The Software+Services (S+S) angle obviously interests us because we see ourselves as being heavily involved in this space - it was great to hear Michael talk about integration as a cornerstone of S+S and also about Microsoft’s vision for value-added services delivered over the Internet.

However it was Lou Carbone’s address that was particularly interesting - it wasn’t focused on technology at all and was all about customer experience and the need to deliver value to your customers, understanding what your customers need and delivering on those needs. It was a great talk and very inspiring - I commend Microsoft on opening TechEd with this kind of key note - it’s important to understand that technology is an enabler and in the end it’s not the technology that sells your products, it’s your customer experience. This something we pride ourselves on a lot at Xero and is baked into our brand. I hope other delegates who went to the key note got the message - love your customers!

After the key note the hard part is to decide what session to attend. There are so many great speakers, a bunch all the way from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, US, so it’s important to make the most of the time we have here.

The team has done a good job trying to see as many sessions as possible - probably the highlights being on the newer technologies such as Silverlight and the more general architectural sessions such as architecting business applications and interface design patterns.

Now I’m off to the Ask The Experts event now - our very own Kirk Jackson is an expert there tonight and it’ll be great to see him up amongst the other experts from all over the world.

If you’re at TechEd and want to see Xero in action we’re speaking at the following sessions:

Tuesday 14 August
10:45am - 12:00pm
SVR308 Windows Powershell: The Future of Server Administration
Kirk Jackson
SKY CITY Theatre

1:40pm - 2:10pm (Lunchtime session)
VOC304 Fronde Debate - Software as a Service? Yeah, right.
Alastair Grigg, Xero
Gavin Lennox, Healthphone Solutions Limited
Dr. Andrew Connor, AUT
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
SKY CITY NZ Room 3

Wednesday 15 August 9:00am - 10:15am
VOC203 Xero: Utilising Microsft Technologies as the Platform for a Global SaaS Offering
Alastair Grigg, Craig Walker
SKY CITY NZ Room 4

I found out today I’ve been selected as the New Zealand HTML/CSS guy for FullCodePress 2007! The event is between New Zealand and Australia to build a website for a non-profit organisation.

As they say at the FullCodePress website  http://www.fullcodepress.com/, it’s just like geek Olympics!

I’ll be using the same skills I use here at Xero  integrating what the developers and the designers produce, to build the website, using HTML and CSS (web languages).

The competition puts the New Zealand web teams up against Australia to build a complete website within 24 hours. “No excuse, no extensions, no budget overruns.”

On August 18 I’ll fly to Australia with the other New Zealand team members to compete.

24 hours to build one website! We’ll need coffee, sugar and Red Bull to keep our eyes open, but what could be more exciting than going head-to-head with the Aussies in the geek Olympics?

There was another excellent Webstock event last night in Wellington. Webstock is a fantastic opportunity for web designers and developers to talk about big ideas, while sharing expertise and experiences. Rowan and I were asked to participate in a debate entitled “Web 2.0: All fizz and no substance?” Rowan was the moderator for the debate, while I was on a team arguing in support of Web 2.0 and defending its merits. The opposing team didn’t have a leg to stand on, so they resorted to cynical humor and their dashing charisma. Their tactics were extremely effective, but ultimately they were fighting a hopeless cause.

If you’ve ever wondered what Web 2.0 is really all about, what makes it so significant, and why it’s important to understand then my slides should help clarify it for you:

This morning I was happy to discover that my presentation got featured on the home page of SlideShare. That’s Web 2.0 in action for you.

I recently logged into my U.S. bank account, Bank of America, and I noticed they are promoting online banking as a safer way to get statements than offline paper statements, as seen in this screenshot from their site:

Banks have always emphasised speed and convenience as key benefits to online banking. Security, on the other hand, has been perceived as a risk, not a benefit. Banks, brokerages, and e-commerce sites all had to work very hard to convince people that online transactions are safe. Now people don’t think twice about doing business online. On the contrary, people would be extremely upset if these online services were suddenly taken away.

So it’s interesting to see the internet being positioned as a security benefit, rather than a liability. This makes particular sense considering a conversation I had a few months ago with a senior banking executive who explained to me that cheque fraud costs the banks millions per year, meanwhile their losses due to online fraud are negligible.

Clearly, it’s much easier for banks to prevent, monitor, and trace security tampering electronically when all your transactions go through computer systems that they maintain. The same holds true for storing your sensitive business data. If your financial data is stored on your computer’s hard drive then having your computer stolen is both a serious security risk and a business liability - there goes all your data. You have similar problems if your hard drive dies. If you mail files, electronically or through the postal service, it’s very easy for somebody to intercept that data. On the other hand, it’s virtually impossible to intercept your data when you login to an encrypted site like your bank or like Xero.

When you think about it, it’s obvious. Online is safer.

As a Microsoft MVP I get a unique opportunity to help the wider development community learn about Microsoft technologies, and to take community feedback and influence the development of Microsoft products.

Bill Gates & Rich Kalplan at the MVP Summit keynote

As part of that programme I was invited recently to Microsoft’s campus in Redmond to the MVP Summit.

Microsoft awarded me as a Microsoft Valuable Professional at the start of 2007 for the fourth time, recognising my involvement in the .NET technical community in New Zealand over the past five years.

While the award recognises personal involvement outside of paid employment, the information shared through the MVP programme allows me to learn about new Microsoft technologies in advance of their release, and to bring that information into the planning process here at Xero.

In Redmond last week, Microsoft showcased some upcoming products which interest us at Xero. The next release of their server operating system is code-named Longhorn Server, and is due for release later this year. WPF/E, the code-name for the browser hosted version of Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation, will allow content-rich applications to run on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. The LINQ enhancements to the programming languages C# and Visual Basic.NET allow data queries and manipulation to be integrated directly into the programming code that uses them.

The DinnerNow.net website hosts a sample application showcasing many of these new technologies, and contains a video demonstrating the technologies working together.

Kirk up the Space Needle, Seattle

Longhorn Server

Microsoft has put a lot of energy into making Longhorn Server their most secure and robust server product to date, and has released new versions of many products bundled within Longhorn.

Most applicable to Xero will be the inclusion of Internet Information Server 7 (IIS7), which is the new release of Microsoft’s web server. IIS7 is a rebuild of the webserver architecture, moving from a monolithic to a componentised architecture that integrates much more closely with ASP.NET and allows customisation of all parts of the web request processing pipeline. IIS7 also improves the configuration and deployment of websites, moving to an XML-based configuration system, and bringing improvements to the deployment experience in webfarm scenarios.

Longhorn Server provides new scripting and management technologies, including Windows PowerShell, which is a new command line shell and scripting language that is dear to my heart, that I presented at TechEd 2006 in New Zealand, and at the Wellington .NET User Group.

Here at Xero, we see the advances in Windows Server technologies as incremental improvements on our deployment and hosting experience. Longhorn Server will simplify some of the development, deployment and management tasks associated with providing a Software as a Service offering.

WPF/E

One of the features of Xero that users first notice is our report driven interface, which includes charts and other visual elements to deliver rich business information (see Grant Robinson’s recent post). Our charts are built using Adobe Flash, and render XML data.

Microsoft’s WPF/E is at the simplest level a competitor to Flash, although it allows richer integration with other Microsoft technologies and development environments. WPF/E will run on Windows and Macintosh browsers, and will be a small plugin download, like Flash is today.

I think that we will see WPF/E adopted first by rich media websites, such asYouTube, but as a developer, I can see the benefits in a wider adoption.

LINQ

The LINQ project provides rich enhancements to the .NET framework and the programming languages C# and Visual Basic.NET, which allow database, XML and object querying and interaction to become a first-class citizen of the programming language.

Once LINQ is released, it will allow developers to program more efficiently, as there will be less of a context-switch when moving between layers of their application, and because data operations are declared declaratively, the runtime will be able to make optimizations on behalf of the developer to speed up execution.

Summary

Xero is developed using innovative technologies under the hood, so the software developers here are always looking to new technologies to increase the efficiency of our development, speed up our release cycle, and increase the robustness of our applications.

Upcoming Microsoft technologies evolve the existing application development approaches that we use, which gives us a chance to pick those technologies that may improve efficiencies, and track their process during development.

The first thing you’ll notice when you log into Xero is its report-driven interface.Xero’s visually rich charting and reporting is designed to the bring information you need straight up to the surface. Charting and reporting is there to give you a snapshot of your business - help you identify trends and warn you of upcoming transactions that will affect your cash flow. But not only that, they’re fully interactive, enabling you to dive into the information behind them and perform any actions necessary.

To illustrate what I mean, I’d like to show you a couple of examples of graphs you’ll find in Xero. The graph below is designed to show you how much money is coming in to your business at a glance, by displaying outstanding invoices, and when they were raised.

You can roll over each bar in the graph to find out who the invoices are from, and their exact amount. In Xero (disabled in this example) you’ll be able to click on each bar to view the actual invoice, mark it as paid, or send a reminder email if necessary.

Because Xero can be setup to import your bank statements daily, we’re able to give you a really powerful, up-to-date view of your accounts. The graph below displays a snapshot of recent movements in your account. Not only that, because Xero gives you easy access to the full history of your account, we’ve been able to include some really nice features to let you go back in time. Try it out by dragging the scroll bar left on the example graph below. You can even adjust how much information you want to view at anytime by dragging the time range sliders in the macro view.

It’s this kind of cashflow clarity we’re keen to develop and improve on in the future, and I look forward to hearing how well it is received by our users.