Thoughts from Technovated

Busy with: review of development infrastructure and processes, code review, and development strategy for speed

I recently Tweeted: “Not doing #agile is like walking thru molasses with your hands behind your back, with blindfolds on, covered in treacle “. The context of this was an engagement where I’m essentially evaluating the software development processes within a business where the underlying need is to be robust, fast and agile.

Note they’re not all the same thing:
Robust is code that doesn’t break, is easily tested, scales well, and where collaboration is easy.
Fast is what it says on the tin, literally releasing new code fast and often.
Agile means being able to change direction, or make changes, quickly.

In my experience, Agile software development is the best way to enable the above - it’s a compromise between speed, collaboration and real results.

So with this engagement, the brief was to review everything (tools, processes, infrastructure, code) and to come up with a document that includes analysis and recommendations. My observation from this experience is that there is a fine line between agile development and chaos, but that this line gets thicker the more you invest in the right systems, processes, tools and infrastructure, which all enable and support doing *stuff* fast.

For example, in no particular order:

Testing is harder than it needs to be if there are no testing environments, unit tests, documentation of code, testing scripts, user outcomes (there are many examples, these are just a few)
It’s difficult to estimate and prioritise for business priority, when your list of items to work on is not prioritised or you don’t know what dependancies are
If you ask people to step outside of their comfort zones, more often than not you’ll be met with resistance. Use tools that make people comfortable
If it takes a long time or is difficult, to release a version of your software, then you’ll release less often and make more mistakes
If everyone understands the processes involved, you’re more likely to become more efficient. If those processes are changing or non-existent, efficiency is hard to gain.
If you’re going in the wrong direction, you don’t want to get there faster. If your code doesn’t support quick changes, you’re not going to be able to change direction quickly

The above are just some examples that were pertininent, so you should get the general idea.

My hope is that with the right motivation, we’ll fix the issues holding things back by setting up the right infrastructure and processes to support the business goals, and end up creating an environment that does indeed foster robust, fast, agile development.

Busy with: improving organic search engine traffic, and optimising the client site for more sales calls

Quick update: I’ve just spent the afternoon putting together the project approach for a client that has retained us to “make their web stuff work for them” after two bad experiences.

The previous company has left them in the lurch, and from what I can tell from reviewing everything, has left them with programmatically correct code, but not a holistic approach that touches the other elements necessary to make sales over the web. For example, the markup (client side code) used in the site executes the design well enough, but does not accommodate or take into account how search engines work, and most importantly fails on some user interface / usability fronts too. It’s not a product company that sells widgets, but one which relies on personal contact with a salesman to make revenue, but where the personal contact could be first initiated over the web.

If people can’t find you on the web, then whatever your site is, and however good it is, and however much it cost you, is nigh on useless. So these are things that we’re going to be working on - the objective is to improve the organic search funnel to get more people to the site without paying anything, and to increase conversion so that when people are on the site, it does what it is supposed to do. To coin another phrase to explain things, “we want our site to be like 3 salespeople”….

And so this is the high level project breakdown:

Setup infrastructure to work fast and make changes quickly
Move CRM system over to new server to remove old service provider dependancy
Setup Google Analytics and Google Adwords; make them efficient
Transfer previous (old) website search engine juice
Fix markup sitewide for organic SEO
Improve homepage usability and conversions
Move content from old website to new website
Setup blogging platforms for CEO and company
Setup social media funnels for engagement and credibility
Create content funnel sites for SEO, client education and acquisition

As you can see, the work varies from development, to online marketing, and with a bit of social media thrown in to make the client acquisition funnel wider.

I’m really enjoying working with a group of people that understand the importance (after a little education) of a holistic approach to what they do on the web, but more importantly the recognition that it is a process that needs to fit in with whatever is already there and is not something that can be rectified overnight (without a huge capital outlay).

The web is too much of an ecosystem now to ignore how people interact with different utilities (google, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube), and thus how they directly affect the number of visitors to your site. Making sure you optimise for the funnel (into the site), and the site itself (generally usability on the site) will stand you in good stead.

Another update: This has also now started encompassing social media and software as a service consulting and implementation -> “How do we use Twitter?” and “What’s this Google Calendar thing?”….

Enterprise adoption of web services takes a staep forward with “30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo”

Good to see an enterprise of this size adopting the web service / SaaS model.

Mode details here:
_ Official Google Blog: 30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo

This marks a significant moment for Google Apps, because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, making this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of Capgemini, one of the world’s most highly regarded technology advisory firms. This deployment across Valeo’s distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.

Hopefully this is something of a beachhead for web services as a whole…

Can Anyone Suggest a Good Open Source Email Ticketing System?

We’re getting overwhelmed by support requests from our latest project and are looking for an open source customer support solution, does anyone have any suggestions? The main functionality required is to be able to divert emails sent to a support address to a ticketing system.

We also need the following:

Allow emails from more than one account to be diverted to the system and converted into tickets which can be assigned to team members according to language.
Have predefined responses stored in a database which can easily be included as a basis for an email
Allow specific emails from specific accounts to be automatically assigned to individuals
Have various levels of importance for support requests
Should allow the creation of different groups with various role capabilities

If you have any suggestions or experience to share please let me know in the comments.

Update: we’re using eSupport

New features & improvements to kindo

We’ve been hard at work since we went live with Kindo, and yesterday did another major release which we’re really proud of…

Check it out, you should start to see the first signs of our social direction, which sets us apart from being “yet another genealogy application”… 11 Languages helps too…

_ Kindo - Some new features & improvements to kindo

The kindo team is very proud to announce that we have released a number of new features which we hope will improve our users’ experience.

Firstly, we have added 3 new languages, namely Russian, Turkish & Brazilian Portuguese, which now brings the tally to 11.

Our family

Secondly, we have added a brand new page called “Our family”, where you can view the latest updates from all of your active family members. It also has a section with family statistics, so you will be able to see some interesting facts about your tree – the more data the better, so start updating those profiles

How to use Kindo

Check it out, something nice to watch on Google Video:

_ http://video.google.com/

From:
http://blog.kindo.com/

No more Beta - Kindo is born today!

Right now there are lots of proud moms and pops here at our Putney offices! Today we’ve just released our first public version of Kindo [kindo.com], along with some nice improvements to our baby:

Pruning is better (and you can use your keyboard to move your family tree around)
Invitations are smoother (and we’re playing nicer with Hotmail)
Your profile page has more information for your family (more status updates, and a better calendar)

Since we’re no longer in “beta”, you can be sure that your tree and pages will work as expected. So continue to build your beautiful trees, and share it with your whole family. And tell your friends to start their own tree too!

We feel we’re far from the finished article - Kindo will grow up, evolve, and get bigger and better all the time. We’ve launched a new Kindo forum [http://forum.kindo.com] too, which is a good place to ask questions if you need any help. Please tell us what you do and don’t like about Kindo, and also tell us how you want it to grow too!

Bye for now!

New release on Kindo Beta today!

Sometimes there’s nothing better than some positive feedback from people you love, and in the case of Kindo it’s no different. This afternoon I sent out an email to my folks to let them know that we’d done another release, and they could check it out, and this is the response I got from my Dad:
“Hi Gareth,
Mom and I had a look very good, much easier and better to use I will now send to other relations…
Love
Dad & Mom”

Somehow, that short email the way only my Dad writes emails, makes it feel really good to get this release done. I don’t want to sound mushy, but hey, that’s the way I feel.

We’ve been working hard on Kindo for a while now, and whilst at times it’s felt like the light at the end of the tunnel was far away, today we’ve taken another step closer to a Public release of Kindo we can be proud of.

So, onto the meat and potatoes. Some of the stuff we’ve added to Beta:

A profile page, so you can keep track of what your family is up to (and remember their birthdays and anniversaries)
Invitation pages, so you can re-invite those family members who are too lazy to respond right away
Pruning, so you can see who’s who in your tree. We’ll only show your blood-relatives, which makes the tree so much easier to navigate

Let us know what you think please!

What’s next for the Kindo Family?

Over the last month or so, our number one priority has been to release Kindo to friends, family, and early adopters (these were our Alpha and Beta releases) so that we could get as much feedback as possible to make Kindo into something people love to you use.

So far we’ve received great feedback, but there’s still loads to do!

At the moment we’re tying up some bugfixes and user interface improvements for another interim release (thanks to everyone for their feedback!), whilst working on some major new additions to Kindo, which will bring:

pruning to your tree (to simplify you will only see blood relatives - think pruning a rosebush
a full profile page for each family member
the ability to invite your whole family from one page, or to remind family members to join Kindo!

Once we’ve done that, there are some really cool features in the pipeline which we’re not gonna talk too much about now

In the meantime, we’d love to hear more from you:

What do you want to see on Kindo?
What is missing from Kindo?
What improvements could be made with the interface?

More soon…

Kindo releases a private beta

The team at Technovated has been working very diligently for the past few months to get a new application off the ground. Its called Kindo and we have finally released a private beta which is open to invitees only. If you would like to get onto the beta testers list, then submit your email address via the form on www.kindo.com.

We have also released a new blog on blog.kindo.com, so if you would like to keep up to date with our latest news, then please visit it. Comments are more than welcome

Here are some snippets from two interesting posts on the Kindo blog

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/08/02/some-technical-details/en/

We’re having fun building the Kindo application and used a number of frameworks and components to achieve the finished result.

For the web framework we’re using Seagull which offers excellent integration with Flash through the AMF PHP request handling and easy integration with Ajax and Graphviz. For the Ajax interactions we use jquery exclusively, for Graphviz a heavily extended version of the PEAR lib of the same name. Working with the dot language has been interesting and a good opportunity to experiment with the subtleties of a genealogy graph.

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/09/04/welcome-to-the-beta-release/en/

A little while ago we released an Alpha to a small group of people, to gather valuable user feedback. Thanks to those great people, we’ve had our heads down improving Kindo, and as a result we’re releasing the Beta, and at the same time opening it up to a wider audience for more feedback.