Project Management 2010 »

Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the future. Being an EPM Live partner we got to see the early scoop of their new 2010 project management solution called WorkEngine.

Sure, you’re a partner you will say, so you have to sell it whether you like it or not. Wrong. As an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) we seek to implement the very best 3rd party products for our clients and will not be limited to just one supplier. We do however make a strong selection of the ones which we want to offer in the first place. Being very enthusiastic of what I have seen so far I think it is mandatory for anyone related to project management to take a good look at this product.

Last year, EPM Live was being named the global Microsoft EPM Partner of the year for a fourth year in a row. This year, EPM Live has been introduced into the Gartner PPM Quadrant as one of the 25 best project solutions available. Next to that, the product has had the most new clients of all project solutions in 2009. Now these are some facts that count.

With their new concept of WorkEngine 2010 they have taken the product to a whole new level. The product has been built on top of the new Sharepoint 2010 platform and uses all capabilities, added with some nifty features of their own. With the 2007 version just being the full package, different product levels and solutions are available for the 2010 version so smaller companies can take advantage of the product as well.

WorkEngine 2010 also features the increasingly popular Agile Scrum methodology in one of their solutions, next to the standard waterfall / MS Project methodology. This is good news for software developers seeking to leverage this method to their advantage. A special solution for service calls / helpdesk is available as well and if you want you can tie it all together with shared resources. I suggest you just take a look at www.workengine.com to get a glimpse of the product.

Being the partner for the North European market we can’t wait to implement this product for our own organization. We already run on the 2007 version, but the 2010 version should make us even more efficient and effective. Our 50% projected growth in turnover this year is in no small part also the result of implementing this solution into our organization.

I am sure others will brag about the product in the coming months in high volume as well. Hopefully we have gained an advantage over competition at that point already, catapulting growth even further. Damn, I’m excited!

You can find out more about the product at www.workengine.com or ask me about it directly.

Related subjects: epm live sharepoint workengine 2010 project management scrum development management

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Websites aren’t what they used to be anymore… »

You remember the days? You made some HTML, let it run on Netscape and voila! You’re a tech wizard and people called it a website! Well, this example might be a little prehistoric for most people but this is how it went in 1997. I just completed my first course ‘How to do websites in 20 minutes’ at college.

Thirteen years later, developing websites and the standards it has to meet have changed quite a bit. Some for the good (CSS, CMS) and some for the bad (a jungle of different browsers and versions). When you’re having experienced web developers around getting the website right with CSS, CMS and all browsers is something that just requires a lot of work and code purism.

But how about the creative part? You also need to know your way around the latest Web 2.0, 3.0 or wherever it is going. Social media should be integrated anywhere and should blend within the website as if it was part of it. Twitter can feed messages, Flickr generate your photo gallery and Share provides a quick way to share any page with your friends. Also add jQuery for the nifty movements and interaction and maybe get Flash in when you have some real creative people there.

When you have implemented all those things mentioned above, people will definitly call it a website. It is a great web presence and show-off for your company. But now arises the biggest question of them all: “Does the website achieve the goals we set for it to do?”. Now that is a real mindbreaker when you really think about this.

Anno 2010 you just need a team to develop websites, the techniques and possibilities have become too much to handle on your own. You need a team of creative people, a designer, web developers, a great CMS to build upon (we prefer Umbraco and EPiServer) and… a project manager (and a PM method). It only took 13 years to get to this point. This makes you wonder how we will develop websites in 2023. If they still exist.

Related subjects: websites CMS development umbraco episerver

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Ayo… technology? »

Rapper 50 Cent (prenouce FIT-TY) actually was singing about CMS developers when he rapped his ‘Ayo Technology’ together. Eventually, Belgium was catching up when Milow graveyarded the song to some ballad, so I think most of you know it. ‘I’m really tired about using technology, I need you to sit in front of me’ is what they were singing and boy… they were right!

Having been around the .NET scene since its early days I have always been looking for a good deployment solution. First, there were those terrifying Windows deployments. Great one-time, but updating? DLL hell as the devs used to call it. Sure, I hear all you C++ and even-more-dinosaur devs ralley about the prehistoric days, but this felt real to us too.

Then, professional web and CMS development finally arrived. Yes, this was it! No more de-centralized deployment! Our dark days were over! Nope, they were just about to start.

As to this day, you can synchronize everything. And then I mean… everything! Just log onto my mobile phone and check the house, my friends across the globe, e-mail, blog posts, website, you name it. Everything is connected to each other everytime, everyplace.
You know what thing can’t be synchronized? Your enterprise all-important-live-sitting-can’t-go-wrong CMS. It relies on programmers to manually update their DTAP (Development Testing Acceptance Live) environment 3 times, sometimes even on different environments and expect nothing to go wrong. And did I mention we should use a pen and paper to register the changes? Or use (Sharepoint) lists for the more sophisticated and fortunate of us. That makes up for this formula:

CMS Deployment = (Developer + List + Testing)³

You could imagine it could become the same mess as the programmer’s desk, although a bug wouldn’t smell as bad as his peanut butter.

Hello! Any CMS publisher listening? The client doesn’t want peanut butter. He wants the topping on the cake. Better start creating that cooking material pretty soon then. And please, don’t forget the cookbook as well.

Related subjects: cms development .net deployment

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