Comfort Inn Midtown West - NewYork - Manhattan

Sad story...bad experience...will never use it again...

We arrived to the hotel as per schedule around 1:30 pm in the noon of Friday 09/04/09. We were told the room is not available and we will get it later. So we checked in our luggage went to do our sight seeing and came back at around 1:00 AM in night. The counter lady tells us ohh a pipe leakage has happened so we have to move you to a hotel diagonally opposite to us - the GEM hotel and tomorrow you will have to come back as they do not have a room for tomorrow. We did not say a word and stayed in the other hotel. The next day morning we again took all our stuff and went back to comfort inn and checkedin our luggage at the counter again. When we returned that night at around 1:00AM the lady at the counter tells us the room is under maintenance and we will have to go to Brooklyn downtown to stay (at 2:00 AM in the night). Please note that we were not called by the hotel management at any time during the day or night. How can you expect a customer to go from Manhattan to Brooklyn at 2:00 AM in the night. We tried to call the manager (V K Macvava) repeatedly but he would not pick up the call. The management says as we had got a deal in $200 they will not pay anymore for us to stay near by. Worst they tried to shift us to Holiday Inn and they would not honor the walk through letter by comfort inn.

Finally with some help from Ayaana (counter lady) we could find a hotel Alex at 3:00 am in the night for which she said she does not have any right to book a room even if it was $235 a night- which was mere 35$ extra than what we were paying already for the comfort inn room. So we had to pay from our pockets for the same. Worse, the lady did not even pay for the taxi fare!!

We have been charged for the hotel GEM for $235.99 while our deal was at 199.99. If not reversed soon i will dispute the charges on my cc. We did not even get a receipt for this from the hotel

We never got to stay in the hotel. This is absolutely unacceptable. I would give a -ve on customer service as well. We should have been called before hand if the rooms were not right and we should have been accomodated in another hotel near by free of cost.

We want our money back period (235 for GEM and 235 for Alex) for all the trauma we faced in this mess. Unless done we will blog about this occurrence and give extremely bad reviews on comfort inn and hotels.com on this one. Please do not expect us to use you guys again if we do not get a reply on this in the next day. I really want to see how good customer service does comfort inn and hotels.com have now.

UX - User Experience - Biz. relevance for SI

1) ECommerce applications:
Whether it is Insurance or BOA or Amex or Ingram or Motorola or Amazon, all companies are being pressured to give review and ratings (amazon, amex, BOA), comparison (progressive insurance), streaming video reviews (amazon) to the end users and analysts.
- This on-line channel of providing enhanced features is not only in demand for web apps but also for iPhone apps or black berry apps; which is big business. BOA recently came up with a free black berry app made in flex or silverlight.
- Streaming video product reviews are now being sold by companies like CNET which requires a company not only to strategise on their search and web content management but also the way to present it. Flash player or Java fx or silver light are major contenders for this business depending on the current infrastructure of the company. This area is still maturing and there are a lot of opportunities in this area.
- Most insurance and banking companies are yet to convert their peripheral apps like stock trading in BOA or profile management in Chase to RIAs.
- Desktop widgets are other applications which are catching good traction in the market. Southwest, Amazon, Google are the early winners in this. Even in this area big vendors have taken sides. For eg SAP Widget toolkit is an add on to Yahoo Widget Toolkit and Yahoo engine (actually a prerequisite.)

2) BI Applications
Companies like Microstrategy (version 9) or BO (Excelcious) have come out with capabilities where in either
- The UI generated by the engine by drag and drop ides is RIAs or
- The development environment demands skills in flex or silverlight or
- The UI to be developed and tweaked is for desktop widgets (for KPI level notifications or alerts.)
Though the first one is not much of a opty from a services perspective the last two can definitely be of value add in the BI domain. As UX is never a focus when strategising BI companies often scamper around for this skillset as it is not in their planning.

3) ISV Capability
Actuate, Pentaho, Microstrategy, BO, SAP or Oracle (any small, medium or big vendor) are companies which are looking for changing the rendering technology of their UI generating engines to be in RIA oriented. For eg SAP is not changing the way we develop webdynpros. But they are changing the engine that generates htmls to give an option to the companies to select between plain html and AJAX. This trend is now being followed by smaller companies like microstrategy or actuate. This is creating new opportunities in product enhancement space. The same eg can also be carried over in other UX based tools like portals or ECommerce engines.

4) Internal apps/Portal apps.
Internal applications and portal apps which face the employees of organizations are being RIAfied in the enterprise pretty regularly now. A quick task approval app in the form of a desktop widget or a mobile app or travel reimbursement app in disconnected and connected mode is very common in the enterprises. Most of these apps are custom and is a huge space for development support services. 

5) Consulting services
- Big companies like Ingram Micro or Motorola or BOA or Amex have different regions in the globe having their own apps. Ingram uses Cold fusion in Asia PAC, YUI in UK, JSP in US and PHP in Germany. Consolidating them to one UX to take competitive advantage of the customer facing channel and showing a single face to the customer is one service a lot of companies need.
- Another service is definitely UX toolset selection and TCO recognition.

Some points to ponder or what I saw customers talking about..
1) Big application vendors have started to take sides with these technologies like SAP is taking flex or Oracle is taking up JSF (they call the enhanced version ADFs), Microsoft with silverlight and lighter weight AJAX in ASP.NET and C#. So for most companies the choice becomes a taken and they just move ahead with what the most affluent vendor in the company suggests as the roadmap.
2) According to some analysts big companies (Dell, AMEX, Visa, HP, Intel etc.) with large on line presence are not using any of these technologies to bare bones. They have matured to a stage where in they have their own frameworks (controls, UI screens, data transformation logic etc) built as a company wide standard. These frameworks are not going anywhere.
3) UX applications are also gaining visibility because of their default scaling capabilities in other channels. E.g. SAP Webdynpro or Flex player requires zero or minimum coding for converting a web app to desk top app or a mobile app.

What lead to advent of cloud computing

Extjs Summary

Pros

• Commercial and Open Source licenses available
  
• High performance, customizable UI widgets
  
• Well designed, documented and extensible Component model.
  
• Good widgets. ExtJS is a superset of the widgets of all available JavaScript frameworks. With no obvious bugs it is great from a end user's perspective.
  
• Good API documentation. If you need to look up something you’ll probably find it.
  

Cons

• Applications do not degrade gracefully. Turn off JavaScript and you are left with a few lines on your screen.
  
• The CSS. It’s nearly thousand definitions which are giving you no idea which is used for what purpose.
  
• The HTML is huge. Many tags get so many CSS styles assigned that you don’t understand what’s going on. DIVs are nested so deeply that you’ll need a minute at least to find a certain widget in Firebug.
  
• Issues in loading the start page because of a 500 KB library
  
• Development/Customization  effort is significantly high in terms documentation effectiveness & IDE availability.
  

Cross channel Support

Extjs supports all major web browsers including IE 6+, Firefox 1.5+ (PC, MAC), Safari 3+, Opera 9+ (PC, MAC). Though there are issues when custom DIVs are added because parent child relationship does not render in the same way in all the browsers.

In case of an advent of a new browser one has to depend on the company Extjs as there is no way to customize the existing Extjs APIs.

YUI Pros and Cons

Pros

• Clearer separation of client and server code.
  
• Works very well with traditional page-centric applications(unlike GWT). 
• Has decent graded browser support.
• SAP widget toolkit is built around YUI.
• Controls like Panels, Auto complete, Data table, tab view, slider, pop ups work very well and are easy to implement.
• Easy to adapt for skilled JavaScript developers.

Cons

• Lack of good IDEs leads to difficulties at development time for development & UT.
• Leaves you to manage how to translate your server-side return values to XML or JSON
• YUI Browser History does not support Opera. This is due to the fact that Opera does not update the `location.hash` property when using the back/forward buttons. It will be corrected in a future version of the Opera web browser.
• Developers need to use commercially available IDEs to develop applications in YUI. Eclipse plug-in is not free.
• Issue resolution for YUI library issues is difficult and forum updates not frequent enough

Cross channel support

It also offers two fundamental ideas, a) A broader and more reasonable definition of “support.” b) The notion of “grades” of support. The Graded browser provides an inclusive definition of support and a framework for taming the ever-expanding world of browsers and frontend technologies. 

But considering the way YUI architecture has been designed it is mostly up to the developer to take care of the cross browser issues in case of errors and incompatibilities. But the good point with YUI is as all code is in .js and it is open source, the developers can modify it to fix their problems (unlike GWT).

Is this United States of America???

I was so excited when I thought I will have a california state license. A license valid not only in US but in countries like France and Germany. But I am sad the excitement was short lived and after about 65 days of waiting I am absolutely disgusted with the procedure. I have submitted my documents including h1 approval and I94 and all other documents needed. I have called up DMV like n number of times but no response. 

I guess I am getting a flavor of the real USA. Believe it or not now a days even in India, the small town I come from (Surat) you get license in 1 hr max (if you have the right documents). But I guess this is the down fall of a great country whose attitude and life I have always admired. Forget about India, other states like Ohio or Arizona we get the dirving license in an hour, I wanna ask the authorities why is California so special? This is the worst service I have ever got in america. DMV almost never has ideas on what can be the appx date of arrival or cause of the delay or whats going on in the approval department. People on no. 9166577445 are much more reasonable, but still I had to send him my docs by fax and run around after him. I really felt helpless and like a begger today. Just frustrated and embarased by the situation.

Cloud computing - experiences and repository of good links

Handicapping cloud computing: The big picture

Will cloud computing do away with IT pros?

GWT Highlights

Cross channel Support - 

GWT shields you from worrying too much about cross-browser incompatibilities. If you stick to built-in widgets and composites, your applications will work similarly on the most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. (Opera, too, most of the time). Whenever possible, GWT defers to browsers' native user interface elements. For example, GWT's Button widget is a true HTML button rather than a synthetic button-like widget built, say, from a div.

Pros

• GWT does a good job of abstracting away some of the low-level aspects of Ajax application development, such as cross-browser incompatibilities, the DOM event model, and making Ajax calls.
  
• GWT scores in its RPC mechanism and built-in serialization of objects between Java code and JavaScript. This removes a lot of the heavy lifting you see in the average Ajax application.
  
• GWT has the upper hand in terms of unit testing, providing JUnit integration for client-side code. Unit-testing support is an area where JavaScript is still sorely lacking.
  
• Can map native server objects such as database results to JavaScript equivalents.
  
• Minimizes the amount of JavaScript code you have to handle (depending on the library)
  

Cons

• Any errors in your generated JavaScript are out of your control. A particular problem is GWT's reliance on user-agent detection: Each release of a new browser requires an update to the GWT toolkit to provide support.
  
• The GWT tool chain is provided in binary-only form, and modifications are not permitted.
  
• Although it's possible to combine GWT widgets with normal HTML form inputs, the state of a GWT widget is fenced off from the rest of the page. For e.g., there's no straightforward way to submit the selected value from a GWT Tree widget as part of a regular form.
  
• Ties the JavaScript code tightly to the server language.
  

UX Analysis

Various UX technologies available in the market today are making a full circle back to where it started from. The evolution started with client server technologies (desktop applications like swing or windows forms in Visual Basic etc.), moved on to web UI (Java Server Pages or Active Server Pages) and now all of them are coming back to more `desktop like` UX (AJAX or Silverlight or Flex etc.) in a browser. So we decided to do a study of the prominent AJAX/RIA technologies in different categories in the market using some fixed criteria. The study included GWT (Google Web Toolkit), YUI (Yahoo User Interface), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, Java FX & Extjs (may be more when I actually give the presentation). This blog post is a list of criteria that I used to analyze the current UX offers. I have already presented these results to the great delight to a couple of our customers.

The study includes some recommendations for each technology, a overview slide (including architecture, channel support and pros & cons). At the SAP Inside Track in Palo Alto  I will share the results with the community in a session. I also plan to blog on the findings once the event is done. This post is a teaser to make you want to come ;).

Following are the criteria this study was done at

•Cross client support/experience -

    •IE/Firefox/Other browser support

    •Support for other clients.

    •Client side installations

•Development tool support

    •Ramp up times

    •Skill set requirements

    •Overall maturity

•UX Controls

    •Out of box controls and palettes

    •Extensibility of UI controls

•Ease of customization

    •Integration efforts

    •Evolving UI design patterns

•Security and accessibility

    •Integration with SAML

    •Integration with open source frameworks

    •Ease of enterprise integration

•Performance and usability

    •Tools availability

    •User experience

Any kind of feedback or suggestions are welcome. See you guys at the event!!