• Office Live Workspace revealed: a free 250MB "SharePoint Lite" for everyone - This isn't the Google killer since it's not an "online" version of the classic office applications. What it is is the slow-moving-and-customer-ignorant-IT-organization killer, which is a great thing as far as I'm concerned.

• Sharepoint is not a good development platform / SharePoint is a good development platform for applications / SharePoint is an Awesome Dev App Platform - One of our SA's said early on in his experience with MOSS 2007 application development that "MOSS takes the rapid out of Rapid Application Development," which I think is true in the OOB development experience. Since then, however, we have been able to experiment with varying ways to develop apps in MOSS and have started to see areas where we can create value and assist in speed by abstracting out some of the complexity. That being said, Visual Studio needs to catch up and help make that development experience richer. As Andrew Connell said, that's a knock on tooling and the development environment, not the platform itself.

• MOSS Faceted Search (CodePlex) - If you're using or plan to use MOSS and you want your users to get the most value out of Search, I would recommend taking a serious look at faceted search.

All MOSS Links today... some days are just like that I suppose. :)

I'm sure by now that most of you have heard of Rollyo by now. For those of you that haven't seen it yet, here's how Rollyo describes themselves:

Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others.

And it works as advertised IMHO. I love the idea of having a specialized search that cuts out all of the fat. For starters, take a look at Seth Godin's searchroll. He provides an roll that searches a great cross-section of content. And as an added bonus, I've created a searchroll of my own. I tire of searching on UX concepts and wading through the piles of ads and junk I have no interest in. So, I created the "User Experience" searchroll for your rolling pleasure (full disclosure notice: I shamelessly included this site in the roll). Here are the sites I've included: headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users adaptivepath.com www.boxesandarrows.com www.vanderwal.net robfay.com louisrosenfeld.com/home www.designbyfire.com www.alistapart.com www.webword.com www.jjg.net www.digital-web.com www.greenonions.com www.ok-cancel.com www.userinexperience.com 37signals.com/svn www.useit.com I'm sure I'm missing something. Let me know what it is and I'll throw it in. Enjoy!

In a previous post, Design for Context, Part II, I dug into the Home Depot a bit for their use of the self-checkout stand. Well, the Home Depot got it's lashes and now it's time for Lowe's to hear a few gripes. In this post and my next post, I'm going to do a side-by-side comparison on the experience of searching for a ladder at Lowes.com (in this post) and at HomeDepot.com (in my next post). Last week, I asked the question "What makes for a great search experience?" and listed a couple of my personal requirements. They were: 1. Ubiquitous (or uniform) search box 2. Results easy to identify, even on a crowded page 3. Ability to refine or start over I'll add to that list the #1 thing John mentioned in his comment: 4. Ability of search to differentiate between a search for an actual product or information about a product. I'll test this rule be searching each site for "tips on ladder maintenance and repair." What I intend to do for both Lowe's and the Home Depot is test each site according to the four rules above.

This morning, I started working on a couple of posts that will pit the search experience of two competing sites against each other. I plan to finish and publish these in the next few days, but I'd like to get the comment-mill going in the meantime. The question is: What are the things that make for your ideal search experience? If you can, please comment on this post and list a few things you think ypur ideal search needs to have. It doesn't need to be comprehensive, just a few ideas off the top of your head. Also, feel free to link to a site or sites that you think do search well. Finally, since I'd love to get as many comments as possible, feel free send this post around to friends, family, search experts, etc so they can comment as well. I'd love to get a long list of the things people are looking for in their search experience. Here are some of mine to start things off: 1. Ubiquitous (or uniform) search box 2. Results easy to identify, even on a crowded page 3. Ability to refine or start over This is by no means complete. So what do you think? SEO, user experience, search, usability