In the past if you wanted to do anything the least bit interesting on the Web you needed to have a variety of skills, such as HTML and CSS coding. You needed to know about JavaScript, or VB Script, and JSP or ASP .NET. You also needed to invest in IDEs or editors for developing your site presentation, and you had to have computer systems on the Internet to host a Web Server, or a Service Provider who hosted Web sites. This often resulted in a large investment in time, education, equipment, and money.

Today, however, there are dozens of companies that specialize in providing website hosting, and many have “drag and drop” content builders that you can use online – no longer requiring the large investment in development tools and servers on your part.

The result is it is much easier, and less expensive, for the common individual or small company to get ‘on the web’ with a reasonably professional, and reasonably functional website.

If that is the case, then why should you hire a professional to help you create and maintain your website?

​The simple answer is, as much as anything, you’re hiring the experience that comes from someone who has been there before.

With today’s technology it is very easy to create a website that is attractive, and interesting to see – once.       But they may be very hard to use, and people – your potential clients – may not come back.

On the other hand, it can be equally easy to build a web presence that says everything you want to say, but is dull and boring, or is difficult to use because it doesn’t take into account the human factors that are different between a mobile phone and a full sized desktop computer. It may contain graphics or other content that does not display on all devices.

In either case you end up losing business because people can’t, or won’t use your website.

It takes experience to know the difference between these very different requirements, and find the combination that is best for you. 

You can find information and a price list on some of the services we can provide here. 

And you can download a PDF document with more information here. 

Things have been a bit quiet on this web site and blog for a several months. That’s because first, I was very busy with some consulting work, and then a few months ago I received a call from a recruiter. The net result is that I am back in the corporate world. I am still working as a technology consultant, and still working with very large clients around the world. The difference is, now it is as a full time employee, rather than as a third party contractor.

As a result of this there will be some changes in Hood Software Solutions, LLC, as well.

In order to avoid possible conflict of interests, and because I won’t have time for travel or large consulting contracts, we will be changing the emphasis to focus more on startups and smaller organizations that may need help with establishing or enhancing a web site, blogs, messaging and advertisement, or similar activities. We will be expanding the staff to include family and close friends who can contribute specific skills to these projects, mainly on a part time basis to begin with.

My role will be less as the “doer” and more as the teacher and mentor.

I want to thank those of you who have supported us in the past, and hope you will help us spread the word about this new emphasis for the company.

I look forward to the changes.

I have made a few updates to this web site. There is not a lot of change in content with this update, but I have changed the navigation a little, and hopefully made it easier for you to find your way around.

Probably the most notable change is the image that appears on each page. The previous one was a stock image from the web site provider. I really liked it, but it wasn't "mine", and if you looked closely it featured a Mac laptop, which might have been confusing for some people. This image is a little more "artsy", but I like it.

And finally, I am working on a new feature, which will be a set of Portfolio pages. These will contain case studies and other information about projects I have led or assisted. This should give you some insight into how I might be able to help you, or maybe just provide some ideas about how you can improve your own application environment. This should be available shortly, and I will add content over time.

Please respond in the blog comments, or on my Contact page to let me know what you think.

And just a reminder, if you would like to receive instant updates on my blog postings, you can add the RSS Feed that is included on this page.
This blog posting gives instructions on how to do that.

I am posting this today in honor of Earth Day, but the message applies any time of the year.

Does our organization have applications that have been around for a while, they basically do their job, but people are complaining that they aren’t modern enough? Too slow? Too hard to use? Difficult to change? If so, you aren’t alone. This is a common complaint. And the common solution is most often to look for a replacement. But a wholesale replacement of the applications that support your core business may not be the best thing. Especially if they have been written or modified specifically for you.

The reason they are called Legacy is because they have value.

Sometimes – many times – a much better solution is to modify those applications, just enough to bring them up to date, without changing the core business rules that are embedded in them. It may be a new user interface, or providing a more modern programmatic interface, or even rewriting a key part of it to be more efficient or easier to modify. Modifications like these are often safer and easier, and in the long run much less expensive than a complete replacement, and they can still have a tremendous positive impact on your business and application users. 


Three mini case studies.

I’ll describe three examples of real world situations that illustrate this idea.

Case 1 – Financial Institution

The users of this financial institution were complaining that the application was out of date and hard to use. They wanted to replace it with a package, even though they knew there was no good match for their business, and any package would require major modifications, either to the software or to their business processes. Two consultants thought of a better way to handle this, and in just one day wrote a Visual Basic client to access three of their most used transactions. When they showed it to a group of users their response was, “This is great. Let’s buy that application.” They didn’t even realize they were using the same application in the background.

A few years later they had a need to integrate their application with a new telephony system. They used the same middleware technology to do that, and again made very little change to the back end application. The manager said later they had changed two lines of code, for security purposes.

Shortly after this a third party introduced an online mortgage brokerage system that would allow a consumer to “shop” for the best terms for their home mortgage. Again, they were able to use the same middleware to expose a set of transactions as Web Services, and use Microsoft BizTalk to interface with the third party.
In each case they were able to quickly respond to a new business need, improve the end-user experience, and grow their business.

Technologies included Visual Basic and BizTalk from Microsoft, and Enterprise Application Environment (EAE) and Component Enabler from Unisys. 

Case 2 – Government Agency

A government agency had two core applications that had very different interfaces. One was a character based terminal interface, and the other a rudimentary graphical user interface. They had been receiving complaints that the applications were hard to use, and required a lot of training for new employees. They introduced a new web browser interface for both application that had a common look and feel. It greatly simplified call center operations, and made the applications easier to learn and easier to use. The effect was an immediate improvement in user acceptance. They were able to train new employees in days, rather than weeks, and they found it much easier to move people from one application to the other during peak times.

Technologies used included Agile Business Suite and AB Suite Client Tools from Unisys.

Case 3 – Insurance Company

An insurance company already had a significant web presence that most of their users were quite happy with, but some users wanted “more”. Some of the agents did not want to be tied down to a computer in their office all of the time. They wanted to be able to use their tablets and smartphones to do their work. The company was able to provide a new mobile front end to the same applications the agents were accustomed to using. The mobile interface is simpler, obviously more mobile, and still preserves the integrity of the core business applications.

Technologies used included Agile Business Suite and ClearPath ePortal from Unisys.

How can we help you?

These are just three of many examples in which a relatively simple, but dramatic change to the user interfaces had a huge impact on the business, and on the user acceptance of the applications. In each case the change to the back end application was minimal.

Every situation is just a bit different, and the technologies or development arrangements that worked for these organizations may not be right for you, but there are plenty of options to choose from. And just because you CAN change an application or make new web or mobile interface for it, that doesn’t mean you SHOULD. For example, there may be security concerns that would make it unwise to expose core business transactions and data, unmodified, to the outside world.

If you have questions, or a situation in which you think your business could benefit from some updates to the user interfaces, I would be more than happy to help. You can send me a short note via my contact page.

I will get back to you as soon as possible. If I am not able to help, I may be able to connect you with someone who can.

This is not so much description of a problem with the latest OS offering from Microsoft as it is a tale of how that bug effected my machine, and the global cooperation that finally identified and solved it.
 
Warning: This might get a little “techie” for some people. If that is you, just skip to the summary for the conclusions, and how this might impact you.
 
The gist of the problem is that alternate users on a Windows 10 system may have a failure in the User Profile Service and be unable to log on.
 
That is the problem I was having, but not the way it was showing itself on my machine.
 
Background  

I use a very nice application development product from Unisys called Agile Business Suite (AB Suite – find out more about it on their web site here - http://www.unisys.com/offerings/high-end-servers/clearpath-forward-systems/cross-platform-software/agile-business-suite ). It has two major parts, a Development Environment that works as a package in Visual Studio, and a Runtime Environment that installs on a Windows server or desktop, and uses the latest Windows .NET environment and SQL Server.
 
In June of last year I bought a new laptop for business. It came with Windows 8.1, and right away I installed Visual Studio, SQL Server, and AB Suite 5.0. Then in July I upgraded to Windows 10, almost as soon as it was available. I did the recommended in-place upgrade, and everything seemed to go pretty well (see my blog entries about Windows 10, if you are interested).
 
AB Suite was not officially supported with Windows 10 at that time, and the clients I have been working with were using an older version, so I had either been using a remote server, or running AB Suite in a virtual machine on my laptop until the IC (Interim Correction) supporting Windows 10 came out around the first of this year. My work with AB Suite 5.0 was tabled until that time.
 
The Problem  

In January I installed the IC (AB Suite IC 5.0.1018) that is qualified with Windows 10, and began to Build my small test application. AB Suite is a model driven development tool that will automatically generate the C# programs for your Windows environment, creates and installs the COM components, and even creates or reorganizes the SQL Server database for your runtime application. When I began to Build the application everything went very well, until right at the end of the process when it creates the database. The program REORGDB terminated with a strange error, saying “type mismatch”.
 
I assumed that since the program had worked before I upgraded the machine last summer that this must have something to do with the upgrade. Maybe it was a difference in SQL Server, or something with differences in the user account permissions granted in Windows 8.1 vs. Windows 10.
 
I did everything I could think of to try to resolve the problem, even to the point of uninstalling and reinstalling AB Suite, Visual Studio and SQL Server. It still was not working. So I contacted my colleagues in AB Suite engineering. They had never seen an error like this either. At their suggestion I checked the permissions on the two user accounts used by AB Suite – one is an application user that becomes the owner of the AB Suite runtime application, and the other is a special Administrator account that is used for various maintenance functions. I found one permission was missing from the AB Suite Administrator account, but fixing that did not correct this problem.
 
On the Trail  

We had a remote debugging session, with me in the US, three locations in Australia, and one location in India. (The AB Suite engineering team is quite diverse and in many locations.) During the session we zeroed in on the two application accounts, App User and App Admin User. We discovered that the App User was not listed as a Login in SQL Server. Also, one of the engineers noticed that I was running under a Windows Live account, rather than a local administrator account. And then finally, we checked the Windows Registry and discovered that neither application account was listed under user profiles. All of this strengthened our belief that there was something wrong with one or the other of the application accounts, but we still couldn’t see what could have caused the problem.
 
The application accounts had not been created after I had upgraded to Windows 10, so we thought that might be the source of the problem. We agreed on three experiments. First I would remove AB Suite and the application accounts and allow AB Suite to create the accounts as part of the installation process under Windows 10. Next, if that was not successful, I would remove and reinstall AB Suite, this time using a local administrator account. And finally, if all else fails, remove and reinstall not only AB Suite, but also SQL Server and Visual Studio, this time using the local administrator account.
 
After all of these attempts I was still getting the same error in REORDB. Not only that, the accounts were still not included in the Profiles in the Registry.
 
Someone suggested logging on with these accounts to force the system to create Profiles for them. But I found that I was unable to log on. The system was unable to find or create a profile for these users.
 
This proved to be the key to solving the problem.
 
I found a forum posting on a Microsoft website that seemed to describe the problem I was having with the user accounts. The users said when they upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 they were unable to log on their machine with child accounts. The error was the same one I was seeing, that the User Profile Service failed and profile could not be loaded.
Here is the link to that forum.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-security/windows-10-user-profile-service-failed-the-sign-in/3a39f75e-030c-4cd5-8b9f-c7bdaf77c41e?auth=1
 
The workaround that seems to work for most people is to either do a clean install of Windows 10 from the original release media, or to copy a user profile from another, working Windows 10 machine. Well I didn’t have the original release, and didn’t really want to go back to the beginning, even if I did. But at the same time, I wasn’t sure how I would go about getting a user profile from another, working Windows 10 machine.
 
Then I remembered that my home computer was also running Windows 10, but it had been upgraded from Windows 7 – not Windows 8 or 8.1. Following the advice in one of the answers in the online posting, I copied the default User profile from my previously Windows 7 machine to my laptop. Then I recreated the application accounts and was able to log on with them. The profiles were created, and they appeared, as expected in the Registry.
 
Then I reinstalled AB Suite, again, ran my application Build, and this time everything worked exactly as it should.
 
Just for good measure, I generated another AB Suite application, and this time it worked perfectly. Problem solved.
 
Summary and Conclusions  

This problem was a strange one because the symptoms all pointed to some sort of permissions issue with the application user account, but everything else seemed to be working. I had followed exactly the same procedure I have used hundreds of times when installing the software, and the only significant variable was the levels of the software. It is exactly the type of problem you expect when testing with new release levels. But apparently no one had seen this problem before with AB Suite. It was because of the way I migrated my system from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, which apparently introduces this problem with user accounts. Remember, I was following recommended Microsoft procedures, and did not see any other errors at the time.
 
How likely are you to have this problem?

• If you install Windows 10 as a clean installation from release media – you probably won’t have this problem.
• If you upgrade to Windows 10 from anything other than Windows 8 / 8.1 – you probably won’t have this problem.
• If you only ever use one user account; the one you used when you installed or upgraded to Windows 10 – you probably won’t see this problem.
• If you upgrade in place from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, and if you have more than one user account on your machine, even if you do not use AB Suite – you will almost certainly have this problem with one or more of your alternate user accounts.

 
 
For most people in a business environment this may not be a concern, because when you receive a new computer, or upgrade an existing one, it is probably set up by a help desk or tech support team, and they build your system from a standard system image that may have been tailored for your company. On the other hand, if you do your own upgrade, say because you received a notice about the free upgrade from Microsoft, or if you recently bought a computer that came with Windows 8.1 already installed, please be aware.
 
The problem was not hard to fix, but it was very difficult to diagnose in this case. Kudos and thanks to the Unisys AB Suite engineering team for their perseverance and support in tracking down this problem. Hopefully, since we have identified the problem and its resolution, you won’t have to go through the same frustration we did.
 
I don’t know if Microsoft has fixed this problem in later updates to Windows 10, but as recently as April 2016 some people still seem to be running into this problem.
 
As I said, the problem isn’t especially hard to work around, once you know what is happening, and what symptoms to look for, but getting to that point can be very frustrating and time consuming. So I am posting this history so others can benefit from this experience.

I just learned about the companion site to LinkedIn called SlideShare. There are thousands of presentations and other items posted there, on a variety of topics.

A few months ago I wrote a blog posting about "Tips for Presenting to an International Audience", and it received some pretty good feedback.

I decided to give this a try, using the same material, but in a different format. Of course the content of a short presentation like this is not going to have as much information as a longer article, so the last slide in the presentation contains links to my blog posting and to this web site.

The site is called SlideShare.net, and here is a direct link to my presentation.
http://www.slideshare.net/AlanHood2/tips-for-presenting-to-an-international-audience?qid=da3bbb1b-9257-4ac7-ad34-514bb19e6175&v=&b=&from_search=1

Maybe in the future I can use this site to share some more "meaty" technical topics. Those would be topics that would be appropriate for a public forum - i.e. of general interest, and without proprietary information.

Even though the site claims to have three publication modes, Public, Private with a Link, and Private, I think I would be very careful to only post information that would not cause harm if it was accidentally published to the public. (A general guideline for anything you put out onto the internet.)

Please let me know how you like it, and if there is a topic you would like to see in the future.

It has been a few months since my last blog posting. I told myself I wouldn’t do that, because I hate it when someone starts a blog – especially one that seems to have some interesting content – and then they don’t keep up with it.

What can I say? I’ve been busy, but I’ll try to do better in the future.

Since the previous entry two papers I have written for Unisys have been published. One on Agile Development with Agile Business Suite, and the other on AB Suite in the Application Lifecycle.

Both of these papers deal with application development, and ways to do it better. Even if you are not an AB Suite user you may find the paper on Agile development useful because it gives a summary of The Agile Manifesto, which is the core of all that is currently called “agile” development.  
Even though the agile development methods have only been popular for a relatively short time, most of the concepts have been around for many years. People who have been following what we previously published as the “LINC Development Methodology” were practicing something very close to modern agile development processes. These include short iterations, frequent delivery, early and continuous involvement with the users, continuous testing, feedback, and ongoing improvement. In recent years development tools have evolved, or new tools developed to assist with agile development and release, and that is essentially what these two white papers address.  
Agile Development with Agile Business Suite

AB Suite in the Application Lifecycle.

At the 2015 UNITE User Conference, in St Louis, MO, I gave a presentation on the Agile development process. A copy of that presentation is posted here in the Articles and Media Presentations section.

Check it out!

 This week a small, but enthusiastic crowd of supporters gathered under the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri for the 2015 UNITE conference (October 12-14). The theme was “Celebrating 60 years of Unisys User Networking”, and marked the 60th anniversary of UNITE and its predecessor organizations CUBE and USE. There were strong management and technically themed presentations from representatives of Unisys, vendors, partners and user delegates. The keynote address on Monday was given by Brian Herkalo, Director, Global ClearPath Product Management for Unisys, on the theme of “Pivoting Toward the Future”. In all there were more than 30 sessions, organized into General Interest, MCP, OS 2200 and EAE/AB Suite tracks. 
 
Earlier this year, when Unisys announced the cancellation of the Universe conference for 2015, the UNITE Board of Directors and advisors met and decided it was important for the user community to have a face-to-face conference this year. They took on the Herculean task of pulling it together in just a few short months. And they did an excellent job. Due to the very short notice the attendance was understandably lower than previous conferences, hovering somewhere around 100 individuals, but they were all dedicated and enthusiastic supporters of Unisys ClearPath systems and related products and services. The Expo area had several of the usual vendors, and even many of those who chose not to rent booth space this year sent representatives as delegates, so there were many opportunities for users to connect with Unisys sales and marketing and thirds party vendors, alike.
 

Many positive comments were heard from delegates and vendors. In the closing session, Guy Bonney, this year’s President of UNITE, said “there will be a conference in 2016”. Whether it is in conjunction with a Unisys Universe conference, or another one like this, organized by the user group, UNITE will be represented in a conference in North America. Kudos to the UNITE organization for pulling off another excellence conference. We hope to see even more of you at the next one.
 
For more information about the UNITE organization, or to get on their mailing list, visit their web site at www.UNITE.org.