Anyway

I spent a cer­tain pro­por­tion of Fri­day morn­ing watch­ing the web­cast of the Scott and Steve show — the update of the col­lab­or­a­tion work that Microsoft and Sun star­ted a year ago. Lots of other people have blogged about what was shown and the implic­a­tions (try Tim, Eve, Pat, Robin, Greg and Jonathan for some dif­fer­ing Sun views; CNET, The Register, and Slash­dot for some outside-Sun views).

I had a spe­cial interest in watch­ing the demo (starts at 17:19) as I did the CSS for the Sun part. What happened was, I’m new to all this iden­tity man­age­ment stuff, and asked whether I could help in pre­par­ing the demo for the eGov forum at the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing in Dub­lin in April, in part to help me try to get the con­cepts straight. Pat said the inter­face to the demo could do with some work; I took a CSS that I’d done for my blog (really must move it into WP 1.5 format some time to reuse it!), spiffed it up a bit, and voila! a CSS custom-built for iden­tity man­age­ment demos. So it made sense for me to con­tinue spiff­ing up the demos for this press event. Unfor­tu­nately you only see about 2 seconds of the actual demo on the web­cast and it’s pretty blurry (the web­cast shows more of the demo presenters than the demo they were present­ing), but Pat assures me it looked great on the big screens in real life.

I took what I’d done for the eGov forum, made some changes to make sure it would work on IE 6 on Win­dows XP as well as the JDS browser on Sol­aris (which, being basic­ally Moz­illa, doesn’t have the CSS “incon­sist­en­cies” that IE 6 has) and then pinched the col­ours from the new Sun brand­ing. Pat sug­ges­ted using some of the Sun images to add some pizazz to the site, while Tim made the fake com­pany logos.

Joint demo devel­op­ment takes a lot of coordin­a­tion. We dis­cussed small things like which logos we should show (we settled on Sun + Sol­aris / Microsoft + Win­dows) as well as big things like the pre­cise script that would be used, which defined how many links should be act­ive, and how many dif­fer­ent web pages each com­pany needed to pre­pare, which determ­ined how much cod­ing needed to be done. And a bunch of other stuff, of course. We had daily phone calls within the Sun demo team, and daily phone calls with the Microsoft demo team, just to nail down all those little details.

In the end, we got there, the demo looked good and worked, and, I hope, made sense to people. Spiffy CSS or fancy images aren’t much use if people don’t get what’s being demon­strated. The write-ups I’ve seen indic­ate that they did.