Eric and I spent Day 3 at AFCEA’s LandWarNet having a lot of conversations with vendors and with members of Army programs.  The main themes of our discussions were security, collaboration, and connectivity.  All three are interconnected.  Army members must be interconnected if they are going to be able to communicate with each other, particularly in a warfighting environment where events in Southwest Asia are tied into teams back in the United States in real time or near real time.  They must collaborate to share ideas and to stay ahead of a very smart and very motivated enemy.  Finally, they must act in a secure IT environment (much less a secure physical environment) to ensure that the same enemy doesn’t discover our plans and get into our decision cycles.

One of the means by which solders can and should be connecting with each other is through the Army’s knowledge and content management system, Army Knowledge Online (AKO).  It’s one of, if not the, largest knowledge management systems in the world.  It has over two million users, and hundreds of thousands of pages.  What it does not have is a good way for people to discover each other and common communities of interest.  A good example is when the Stryker Brigades deployed to Iraq.  In the beginning, there was no knowledge how to deploy, since nobody had done it before.  However, as more and more knowledge (tactics, techniques, and procedures) is developed, it should be shared for new Stryker leaders to leverage.  AKO could be a way to push information to people who may need that information.  By leveraging this portal to share information in a way similar to the Netflix recommendation engine, the Army could disseminate information more quickly and help innovate.  The enemy in the Global War On Terror is innovating; we need to make sure our soldiers have the tools to innovate as well.

Eric Pugh and I are at Day 2 of AFCEA’s LandWarNet conference.  While we haven’t been in many sessions, we did get to sit in on LTG Sorenson’s lunch briefing today outlining the IT direction that the Army is taking through 2011.  One of the issues that he talked about was the difficulty that units and soldiers faced in portability of their applications from garrison to predeployment to warfighting.  Because connection to applications is not universally portable, maintaining continuity is problematic.

We also attended the Army Knowledge Online Single Sign On session.  They use SharePoint for the SSO solution and then push the SSO to the approximately 450 applications which tie into AKO.  As an aside, we’d prefer that they use JA-SIG’s CAS single sign-on solution.  Instead of needing to be inside a military installation to access AKO, users can sign in from anywhere.

It seems that once the infrastructure is in place, the Army could use a similar approach to allowing soldiers to link in to the applications they need wherever they are in the world.  Pushing applications down and out will grow more important as, as LTG Sorenson said in his opening speech, network centricity is pushed closer to the soldier.

Some other observations:

• Soldiers who in the field are given a broad swath of responsibility and find themselves with that responsibility reduced when they return to garrison are discontented.  That’s no surprise.  If we’re going to be successful at war long term, garrison ops need to adjust to more closely mimic in-theater ops.
• LandWarNet is in Second Life!  I’m glad that the military is learning the value of Second Life.  The SLURL is here.

When it’s a mall, a kennel, a wireless hotspot, or a restaurant.

Here at the 50th AAAE Northeast Chapter meeting the session I was most looking forward to was Non-Airline Revenue since our product, AeroWeb, has a lot to offer in that area. Airports are faced with declining flights, and therefore declining revenue from airlines and are looking for other ways to make up the lack.

While this session briefly talked about 18 areas that could contribute more non airline revenue, from air cargo, to airline services, the focus was on maximizing revenue per passenger through better services. The biggest source for gaining significantly more revenue quickly was extending advertising opportunities, and increasing revenue per passenger through food and retail. Many of the airports on the Northeast have large atriums, and those high traffic areas are great places for additional advertising via banners. Additionally, by featuring premium restaurants with a local tie to the airport, you encourage folks to come in. I know I go to Legal Seafood in Logan versus the generic sports bar located in the same terminal. Also touched on were how airports are hosting kennels, and even hotels on the premises.

What wasn’t touched on was the opportunity to increase revenue by making an airport’s web site work harder. Airports who have free wireless available typically send the user to the standard public airport homepage. But what about instead sending those folks to a specific internal page that provides what they are looking for (since you know they are in the terminal!):

1. Where are the restaurants and retail?
2. Advertising/special deals for venues in the airport?
3. How long will it take me to get to my gate.. More importantly, how long can I shop before I go to my gate?

We’ve been discussing what it would take to allow a passenger to subscribe to text messages providing detailed information about their flight, from delays and gate changes, to details on who can board when. Just look up a phone number on a FIDS display, punch it into your cell and now you can walk around the airport, secure that you are being notified regardless of where you are. This might even help those “Gate huggers” who will immediately bypass all shopping and retail services in a mad rush to get to their gate, just to wait around for an hour.

Airport Managers should also be looking at what services you are paying for related to your website, and see if you can turn those around. For one client, the airport was paying a monthly fee for a ticket booking engine that didn’t even work well. We integrated Kayak into our AeroWeb airport website product, and now that airport is making affiliate revenue for driving traffic to Kayak! The same situation often pops up for weather data, you can set yourself up as an affiliate to Weather.com, and even potentially earn revenue on people who click through to Weather.com.

While I love the idea of sleep pods and kennels in airports, I think the real “service” that takes advantage of your being away from home is routine services for your car. Getting maintenance done on your car is always a hassle. However, if you can just drop your car off for an oil change or your 90,000 mile overhaul, and pick it up when you return, then it makes sense to book those activities (maybe via a web interface?) while you are traveling.

Here in Charlottesville you can take your car to Airport Road Auto Center, and they’ll run you the four blocks to the airport, and then on the day you return drop your car off in the short term parking lot, all tuned up and ready to go!

3 years later and it never ceases to amaze me with how many surprises SQL Express comes with when you try to install it on a windows 2003 server for whatever reason.  So today when I was playing the role of “Server Admin” and attempting to install SQL Express, I ran into a couple of issues.

The first one was

The SQL Server System Configuration Checker cannot be executed due to WMI configuration on the machine <mymachine> Error:2147749896 (0×80041008)

So after the initial, “why, God, why?????”, I found this nugget off of google. It’s basically a command script that goes through and fixes possible errors for the WMI configuration (FIXWMI.CMD).  So after running this, I could finally get SQL Express installing, well, sort of. 

Evidently SQL Express sometimes has issues installing, when it installs itself in “stealth” mode which is how it installs when you run the “SQLEXPRE32.EXE” installer.

SQLexpress fails with the error: An installation package for the product Microsoft SQL Server Native Client cannot be found. Try the installation again using a valid copy of the installation package ‘sqlncli.msi’

So to get around this, you need to create a temp folder where ever your evil server admin heart desires. I chose to be spontaneous and created: “c:\temp\sql”.   Then you need to open a command line and change the directory to where ever you have the file “SQLEXPRES32.EXE” kept and run the following command:

$> SQLEXPRES32.EXE /x:c:\temp\sql

This will unpack everything into that folder.  You should now have a “c:\temp\sql\Setup” folder, inside of which is a file/msi called … (drum roll), “sqlncli.msi”. Double click on that msi file and run “repair”.  After that rerun the “SQLEXPRES32.EXE” and all should be golden. 

This blog was sponsored by the letter S and number 5 and does not imply warranties of any kind, use at your own risk, the same kind that you take when you open up regedit and begin mutilating various keys and values. 

Come join Eric Pugh and other local and regional Scrum practitioners for drinks and dinner where
we’ll hash out real world issues that face Scrum Teams. We’ll be talking about what made us start using Scrum, the cultural challenges we’ve had, and how we measure our results. We’ll share some
stories about wins and losses since we last met in May 2007!

Please RSVP to epugh@opensourceconnections.com so I can make sure we have an appropriate sized room at West Main.

When: July 24th from 5:30 to 8 PM
Where: West Main Restaurant http://tinyurl.com/5kdphs
Who: Anyone who is using Scrum, thinking about Scrum, or quit using Scrum!
Help: Eric @ 434-466-1467

I’ve uploaded some photos to Flickr of the debut of AeroWeb at the AAAE Conference in New Orleans.  You can see photos of our booth, as well as some of the fun we had at the Mardi Gras World event on Monday night.  It’s been a great conference, and I want to thank everyone who stopped by our booth to discuss AeroWeb!

You can view the photos here.

It’s Tuesday morning, which if the final day for exhibitors at the AAAE conference for airport executives in New Orleans. Eric, Riley, and myself, along with my wife Lauren, have been here since Saturday talking to regional airports around the country about OpenSource Connections new product AeroWeb.

The reception has been really great so far. While I think exhibitors always wish that there was more traffic by the booths, the quality of many of our leads has been very good. We are demo’ing the websites on our laptops, and have a screencast of AeroWeb running on a large monitor at the front of the booth. The screencast has certainly helped bring people into the booth, and our demos have been running very well so far and everyone who sees them seems to be impressed.

We’ve had conversations with a wide range of airports, with airport consultants who could conceivably recommend AeroWeb to their clients, with other vendors we could potentially partner with, and with industry journalists. We’ve also made a few contacts with companies who may be interested in the software development skills of OpenSource Connections, outside of our airport product.

The features we are showing airports for the most part seem to be right on. A couple of ideas that attendees have brought up have been interesting. One attendee noted that the main reason he felt people go to his airport website currently is not passengers, but vendors who are looking for information about RFP’s. So he wanted a content section with a lot of information about RFP’s. After looking at the websites of some other airports we’ve talked to, they also have at least a page with current RFP’s listed on it, and PDF downloads of the RFP’s right there. Of course, this is easy to do in AeroWeb, but we hadn’t put a page like that in our demos.

Another interesting observation made by a trainer from a small airport was “Can you schedule content to be published at a certain date?” The answer to this is also yes when you are editing content and blog posts through our back end Expression Engine administration tool. However that functionality and content versioning is not currently exposed through the inline editing tool we are primarily demo’ing to clients.

I’ve got some photos to post, so I’ll post those and more comments later today after the show ends. For now, I’ve got to run back to the booth for exhibiting hours!

Thank you to everyone who helped with the May 15th meeting of the Charlottesville .NET User group. In no particular order this includes Al Tenhunfeld of Dominion Digital for providing Pizza and assisting with other meeting related tasks, Eric Pugh of Open Source Connections for bringing a fine selection of Pilsners and Ales and creating the introductory slideshow, Eric Meier of the McIntire School of Commerce for founding our group and spreading the word at UVA, Geoff Snowman of Microsoft for his presentation of Windows Workflow Foundation and Charlottesville Business and Innovation Council for use of their offices.

So what’s next?

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday July 17th. The current working topic is Microsoft’s Silverlight. But please suggest topics or speakers for future meetings.