I really liked Angus’ recent post on User Stories (Wikipedia link about User Stories here) and how he grapples with question of whether they are even needed. User Stories feature prominently in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 releases, so you’re sure to hear more about them (in the Microsoft space that is). The value in Angus’ post is how he outlines the issues (and thoughts from a variety...
One of the mistakes I made when I started at Elcom was in thinking we were just a web company. You know, web sites and not much else. But as I quickly learned, we’re also in the business of intranets – in fact we’ve been building significant Intranets for clients for a while now. Turns out I wasn’t alone in my thinking – many people assume we are just focussed on web sites. It’s...
Last week, following probably the worst IT downturn in the last 8 years I decided to leave Elcom. Crazy huh? Yeah, it may turn out to be foolish, but in this post I aim to explain why, and in the following post, what I‘m looking for as my next step. I thought I’d put this out there and see if it opens the door to any opportunities. Have I resigned? No I haven’t actually resigned as...
Product good. Marketing… not so good It’s been an interesting exercise thinking about marketing at Elcom over the last few months. In my opinion (biased as I am) I think we have an excellent product. However, something we haven’t been very good at is the marketing side of things. Often people have heard of us, but they don’t really know what we do. We mention that we have a content...
The links between Atlassian and Microsoft Office grow stronger with Atlassian’s latest Connector between Confluence (their Wiki product) and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this case the Connector allows content on the Confluence Wiki to be imported, edited and updated from Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Check out the super simple 3 and half minute video to gain a good understanding. The...
The Techies at Elcom completely reformatted my machine a few weeks back and installed Vista 64bit. This has been great because I can now access all 4GB of RAM (woo hoo!). But there’s been another unexpected benefit… It turns out that there’s no printer drivers for our Elcom printers that work on Vista 64. So, for the last 4 weeks I’ve been unable to print anything...
We’re launching a new product this week. This Thursday morning to be exact. You may know that Elcom, where I work, is a web company that builds products for medium to large companies. We do intranets, extranets, portals, web sites, etc. Plus we do a fair bit of customisation. Over the last few months we’ve been turning things around a little and ‘productizing’ our custom...
I’m heading home from the US of A today, which sees me arrive back in Sydney (hopefully) on Thursday morning 24 April. CodeCampOz The next day I head down to Wagga for CodeCampOz. That finishes up on Sunday (27 April) and I fly back to Sydney that night. Elcom On Monday I’m back in the office, ready to start spreading the good news to the team (within NDA guidelines of course –...
Brad Marsh has a few screenshots of our upgrade experience from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to 4.0 Summary: it went extremely well. My comment: CRM 4.0 seems to be slower than 3.0 but since it’s running on an old server, it was expected (new server infrastructure coming in the next few weeks – Yay!). Overall, no real problems. Our CRM scenario is pretty standard with only a few customizations...
We've done a little more testing of our product on the Microsoft 2008 stack and I'm pleased (and a little worried) with the results. The pleasing part: we are now showing results on the 2008 stack as being 16X faster than the 2003/2005 stack. The worrying part: results of 16X faster are very high – what if we've tested something incorrectly… So, the goal of this post is to...