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June 02
Tablets at Work: Function or Fun?
by  McEnery, Beth  on 6/2/2011 4:18 PM

Risetime consultants have noticed iPads popping up with increasing frequency at our client offices, which led us to ask: what are they really being used for, and can they support business users the way a laptop or desktop PC can?

iPad Leads the Tablet Pack

It’s no secret that the iPad dominates the tablet computer category. According to a recent Nielsen media survey, 82% of consumers using a tablet have an iPad. The rest of the table market is highly fragmented, with devices like the Samsung Galaxy, Dell Streak, and Motorola Xoom holding only single digit market share Consuming vs. Creating Content.

A recent article in Crain’s Chicago Business discussed how local executives have embraced the iPad. But most of the execs featured in the article agreed that the iPad is all in good fun and is extremely convenient, but it’s not necessarily a machine for power users. This is mostly due to the ability to create and manage content on the iPad – it’s not perfect for creating… but for consuming content it is ideal. Executives tend to be content consumers, not creators: a major reason for their overall embrace of the iPad1.

Tablets are Fun and Functional

The benefits of tablets are obvious: they’re light, portable, fun and easy to use. However (much like mobile devices) when it comes to utilizing tablets in the enterprise, there are several concerns for the IT department: namely security and hardware/software compatibility.

So… how do you know if you really need a tablet computer, or if it’s just a fun new toy? According to SmallBusinessTrends.com, you definitely need to get an iPad/tablet if you:

•
  • Frequently travel – portability is key
•
  • Have to show customers products online
•
  • Attend conferences or meetings, and take notes
​
•​
Need to take credit card payments from customers (there’s an app for that)​

 

You might not need an iPad/tablet if you:

•
  • Don’t frequently surf the web
•
  • Have easy access to a laptop or desktop
•
  • Frequently utilize custom software

 

The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Computing?

There has been recent speculation by analysts that Intel’s new tablet processor “could bring a new wave of tablets that are more closely aligned to security, software and hardware needs in enterprises”. Because these devices will support Windows and commonly used IT management, processes and applications; they will fit nicely into enterprise IT environments. More tablets are entering the market that are targeted at enterprises, with three new tablets released in this category in just the last month.

1. Strahler, Steven "Chicago CEOs Embrace the iPad" Crain's Chicago, 14 Oct 2010.

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May 09
Enterprise Mobile Technology and Strategy
by  McEnery, Beth  on 5/9/2011 1:53 PM
Our last blog explored the development of applications vs. websites for an organizations customer-facing mobile presence. In this blog we will dive into the factors involved in leveraging mobile technologies within the enterprise to increase employee productivity and connectivity to back-office systems. 
 

Mobile: Coming Soon to an Enterprise Near You!

It’s no surprise that mobile applications for business are receiving ever-increasing attention from the technology world. Mobile is taking over so many aspects of consumerism; it’s inevitable that it will be translated into the enterprise, and slowly but surely businesses are incorporating mobile applications into their operations/technology strategy1.

Mobility_Scenarios_Graphic.jpg

Get the Most Value from your Mobile App

Deriving true value from an enterprise mobile application is two-fold, you must: 1. have a strong business case/need for mobility, and 2. have the technical infrastructure and resources to support the mobile application.

 

Can Your Infrastructure Go the Distance?

To support the technical infrastructure, we’ve collected some tips from a recent webcast by the Technology Executives Club; exploring interactive mobile applications in the enterprise. They recommend organizations take the following steps in order to prepare to leverage mobile applications within their organization:

1. Focus on building out a Services Orientated Architecture (SOA)
2. Learn about the Cloud
3. Understand the various mobile devices and their platforms
4. Understand mobile application development strategies
5. Understand mobile-related security topics

Where are your employees? Why do they need mobile access to information?

With the knowledge and resources to support mobile applications in place, a business case must be built. In many organizations, employees are often disbursed throughout the country and the world. Not everyone is sitting at a desk or has easy access to a laptop and ideal working conditions. Tablet PCs, Pocket PCs and Smartphones are there to fill this gap where another kind of worker still needs to get access to critical information on the road, or submit their own data as gathered from the field. Would quick mobile access to information allow respective employees to make better decisions or do their job faster? A good example of this is mobile apps for CRM to support field sales reps.
 
A carefully planned and executed mobile strategy within the enterprise can deliver the same conveniences that it does to consumers: connectivity, quick information, and empowered decision making. We’d love to hear your thoughts on mobile applications for business… Has your organization established a business case for enterprise mobile apps? Comment on this blog below!

 

Sources:
1. Lopez, Maribel. “Three Mobility Trends That Will Change Your Business”. Information Week. http://www.informationweek.com/articles/229300384?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All

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April 25
SharePoint 2010 - A Year Later...
by  LANGROUP\jmuccillo  on 4/25/2011 10:43 AM

We’ve now been using and implementing SharePoint 2010 for our clients since its release a year ago. While there were a number of things to get used to (like the total overhaul of Central Admin) I think we can now stand back and take an objective look at some of the best features, and also where things still could use some help.


Pro: The Ribbon
I know I probably complained in some other post that I didn’t think the ribbon was going to work for me. But I actually really love it now. As soon as you understand how the ribbon works with the context of what you are working on (for example, document/library/page), it really makes working in the SharePoint framework so much easier. We are in the process of rolling out a public facing web site for one of our clients, and the training will be infinitely easier because of the Ribbon interface. Building pages is faster because of the accessibility of the tools. All in all, I do think this was a great move.

Pro: Document/Record Management capabilities
Another feature that I think has improved so much is the Document/Record Management aspect of SharePoint. Some of the best features: being able to more easily create and attach basic workflows, taking advantage of the Document Sets, and easily creating records libraries. It still has some scaling issues that are helped by third parties like StoragePoint for clients with very large file systems, but generally they made many steps to improve ECM capabilities, which will make SharePoint 2010 a more cost-effective, feasible solution for a number of businesses now.


Now for a few things that we still struggle with that you should know:

Con: Document Sets
Don’t get me wrong, the concept is great – routing series of docs together as a unit for approvals, setting content types. These are terrific features. I just wish they had taken it a few steps further. For instance, printing. I know we live in the digital age where we should be paperless, but let’s face it – there are still reasons/needs to print documents. And, one of the big reasons that people put documents together in a “set” is to produce a report. A “Print Document Set” would be incredibly helpful. Along these lines, having a way to easily sequence docs in a set would be helpful. A “Set” of documents should always be reviewed (or printed!) in a particular order. They should always be displayed/available in that order. Of course these things are possible with some custom code and tweaking, but I think they should have been considered for a feature like Document Set.


Con: Public Facing Web site Navigation
It’s true that thousands of “.com” sites are now built on SharePoint. And, in general, it’s not a bad platform. But the one issue that is particularly tricky is navigation. Most web sites you use have a top nav with some dropdowns – fine, that works great. But also for deeper content, there is a side navigation. The problem is, unless you keep nesting sub-sites within sub-sites, which is not the most scalable solution, you have to use pages. And there is no good way to control the sequence and hierarchy of these pages. So, we have to create additional controls and list management to deal with what is a fairly common problem. It’s certainly possible to do this (because we do on our own site and other sites we have built) but it seems like as SharePoint continues to be promoted as a web site content platform, this should be addressed within the product. Until then, we are happy to write code to accomplish this, but I think it’s worth a look.
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April 04
Going Mobile: Deciding between a Website and Application
by  McEnery, Beth  on 4/4/2011 2:39 PM

The mobile web has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks to smart phones like the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. This has incited many businesses to ask the question: should we develop a mobile website or a mobile application… or both? Some businesses are even taking this a step further and are asking how mobile technology can be leveraged in the enterprise to improve employee productivity and provide easy access to back office systems. 

Once the question has been answered: Should we go mobile? (and the answer most likely will be yes!), the next question is… how should we go mobile? This blog will discuss your customer-facing (public) mobile presence- be it a website or an application. Our next blog will discuss leveraging mobile technology within the enterprise.

Should we go Mobile?

mobile-chart2.png
Absolutely. According to research by mobile search experts Taptu, the mobile web is growing at an annual rate of 232%. Morgan Stanley analysts predict that users of the mobile web will surpass desktop users in just a few short years. Sooner or later your customers will be mobile, and you should be ready to meet their mobile needs. 
 

Website or Application?

This is certainly the question on everyone’s minds! The answer… depends on what you are trying to accomplish. It also depends upon who you ask, and there are many who believe you need to have both a mobile site and app, as they serve different purposes.

Website

If you want to control how your brand appears online, and give customers/potential customers an easy way to access information on the go- then you should have a mobile website. When it comes to your company website, optimizing the site for mobile access is an excellent first step. To ramp up quickly, some companies choose to make only their most critical/popular website content available for mobile access … and hide the rest from mobile devices in order to simplify the mobile user experience. Designing sites that are compatible cross-browser and cross-platform adds complexity in developing mobile websites. Here’s a great blog that goes into detail regarding technical considerations for mobile sites.
 

Application

Mobile_marketshare.jpgAn application is the best choice if you are providing something unique; for a specific benefit or service. Or if you have specific capabilities and features that are only possible in an application (i.e. camera integration, offline usage, etc.) But then of course the first question is- What device do you design the app for? Again, this can add another level of complexity and expense if you want to reach users across multiple platforms. With so many smart phone operating systems it’s difficult to know which one is best for your application. Android, iPhone, and Blackberry have nearly equal shares of the market… but recent data shows that Android is gaining momentum.   
 

Mobile Strategy

What are you hoping to accomplish? What value will you provide to customers? The goal and use of a mobile destination is the most important factor in deciding to develop a site vs. an application. Developing a mobile website may have a low barrier to entry, but will the site meet your customer’s needs? Other important considerations when it comes to a mobile strategy include cost, and of course platform if you decide to develop an application… If you only develop an iPhone app- will you alienate Android and Blackberry users? It will certainly be a challenge for organizations to cover all of their bases when it comes to “going mobile”, but having a mobile presence is quickly becoming an absolute must.
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April 04
Finding Closure: The Importance of Closing Projects
by  Partain, Arthur  on 4/4/2011 2:37 PM
In my last post, I discussed the importance of project chartering and how it will enable projects to get off to the right start. Chartering establishes management vision and aligns resources upfront to that vision. It can and will save time, budget and frustration.  I also discussed that a benefit of a charter can be realized after the project is over during project closure.  A project closure report puts the bow on the project by answering the following questions:

 

•
  • Did the project accomplish what was established in the charter?
​ •​
Were all agreed upon requirements delivered? 
​ •​
How did the project perform from a schedule and budget perspective?
​ •​
What was learned over the course of the project?

 

Given the above questions, Closure reports should not be rushed to completion immediately following deployment.  It is important to allow time for certain goals or objectives of the project to be realized and for proper reflection for those who will be contributing to the report.  As a guideline, Project Closure reports should be started after the project has gone live and will ideally be completed near the end of stabilization activities and the transition to ongoing maintenance and support. 
In general, Closure reports will contain the following sections:
 
•
  • Background and Executive Summary: Recaps the history and purpose of the project, significant developments or issues encountered that resulted in delays and adherence to time and budget estimates
​ •​
Highlights and Benefits: Lists project accomplishments
​ •​
Closure Summary - Best Practices/Lessons Learned:
​ ​
  o
   Articulates why the project can be closed​
​ ​   o​   Highlights any new best practice established through the course of the project​
​ ​   o​   Highlights lessons learned that can be leveraged by other projects​
​ •​ ​Goal/Metric Performance: Lists all goals and metrics established by the charter, their corresponding success criteria, and if they have been realized​
​ •​ Deliverable Performance: Lists charter deliverables and major requirements and if they were accomplished​
​ •​ Schedule Performance: Lists milestones and important dates and if they were met on schedule.  It may also detail any necessary corrective actions that were approved by the Steering Committee over the course of the project.​
​ •​ Budget Performance:  As established in the charter, the actual budget number vs. the charter budget estimate​
​ •​ Open tasks and issues: Lists any remaining open issues​
        
I’ve been on projects that have and have not taken the time to write a closure report.  In almost every instance where a closure report was written, it was a benefit to the organization and other projects as it enabled new ideas, processes or procedures.
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March 17
Using the Microsoft ASP.NET Authentication Provider with Silverlight
by  Metcalfe, Joshua  on 3/17/2011 11:10 AM

Recently, there was an MSDN Webcast that showed how to use the ASP.NET Authentication Provider that came out with .NET 2.0 with Silverlight Applications.

The main takeaways from this presentation are:

• 
  • Requires Silverlight 4.0 + RIA Server (along with Visual Studio 2010)
​ •​
The available VS2010 Templates are: Silverlight Business Application & Silverlight Navigation Application
​ •​
The Templates include pre-built Models, Views and Services for the ASP.NET Providers
​ •​
Instructions and demonstrations for how to use the Silverlight Application Templates


The webcast was done by Rich Dudley from ComponentOne, and can be viewed here.

A follow-up article with additional resources can be found here.

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February 11
The New Risetime.com and SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management
by  McEnery, Beth  on 2/11/2011 3:59 PM

We’ve all heard the old saying; “the cobbler's children have no shoes." Here at Risetime, we can certainly relate to that when it came to our website. While we worked on SharePoint sites for clients like Dollar General, McHenry County, and a slew of others, it was a challenge to make the time to work on our own. We decided to change that last year. With SharePoint 2010 receiving rave reviews from the tech community, we knew the time for a re-design, content updates, and platform upgrade was now.

 
If you haven’t visited the new Risetime.com, please take a look. We’re quite pleased with the results. Of course, we need to mention our design partner, Orbit Media for their contribution; we couldn’t have accomplished our re-design without them! If you’ve built a new website from the ground up, along with content creation and revisions, you understand how long and arduous the process can be. But, when it came time to load the copy, images, and video… it became apparent that SharePoint 2010 is vastly improved and provides a very similar authoring/editing experience to Microsoft Office.
 
In fact, when I was adding content to the new website, but still managing the old site- it was painfully obvious when switching back and forth between SharePoint 2007 and 2010 that the time to complete simple content updates was easily cut in half. I was no longer waiting minutes for the Content Editor to open or save. And, saving page drafts and publishing is easily accomplished right in the ribbon. Also, the more robust content editing tools provided in SharePoint 2010 make creating content much easier than before.
 
Features worth Mentioning:
 
Media Web Parts: So Much Easier to Use!
Inserting videos and customizing the look of player is a cinch with the new media web part. Check out one of our new videos featuring Risetime President, Steve Bunes.
 
media web part.jpg


Cool New Site Feature: Sorted Client Success Stories
Risetime client success stories are now presented in lists that are dynamic and quickly sortable, a feature we are very excited about. This was easily accomplished by creating custom columns in the SharePoint Pages library in order to quickly categorize the success stories.  These new columns created easy to use fields that allowed us to quickly include new stories in one or many categories.  The updated Content Query Web Part made pulling and displaying this information easier than ever, requiring no custom coding.
 
Still Room for Improvement: Blogging Capabilities
While the SharePoint 2010 blog is still not perfect, it is much improved over 2007. Again, content editing is quicker, more user friendly, and capable of incorporating multi-media content (video was particularly challenging in 2007). We contemplated switching to a different blog platform when implementing the new site because the SharePoint 2007 content editor was so difficult, but ultimately decided to remain with SharePoint so that our platform was consistent. The blog isn’t exactly what you would hope for out-of-the-box. There are some challenges with the layout of the landing page, and trackbacks remain an issue, so customization is still a must.
 
SharePoint 2010 is Making my Job Easier
If it’s not obvious by now… I am not a technical person. As Risetime’s Marketing Specialist, I’m responsible for maintaining our website… but my technical SharePoint knowledge is limited. Dave Schwantes, a SharePoint Developer here at Risetime, took care of setting up and customizing the site. But I think it’s important to say that from my perspective, the ongoing content updates and maintenance of Risetime.com will be accomplished much faster, now that we’re using SharePoint 2010.
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February 11
Avoiding Ready, Fire, Aim: The Importance of Project Chartering
by  Partain, Arthur  on 2/11/2011 3:25 PM

If you’ve ever been on a project that seems rudderless, lacks understanding across all levels, and finds people asking the question “Why are we doing this again?,” then a lack of a project charter may be one of the contributing factors.  The project charter establishes Senior Management vision upfront and is therefore an essential component to well run projects. In general, charters will contain the following sections:

• 
  • Initiative/Project Description
​ •​ Organization
​ •​ Project objectives and success criteria
​ •​ Deliverable timeframe estimates
​ •​ Budget projection
​ •​ Scope​
​ •​ Approach (Management, Development, etc.)​
​ •​ Risks​

 

Most importantly, it allows for initial alignment of resources of what, why, and, at a high level, how the project is to be accomplished.   Once established, the charter can be revisited in later stages of the project when questions of scope and direction arise. 

At times, when there is a major decision around the purchase of a product or a problem that needs to be addressed, pressure will mount for requirements sessions to start when all that is established is “we’ve got a problem and it needs to be fixed.”  Firing without aiming should be avoided, especially for major initiatives.  Chartering creates the proper lens across all involved parties (Business, IT, Marketing, Training, Stakeholders) that can prevent frustration and dissatisfaction as the project lifecycle progresses to requirements gathering, development and implementation. 

Early in my career, I was on a project that was put together to “fix the problem” and lacked proper planning and chartering.  Without clear direction, the team churned while trying to understand the overall goal of the project.  Another major problem was that depending on which Stakeholder you talked to, the vision would change.  A signed charter could have aligned Stakeholders and the project team from the beginning and therefore saved time, effort and budget.
 
In taking the time to create a project charter upfront, stakeholders and project management will ultimately save their initiative time and frustration and lay the foundation for a successful project.
 
Additionally, a key benefit of upfront project chartering can be realized once a project has been completed.  During project closure, the charter should be revisited to highlight accomplishments, lessons learned, and to determine if the project was a success when compared against charter objectives and success criteria.  I’ll discuss the benefits of closure in my next post.
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December 13
Risetime Partners, Microsoft and Open Text, Lead Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management
by  McEnery, Beth  on 12/13/2010 3:40 PM

The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has just been released. The report is published with the intent of assisting business and IT leaders in evaluating ECM solutions and vendors. Gartner carefully assesses each vendor’s current offerings and overall strategies, as well as their planned initiatives and product road maps.

Market Overview
In the report, Gartner explains that ECM is becoming as much an essential part of an enterprise information infrastructure as it is an investment in strategies, suites, and solutions.  This, combined with the continued evolution and maturation of the ECM market, has allowed for better role-based client interfaces, helping to drive user adoption and satisfaction. The power users have over content is important to note, because additional business benefits can be found when users contribute, describe, protect, find, and collaborate on information more effectively.

The Four Worlds of ECM
Gartner has identified the four main areas of focus in the ECM market:

1. Transactional Content Management: solutions focusing on imaging, workflow/business process management (BPM), compliance/archives, records management and e-forms.

2. Social Content Management: solutions focusing on document collaboration, workflow automation, social content such as Wiki’s, blogs, and videos.

3. Online Channel Optimization: web solutions focusing on web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), portals, electronic forms, web and content analytics, social content and collaboration.

4. Content Management as Infrastructure: The increasing practice of vendors embedding content management capabilities into their solution stacks. Microsoft SharePoint is an excellent example of an infrastructure platform that is suitable for a wide range of content management applications and has great potential to replace existing solutions.

Key Topics for ECM in 2011

Legacy Information Management: Enterprises are seeking to address their vast information stores and support compliance and legal discovery requirements.

Search and Content Analytics: Gartner suggests that enterprises can overcome the legacy content challenge by implementing search and content analytics applications.

Composite Content Applications (CCA) and Case Management Frameworks: Gartner uses the term CCA to describe frameworks and templates for specific business processes that are built on ECM or BPM platforms. It relates to both horizontal and vertical solutions where content, platforms, and processes are required to deliver value from them for the benefit of end users and business buyers.

Electronic Discovery: The legal implications for electronic information management are changing rapidly, and many enterprises will need to assess requirements and implement solutions to ensure compliance.

Shared Services and Alternative Delivery Models for ECM: Organizations will explore new methods of obtaining ECM capabilities, such as cloud-hosted, on-premises rental, outsourced management, and open-source software.

Content in the Cloud: Cloud computing is beginning to change the ECM market landscape, based on potential savings and technology benefits.

Microsoft and Open Text: Risetime Partners and ECM Leaders
Microsoft and Open Text were identified as leaders in the ECM market, identified by both industry-leading “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute”. Risetime delivers superior ECM solutions from both of these technology companies:

Microsoft
Gartner surveys show a high degree of market penetration for SharePoint, and this momentum is expected to continue with SharePoint 2010’s functional enhancements. Microsoft’s solution stack is positioned as the most widely used document and collaboration centered application platform.

Open Text
Open Text is the largest pure-play ECM vendor. Their relationships with SAP and Microsoft complement its strategic aim of providing an ECM suite that works within those vendors’ infrastructure and applications.

Risetime has helped many clients with both Microsoft and Open Text ECM solutions and services. To learn more, take a look at our ECM client success stories.

Source: Gartner Research. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management. 16 November 2010.

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November 02
Integrating ExtJS into an ASP.NET Web Application with WebForms 
by  McEnery, Beth  on 11/2/2010 10:55 AM

There are two approaches for integrating ExtJS into an ASP.NET WebForm.  ExtJS can be used both to ‘skin’ the ASP.NET form to enhance the style and functionality, and to create the user interface, replacing the one provided by the ASP.NET form.  While ‘skinning’ a WebForm does provide some functionality, such as enhancing an html table by turning it into an interactive ExtJS GridPanel, it does not address much of the functionality that would be required in an intranet application, such as editing the items in that grid.  Instead, the user interface should be created in ExtJS.

ExtJS is used to modify an existing web page, so when building an application, you must tell the controls where to place themselves in the page.  A common approach to full screen applications is to tell ExtJS to render your application to the ‘Body’ of the page.  When creating an ExtJS application that must fit within an existing company site’s styling and Master page, you can use a ‘Div’ tag with a distinct id as a placeholder for where you want your application rendered.
 
While it is possible to simply create an .html page to house your ExtJS application, it is usually better host it in a WebForm to provide control over what is being delivered to the user.  Since ExtJS runs on the browser, any security around accessing the page should be handled on the server, and the WebForm itself can be used to help control that and notify the user if they do not have access.  Similarly, accessing Session related information, such as localization settings, can be handled by the server to include the appropriate resources when needed.
 
While JavaScript and ExtJS are object oriented like .NET, the focus of development shifts to the interface and centers around custom and composite controls that build the screen.  While it is easy to build an entire application in a single file and define the interface in one large statement, this leads to performance and maintenance problems.  The best approach is to build the application in smaller components, or controls, each as their own class in their own file, and combine them together.  Instead of adding a GridPanel to your application and configuring it there, you should extend the GridPanel object to create your own custom Grid that knows what columns and data store it uses.  This not only allows you to easily reuse this object elsewhere, it also keeps all of the logic around this specific grid in a centralized location.
 
When creating a custom object, you begin by extending an existing object using the Ext.extend function.  The two main methods that you will be overriding will be the constructor and the initComponent methods.  These methods let you control the configuration of the component as it is being created and initialized.  This is also where you would define any child components that belong to this component.  To eliminate the need for global variables, you can define properties on the components themselves to store their data and references to their controls.  Instead of searching for a component on the screen by its ID, you store a reference to it on the parent object.
 
When creating your custom components, it is important to manage the dependencies between components to ensure their reusability.  It is a best practice that the parent should always know about its children, but that the children should never know about their parents or siblings.  This means that if a child control needs to notify its parent about an event, the child does not directly call the parent but instead fires an event that the parent listens to.  Similarly, if the child needs to notify a sibling, it should fire an event that the parent listens to, and then the parent should notify the appropriate child of what to do.
 
Instead of using the WebForms lifecycle to embed data in the initial page load and then return that data through a postback, it is more appropriate to use ExtJS’s AJAX functionality to allow the interface to directly communicate with the back end.  A common way to handle this communication is to use the Ext.data.Connection object to POST data and requests to a .NET Handler class (.ashx).  The ExtJS connection object allows you to both specify the URL address to call, along with any data to POST to the server.  The .NET Handler class acts as a simplified WebForm page (.aspx); there is no html markup or actual page that gets displayed, instead the handler class has a ProcessRequest method that processes the request and returns data back to the browser.
 
When creating the user interface in ExtJS, you lose the functionality of ASP.NET’s ViewState since you are no long using the WebForm to pass data to and from the browser.  Instead of persisting data in the ViewState, you pass the data back and forth using AJAX, and store it on the server.  While the handler class itself does not contain a ViewState, it does have full access to the Session object to store data in the SessionState.  One drawback to this approach is that all of your user’s pages use the same Session (each user has a single session within the application) so multiple copies of the same page can conflict with each other; this can be resolved having the ExtJS application identify itself either by providing an identifier of some kind (i.e.: the ID of the record being displayed/edited, or a uniquely generated ID tied specifically to the loaded page).
 
When transferring data between .NET and ExtJS (or JavaScript in general) it is important to keep the code in sync with each other and understand the boundaries between the two.  When translating an object from .NET to ExtJS using a JavaScript Serializer, any entity intelligence is lost and only a snapshot of the data is serialized.  This means that any ‘get’ accessors are executed during the serialization, and that ‘set’ accessors will not function on the serialized object (everything turns into a simple property).  While this means that your JavaScript objects will be unintelligent, it does make it easy to translate ID’s into Descriptions as the object is being serialized; a ‘get’ accessor that translates an ID into a Description in .NET will result in that Description being stored as a variable on the JavaScript object, with the same name as the ‘get’ accessor.
 
-Author, Rob Grillos
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