Marketing + Advertising = Godzilla Part 2

Back to that meeting with the Advertising + Marketing dudes.

The main reason this meeting was happening was to nut out the nitty-gritty detail of a webservice interface between Them and Us.

It was a reasonably easy security thing:

1. Our site produces an iFrame with src=w.Them.com?Token=ABCDEF&ReplyTo=www.Us.com/Webservice.asmx
2. Their site calls w.Us.Com/WebService.asmx/GetStuff?Token=ABCDEF to retrieve some Stuff to integrate with Other Stuff they need to display.
3. They generate the page and serve it up inside the iFrame.

(BTW this is firewalled so theoretically no-one else can access Our webservice)

It was Their responsibility to write the spec document for this interface. I could see Mr Sideways Notepad was really struggling with the whole Token and webservice concept ("But we'll just display the Stuff in the iFrame"), but the Bright Young Coder was nodding enthusiastically and even asked some useful questions.

Meeting ends with a little frustration on my part, but Bright Young Coder and I - I thought, had an understanding. Mr Sideways Notepad was bipolar -- glum because he'd finished his latte, but happy because he'd drawn some really beautiful boxes and arrows with his 2B pencil.

I learned something that day. Bring crayons and butcher's paper for Marketing and Advertising to play with in the corner, while the real work can happen uninterrupted.