It seems that I've been hibernating since I haven't posted for most of the winter.  Not only did we have a pretty harsh winter in Seattle, we were all heads down (at Personify) working on some pretty exciting projects.

New PD Site

The biggest news today is that we've launched a new Personify Design site!  We've had the opportunity to work with some fantastic teams and finally had the opportunity to update our portfolio.  There are a ton of other changes in there.  If you like or don't like it, let us know- send us mail! 

Conferences

Over the last couple of months I've had the opportunity to travel to a few conferences where I've had a ton of fun meeting people and learning about new technologies.  Here's a quick overview of the trips:

Mix07: The buzz in the air was significant.  Yes, we were in Vegas, but I'm talking about Silverlight, WPF, and Expression!  As you might know, we have two core businesses at Personify, namely, Web/Design Services and our products business under Team Solutions.  On the services side, the combination of Silverlight, WPF, and Expression will allow our people to deliver even better quality work by enabling better tooling and workflow between our Design and Development teams.  We've been working with these technologies for some time now and are starting to feel the efficiency in the Designer/Developer workflow.  It's a very exciting time and kudos to the folks at Microsoft that are making this happen. 

SEPG: It was my first trip to SEPG and it was a very eye opening experience.  I had a chance to have some exciting conversations with folks who drive very large software organizations.  These are definitely the folks that benefit the most from the visibility and collaboration which is enabled by VSTS/TFS.  In fact, I had an opportunity to demo our products TeamLook and TeamSpec on top of Team Foundation Server and everyone was excited to learn about the pragmatic approach.  For example, with TeamSpec we're trying to solve the "Stale document problem."  Everyone who's been a part of a team with more than 10 people understands the inevitability of this problem. 

Overall, I see a large opportunity helping teams increase maturity via change management tools and techniques.  Even though these methods are based on a handful (ok, maybe 5 handfulls) of core methodologies, every team does it slightly different.  At Personify, we believe that it's important to provide tools that are applicable to all methods.

Future Events

I'll be attending TechEd 2007 in Orlando in early June.  I'll be hanging out at the VSTS/TFS booth (or Technology Learning Center) - stop by and say hi!  I'm also doing a session on Requirements Management.  Once I get the time/date on the session, I'll post it.