Monday, September 20, 2010

GoogleBot is thy friend

When starting the site I was considering using a couple of forms of paid advertising (such as Google AdWords) to gain visibility for the site. After playing around a bit with words and phrases (AdWords have a nice (free) feature that you can actually have a look and “estimate” potential impressions and costs) it turned out to be a bit pricey for what we were trying to accomplish. The next step was to put in effort to get the site noticed and recognised by google and organically obtain a high rank on searches.
One of the approaches is to use google’s webmaster tools to give google a “deeper” insight into the site.
Step one is to expose a “robots.txt” on your site to “hide” areas that you want to hide and to give googlebot the go ahead to check out everything else.
Step two, point google in the direction of a decent site map. The problem I faced with this is that google is not too happy with any format for this site map. After some trial and error I eventually found that the plain text version worked perfectly (go here to generate a quick version to start off with).
So now that google can see into your site we revised a lot of wording to emphasise words and phrases that we would like to be found on. You might have noticed “Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server” being repeated on the various pages a couple of times.
Now finally we tried to get other sites linking to Team Foundation once again in an attempt to get the “web presence” increased. So we looked around at the popular business listing sites and started listing on the free, no-catch sites we could find.
All this has brought us to be top of the list when searching on google in South Africa for phrases such as “TFS consulting”. All this without spending a cent!

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Free Ebook: Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Get it while it's hot..


http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/09/13/free-ebook-moving-to-microsoft-visual-studio-2010.aspx

Some bed time reading on how to upgrade yourself from previous versions to Visual Studio 2010. It gives a detailed overview of how things change and what new features are available in a fairly unique approach.

You can find a detailed overview of the book here.
 
(cross posted from http://devtendencies.blogspot.com/2010/09/moving-to-microsoft-visual-studio-2010.html)

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Licensing...

It is surprising how quickly a day goes when you go from one meeting to another, but all in all a very positive day. First was a large corporate retailer with the potential of establishing TFS as their primary corporate work item management system (well if I get my way at least J ). There is a lot of potential here, but as we all know, corporates aren’t the most agile of entities, change takes time. One of their primary issues will be around licensing, as they do a lot of non-Microsoft (read Java and mainframe) development and testing – hence a bunch of licenses that would be required outside of the MSDN subscriptions that the MS developers already have. Microsoft has covered the Java market very nicely with Team Foundation Everywhere. But the primary problem is testers logging bugs and users logging work items.
Obviously the caveat exists where using "Team System Web Access" (TSWA) you can log bugs and work items without a CAL as long as you do not access work items that were not created by yourself. Unfortunately not viable in this corporate’s situation as teams manage buckets of items.
The next option is to look at buying additional CAL’s. At approx. $500 a CAL in South African terms not a cheap exercise.
The person I spoke to then spoke about an “external connecter” licence. But even if you could afford it, I don’t think that his situation would qualify for this licensing scheme.
Fortunately they use a fairly expensive product as it is to do test management, so a potential re-allocation of costs could be an option and getting back and reading up a bit I started looking at the possibility of SPLA licensing in a situation like this. It would definitely reduce initial costs, and be flexible to the amount of users on a monthly basis. Maybe something I must look into a bit closer.
The moral of the story: The complexity of the Microsoft licensing really causes headaches for the people on the ground that is supposed to use / purchase these licenses. I read an article stating that they would be surprised if a large number of the “fully” licensed companies were in fact fully licensed, possibly even paying too much.
On the positive side: when I got back fairly late in the afternoon, I was surprised by an email from a company asking about me. I had no contact with them before and have no idea how they got to me, but it was a real highlight. Maybe there is some hope after all.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Update

Well it has been a while, so I thought I would give a general update on what has happened so far. Unfortunately I have to say … not much.
I’ve made some progress with the licensing side of things; I’ve broken through the Microsoft guards and procedures to have access to the volume licensed software now.  The problem is that as a ‘hoster’ you need to have a Service Provider Licensing Agreement in place.
Check. Got that.
The next step is to give Microsoft their money, you need to report monthly usage so that they can bill accordingly (you pay for the actual usage, which you again (hopefully) bill the clients for). This should be done on the SPLA essentials “site”. 
This is where most of the registration pain has originated thus far. One and a half months later I still have not been able to get access to this site (even though this is what initiated the process of getting onto the spla and volume licensing agreements in the first place). I seem to be stuck in a : “I don’t have access; No our systems show you have access; but I don’t have access; but our systems show etc.  etc. etc..” communication cycle with the various levels of support around this issue.
Besides me consuming vast amounts of pricey bandwidth trying to get through MS support, I’ve been digging up old acquaintances and everybody that I have had some amicable interactions with to see if I can at least get the word out and in the process find some leads. Things are going slow (as expected) and I have no solid leads as yet, but still going strong.