For over 25 years, Scott McGregor has been designing innovative software products and services widely recognized for their ease of use. Some of these inventions are described below.
Mobile Everywhere
McGregor developed the business model and specifications for a system that would simplify maintaining secure connections for mobile workers across heterogeneous networks. Without this system, users lose connectivity to their open applications any time they switch networks or momentarily lose connectivity. The system maintains the connection while the user is temporarily connected and allows the device to actually switch to different networks (WiFi, Cellular, LAN, DSL, Cable, and Dial up) without restarting remote applications and with no loss of data during dead spots.
In addition, the system provides for end to end security regardless of whether the underlying network is insecure. The result is a system that provides the same experience, at the office, at home, on the road, without the user having to remember location specific login, set up or VPN information. The system even makes wired office LANs more secure since all users participate in a Virtual Enterprise Network of only registered devices. If a rogue access point or foreign device connects to the wired network, the unregistered devices will still not be able to access the secure network. The solution is fielded as a service so that small and medium size IT departments can adopt it without need to master any new technologies.
TailWind FieldSpace
Tailwind Solutions developed a product to support document management for mobile workers in occasionally connected environments such as hospitals or remote field forces. Using his SWIFT development method, McGregor developed stakeholder analyses, including goals, tasks, and recommended product design changes to improve ease of learning, ease of adoption and ease of use. In addition, McGregor developed stage and stand alone video demonstrations that illustrated the product in action while demonstrating a sample use case in the Health care and Clinical Trials industry. This demonstration debuted at DEMO 2004 and gained positive attention at Mobiletrax Showcase in 2004.
ImmuNET
ImmuNET is an innovative real time patent pending network security solution conceived by McGregor. Signature based virus and worm detection can only recognize attacks for which signatures have already been developed and installed -- and in any case, the network bandwidth between the threatening packet's insertion to the network and the target system has been wasted. Indeed, the virus may be sitting in quarantine wasting space in the target system's disk.
But as the number, frequency and virulence of worms and viruses grow, so have concerns about Day Zero attacks, where large numbers of machines are attacked before the threat is recognized and signatures are developed. To address this possibility, Intrusion Detection Systems have been created that support anomaly detection, in addition to known signatures. These anomaly detection systems have the potential to recognize new previously unrecognized threats. But they also are subject to misidentification of unusual traffic that are not worms or viruses. These false alarms are so frequent they undermine the value of anomaly detection for most users.
ImmuNET provides a way to detect the true threats out of the background of false alarms. It does this by aggregating information, in a confidential way, among many independent intrusion sensors around the network. Valid, but unusual, traffic at one subscriber is not likely to occur at an independent subscriber at roughly the same time. So those alarms won't correlate. But because worms and viruses do spread across independent organizations in an easy to recognize exponential pattern, these correlations are found quickly and the true threats are identified, and are reported to ALL ImmuNET subscribers. The correlation pattern that allow the common packets to be recognized is used to create an automated signature that can be disseminated to all subscribers and thereby immunize them against these novel threats.
HP Internet and the High Performance Engineering Computing Environment
As Hewlett Packard Corporate Computing Center Productivity Manager from 1980-1987, McGregor led numerous interdivisional project teams to develop custom software that gave engineers transparent access to departmental servers, corporate mainframes and even supercomputers from their desktops workstations. Implementing custom network file services, X Window based client and server applications for major engineering applications and custom front ends which sized jobs based on computation effort and data sizes, the HP High Performance Engineering Computing environment ensured that computation was automatically migrated to the most appropriate computation server while all interaction remained local. The effort included deploying the first large scale private corporate TCP/IP intranet, using the very first servers from newly formed Cisco Systems and connected by broadband cable, microwave, satellite, dedicated land lines, and dial up services. The effort also included email and net news gateways, connecting engineering UNIX and VAX systems with other corporate systems on IBM and HP proprietary architectures.
SeeItFirst Mobility
Devised initially for Toyota in Japan in 2003, SeeItFirst Mobility enabled a field repair technician to take a video camera into the field to enable video collaboration with a master mechanic at a central service location. The system operated over cellular bandwidths. Because of the limited bandwidth, the design used an innovative patented solution which allowed moderate resolution video to be sent at the highest bandwidth, but allowed the remote viewer to get the maximum resolution "stop photos" of any frame received. The combination of video for viewing motion, and stills for diagnosing specific problems proved more useful than either capability alone.
PlaceWare Conference Center (now Microsoft Live Office)
PlaceWare was built on several collaborative technologies taken from Xerox PARC, but the company's initial product delivered only toolkit functionality. Between 1998 and 2000, McGregor specified sets of related capabilities and devised the PlaceWare Web Conferencing system (which is now Microsoft Live Office) which became the company's new product line. The design divided functionality into separate room metaphors: "Auditoriums" for Structured Presenter led presentations, and "Meeting Rooms" for Unstructured Round Table Interactions among all participants. Only the relevant functions were presented for each use case, resulting in easy to learn and easy to use interfaces that were quickly adopted. Not only did this lead to quick adoption, but the basic user interface is largely unchanged from the initial design even 6 years later.
The design also introduced several other key innovations, including a "quick start" interface that seemed to provide "instant on" entrance into a presentation -- even though at low bandwidths it might actually be several minutes before all the functionality had been downloaded. Previous designs had required the entire application download to be complete before attendance could commence.
Another innovation was the creation of the patent pending pre-configuration testing and the Red, Yellow, Green displays. The entire user environment including networking firewalls, browser versions and settings and client Operating System were surveyed at start-up time to determine whether a successful web conference was possible. If a setting was known to prevent success, the application displays a stop sign and lists the specific steps necessary to change the setting to a preferred alternative known to work.
If a configuration is not preferred, but not known to prevent the system from working, a yellow caution display describes the changes that could be made to improve the likelihood of a good user experience, and then the user may proceed with or without making changes.
If a configuration is known to work well, a green Go sign is displayed and the system automatically proceeds to loading the conferencing application.
Kairos Sales Gear
Sales Gear supported sales representatives giving up to date Power Point sales presentations in the field. The system featured an automated synchronization system which would upload the latest changes to corporate presentations whenever the sales representatives were connected.
Teknowledge Briefing Associate
In 1995 McGregor began designing the Briefing Associate for DARPA. The Briefing Associate appears to be the world's first Web conferencing system. This system was designed to support military and emergency response briefings, both to live audiences of senior officials and remotely over the web to field personnel (both live, and offline at a later time). The system incorporated multimedia and also a speech recognition system that kept the media displayed in synchrony with the topics the briefer was discussing. This greatly simplified problems of handling different kinds of media during a presentation and allowed the briefer to focus on questions from dignitaries not on mechanical aspects of presentation. The ability to allow field personnel to attend briefings without travel contributed to quicker response and better intelligence concerning field conditions.
Consumer-Oriented Web services
My Appointment Life Guide
My Appointment Life Guide facilitates event scheduling in Personal Information Manager programs such as Outlook, Yahoo Calendar and PDAs, by developing highly relevant recommendations for venues, events, artists and activities, based on date, time, location, the user's past preferences and those of affinity groups. The system includes video trailers and is designed to be paid for by advertising sponsorship.
SocialNet
SocialNet was initially designed to be an online data service and later branched out to include business networking and activity partnering services. McGregor helped to redesign the user interface for greater ease of use.
Real Communities
Real Communities provided software products for constructing and managing community based web sites, such as Women.Com. McGregor led design of the user interface for a product line which facitated the creating of a web based scaffold in which content was added and in which discussion threads were managed
Intelligent Agent Systems
Teknowledge Sales Associate
The 1996 Sales Associate was one of the first e-commerce products designed to unite Web based user interfaces with a database of in stock products, combined with an Artificial Intelligence Rule Based Expert System Agent which could advise the user on complex purchase decisions. The initial system was designed to designed to offer advice and recommendations to visitors of a large on-line wine retailer. The system would use information from the user concerning preferred past selections, taste and aroma descriptions, and especially meal ingredients to recommend a selection of wines. Within the selection lists generated, list order, headlines, and images could be adjusted to promote specific recommendations based on promotions, stock on hand, dealer profit or other considerations.
HP "MindShare" Prescient Agents
Widely recognized in 1990 as one of the first and most innovative "adaptive agent" user interfaces, the MindShare project received the name "Prescient Agents" from members of the press who were surprised that the system seemed to know what they were going to do before they themselves knew what they were going to do. The system watched which documents a user viewed at or about the same time, and derived associative links. These links were automatically populated into a "Links" menu item added to every window, and facilitated users finding all related documents to any document they were viewing.
Analytical Solutions
Data Digest Business Navigator (now FasterAnalytics from DecisionQ)
Business Navigator was designed to provide non statisticians with an easy to use intuitive tool which could take any database, spreadsheet or table and with no further preparation determine the predictive relationship among all the variables in the table using a Bayes Net analytical engine. Designed in 2000-2001, the user interface shows the variables as nodes, and predictive relationships as arcs in a node and arc schematic. Within each node is a histogram of all the values of the variables. Clicking on any variable allows you to limit your current view to any particular value or values. Instantaneously the histograms of all other variables are updated to show the predicted distributions under those specified conditions.
HP "Data Snuffler"
The Data Snuffler was a custom Executive Information System designed for a senior executive at Hewlett-Packard. This system allowed the user to specify any table of data or even combine tables, and then select variables to be displayed. The user would then pick among many different graphical formats and the data would be appropriately rendered.
Coordination, Collaboration and Control Systems
Prescient Software MergeRight (licensed to Lucent, Continuus, Tandem, HP, Lockheed, Loral and others)
MergeRight (initially called Merge Ahead) won a cover notice at its debut for its simplicity and ease of use -- unusually characteristics in version 1.0 software products in the Unix marketplace in 1992. The program focused on reducing the cognitive load on people trying to merge changes from multiple parallel mark-ups of a common document. An innovative "color matching" interface helped to overcome a common problem of many symbolic interface systems in which users inadvertently re-add a section that was previously intentionally deleted. This avoided a common source of software bugs being re-introduced late in the release cycle.
HP SRC Software Configuration Management system and Release Management System
in 1997-1990, developed a series of configuration management systems that facilitated parallel development of software among geographically distributed software engineering teams. These products were fielded initially for internal use and were subsequently commercialized at the HP SRC product line.
Deloitte & Touche Course Registration System
CPA need to get continuing education on a regular schedule to maintain their certification. To facilitate such training, in 1976, McGregor adapted models from the newly computerized Airline ticketing and Rental car reservation systems to create a system for Deloitte & Touche that generated custom lists of available courses, delivered to accounting professionals' offices by telex. An interactive system allowed accountants to sign up for or alter course registrations, including room, flight and car reservations for the course site.