SilverStripe.com Blog

Part 3: Q&A with Developer Mateusz Udowski

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:09:22 +1300

After talking to Sam and Alex, the final post in my series about SilverStripe’s adoption of Agile and Scrum, will be a conversation with developer Mateusz Udowski.

We will talk about how the changes have affected him and why he thinks SilverStripe is now more intelligent as a whole than it was before.

Mateusz, what was the most interesting thing that happened during the change? What was the most surprising?

I was expecting we would have problems with completing less exciting tasks such as testing, but that didn’t happen. Shifting the responsibility from individuals to the group gave space for everyone to work efficiently.

Also, we needed some structure and after we started working as a team we began to collaborate and everything seemed to fall into place. I think the main reason for our success was that the team members regarded each other as peers.

What's different now?

The biggest change is that there is no penalty for helping each other out anymore. The budget is relevant on the team level, but not on individual level, which means we can share problems and solutions.

One can clearly see what to work on now, and what needs to be worked on next. Tasks and impediments are clearly visible and are not being swept under the carpet.

Reducing the size of the team from 40 (whole company interacting semi-randomly) to 7 (Scrum team) makes it easier to work together, mainly because we get the chance to learn about and respect each others’ strengths, weaknesses and habits.

What is your day like now versus before?

Less stressful. It's possible to get more work done because we can focus on tasks and clearly see at any moment where we are in the sprint and in the project.

Folk wisdom has it that when you force a person's brain to focus on many things in parallel, their IQ falls considerably, and that's how it feels now - less chaotic, more intelligent.

What are you more more confident about now?

It's easier now to apply creative solutions and "refactor fearlessly". We have shifted from delivering at all costs to delivering high quality products up to capacity. Peer reviews, test coverages and testing by many people all contribute here.

It is possible to enhance how the team works both technically and from a process perspective. We can now build on top of what we have achieved in previous iterations because there is a "we" - a stable team.

What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn?

Not to tell people what to do and how to do it. It never worked well anyway. The other important ability is to be able to discern when is the time to say "no" to factors that would break the Scrum process.

How do you think you benefitted from working with a coach?

I've seen many of these Agile elements previously in different combinations and contexts, but never all put together.

A good coach will give you the confidence to apply all these principles now, immediately, and to a achieve good result. Otherwise we would probably be stuck in the step-by-step approach which would stop halfway through and ultimately fail.

Pointing out the future possibilities is also helpful, showing that it's not the end of the road.

What's been in it for you?

There is more room for error and to try things out, hence more is possible. Short feedback loops and peer reviews provide a platform for learning and a cushion for failure.

Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others?

Yep, without hesitation.

This has been an interesting and valuable coaching experience for me. I know that Silverstripe will reach new levels of excellence through Agile and Scrum and their commitment to team work.

I am proud to have been able to contribute to their success and to have been part of SilverStripe’s journey.

I wish you all the best and look forward to seeing more great results in 2012.

Part 2: Q&A with Scrum Master and Project Manager Aleksandra Brewer

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:09:22 +1300

This is part two of my three-part interview series about the adoption of Agile and Scrum at SilverStripe.

Last week’s interviewee was SilverStripe’s CEO Sam Minnée, and today I will talk to Scrum Master and Project Manager Aleksandra Brewer. Alex works with one of the Agile teams at SilverStripe and has likened working with me with a visit to the dentist.

Alex, what was the most surprising thing that happened during the transition?

Some of the surprising (although maybe obvious) things were that (1) it's possible for more than one person to work on the same user story, (2) work goes faster when people collaborate, (3) sprint planning that results in greater understanding of stories and tasks necessary to complete them really speeds up the work during the sprint - everyone knows what needs to be done and can pick up a simple task and complete it.

What's different now?

I love being able to see the day to day progress of the team - it's so visible on the board, plus the work seems to be going faster, with several people going through small tasks all the time. With the acceptance criteria being defined and discussed before the start of a sprint, and with the Product Owner being available to answer any additional questions and provide feedback throughout the sprint, there is virtually no possibility for any team member to go off on a tangent.

What are you more confident about now?

Talking to clients is easier now, as they are much more involved and ultimately responsible for making decisions about priorities. We (the team) make recommendations, share our knowledge and inform the client about pros, cons and consequences of the different options, but in the end it's up to them to make a final decision.

All along the course of a project clients know exactly where we're at, what's being built, etc., which they love. The transparency of Scrum, although scary at the beginning, is really beneficial for both the team and clients.

What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn?

The hardest thing to learn was to give up the control over what the individual team members were doing from day to day.

How do you think you benefitted from working with a coach?

Working with you has been a bit like going to the dentist - painful at times, but all along I knew it was good for me, and I'm in better shape now than I was before. It's been good to have you keep us on track, and point out things that now seem obvious, and yet were not at first.

Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others?

Definitely. I couldn't imagine going back to the old ways, negotiating "resourcing" among Project Managers, developers being on several different projects at the same time, and not knowing when a project would end because of the uncertainty of developer availability.

Part 1: Q&A with CEO Sam Minnée about Agile at SilverStripe

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:25:45 +1300

Guest blogger Sandy Mamoli is one of NZ's leading Agile advocates, a Certified Scrum Master and became New Zealand's first Certified Scrum Practitioner in October 2007.

One of her major Agile initiatives was working on Sony Ericsson’s global enterprise website. She has also worked with organisations such as the BNZ (Bank of New Zealand), the ACC (Accident Compensation Company), NZ On Screen, the National Library of New Zealand and Snapper.

Currently she is working as an independent Agile Coach helping organisations become passionate about Agile and Lean principles and methods, and to be as Agile as they possibly can and want to be.

When SilverStripe approached me to help them take their Agile implementation to the next level, I was excited about the opportunity to work with this local Wellington business with employees from a wealth of different countries.

SilverStripe wanted to improve the way in which they deliver client projects, increase employee happiness and, in general, just do the best possible job. To achieve this, we decided to move away from the existing Agile-like approach and introduce Scrum, with its focus on client-driven iterations, early feedback and continuous improvement.

During the past six months I have been working with sales, management and delivery teams to help SilverStripe adopt Scrum right across the organisation, and to make it the core of everything they do.

In this three-part series, I will interview the CEO, a Scrum Master and a Developer. We’ll talk about their experiences including the biggest surprises, differences, and how they found the changes working out for them.

Today’s conversation is with SilverStripe’s CEO Sam Minnée.

Sam, what was the main thing you wanted to achieve? Did you achieve it?

Although SilverStripe has favoured an Agile approach over waterfall methods for some time, we wanted to introduce more structure around our development and project management processes. As we are now successfully running the bulk of our work with Scrum, I would say that we have achieved it.

What is different now?

Prior to the change, we had a different set of people for each project. Everyone would work with several different groups of people on several different projects. This made it easier to find resources for projects, but it was subtly killing the team's sense of ownership of a project's success. Despite it being painful (many people had to be moved onto new projects and be taken off old ones) we made the decision to re-shape our developers, designers, and PMs into four consistent delivery teams, that collectively work on all the projects assigned to them.

Now developers and designers are much more invested in the big picture of the work they do - it's not all up to PM’s anymore.

What are you more confident about now?

Teams have a much more accurate picture of a realistic amount of work, and so I'm more confident about our capacity.

Why did you choose to engage outside help and how do you think you benefited from working with a coach?

In short, we wanted a fresh perspective. We could read books about Scrum or send staff on training courses, but this would have only gone so far. It was difficult for the SilverStripe team to see outside of the way we run projects, and it's easy to say "oh, that's a nice idea, but it would never work in practice", when challenged to make more dramatic changes.

Sandy has helped introduce Scrum and other Agile techniques and principles to many different organisations and was able to provide assurance that we weren't going to go down an unrealistic path. The result was that we could confidently make more dramatic changes to the way we run our business.

What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn?

The biggest lesson was that a change in attitude is more important than the process. The process is designed to encourage the emergence of correct attitudes. One major shift for us was the notion of delivering production-quality software at the end of every Sprint. It is very easy to fall into the trap of leaving polish and testing for a "stabilisation phase" at the end of the project, or to enter into a massive piece of work that, like a jigsaw, is completely useless until the last piece is put in place. It didn't really seem like that big of a deal to us, but it subverts the whole process. At its core, Agile is about accepting that things aren't going to go to plan, and constantly being in a position to launch with what you have. Requiring a stabilisation phase or leaving mandatory features until the end mean that you introduce the risk that you are leaving a show-stopper dormant until then.

Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others?

Yes, I would. I strongly believe that Agile techniques are much more likely to result in a successful project than traditional waterfall techniques. However, I would caution people not to assume that it will be a quick fix or a change limited to the development team. In particular, stakeholders need to find new ways to manage the risks associated with engaging in a software development project; you cannot expect that provided a detailed specification, a fixed timeframe and budget can be adhered to. It would be great if that worked, but projects approached in this way frequently fail. Instead, a team needs to keep focused on finding out the best way of meeting the project's high level business drivers within the project's constraints, as unexpected issues arise. That way you can ensure that business goals are met within the necessary timeframes and budgets.

In part two, I will talk to Scrum Master Aleksandra Brewer who works with one of the Agile teams at SilverStripe.

Happy New Year from SilverStripe

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:45:37 +1300

2011 was an exciting year for us. As well as launching websites such as www.aa.co.nz, www.plunket.org.nz and www.yha.co.nz, we made a lot of progress on SilverStripe 3 and have now released the alpha 2 version for our developer community to test.

Our ongoing mission is to find better ways of using the web to help make our clients better. Our open source CMS is a big part of this, but we have also been investigating the way in which we work. To that end, we have been working with agile consultant Sandy Mamoli, and we are successfully using Scrum to deliver our web projects.

2012 promises to be even better. Although I can't give the game away too much, there are a couple of things that I am particularly looking forward to this year:

We're launching SilverStripe 3, a massive step forward for our CMS and Framework

We're expanding our Auckland offices

Here's to another year of using the web to make our corner of the world a better place!

Sam Minnée
CEO

Merry Christmas from SilverStripe

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:48:24 +1300

While much of the world is about to celebrate time off with family and friends with snow falling outside, for us in New Zealand and Australia the festive season is the height of summer, the time for beach parties and barbecues in our back yards. We'd like to thank all our customers, supporters, and our open source community for helping to make 2011 a wonderful year for us.

Our office shuts down today and reopens fully on Monday 9 January. We look forward to working with you to do awesome stuff on the web in 2012, through great work and with the exciting release of SilverStripe 3.0.

Ministry of Science and Innovation shows innovation on the web

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1300

When the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MSI) is looking for a web presence, it has to be something extraordinary. MSI is a new government agency driving science and innovation to increase New Zealand's economic, environmental and social performance. It does this through its strategic leadership and by partnering with the science and innovation sector and through the networks it builds across government, research organisations, business and industry.

In saying that, it seemed almost a natural step that MSI would use world wide celebrated, local, open source CMS SilverStripe to build their website. Our team at SilverStripe Ltd., the company behind the open source suite, built the site and found the collaboration with MSI to be a good match in terms of culture and philosophy.

MSI has a goal to connect all players in the science and innovation ecosystem. It also provides research and development funding to grow export focused companies who can compete globally. Accordingly, the goal of the website was to explain in an easy to understand way what MSI is about, and how people can access funding.

The NZ government is generally very open about what they spend tax payers money on and is proud of the results of its investments. Based on this philosophy, the MSI website was also created to provide information on who received what, how much funding was provided from MSI and to showcase the results through case studies.

With this in mind, there was a lot of content to go into one website; 273 pages and sub pages, and thousands of pages with funding records. SilverStripe then faced the challenge of presenting all of this information in a user friendly and helpful way.

The solution is a clean and fresh design that is focused on clear communication and usability. Different sections for different audiences create a well sorted and easy to navigate content overview, and an advanced and customised search function makes it easy to search the funding database.

Simple and easy to follow HTML5 info graphics illustrate the New Zealand science and innovation landscape and provide an engaging and fun way to learn new things. The info graphics are editable in the back-end and even work on an iPad.

The promotional tiles that structure the content can be updated entirely on the fly, with photos and text linking to any page on the site. If the user wants to share the content, they can click on any of the provided Twitter or Facebook icons and share the content via their accounts.

The project wasn’t all smooth sailing, as SilverStripe faced a few challenges along the way. Julian Meadow, Project Manager at SilverStripe explains the biggest challenge: “The info graphics needed to be created in HTML5 in order to support the iPad. But a lot of desktop users visit the site with IE7, which doesn’t support HTML5. It was a challenge to find a work around for this issue, but in the end we mastered it.”

In terms of design, SilverStripe partnered with MSI design agency Ocean Design, who delivered the MSI basic brand rules and elements. Based on these guidelines, our Creative Director Felipe Skorski created the website framework and design.

The new website msi.govt.nz is a beautiful and very informative website that demonstrates that government work is anything but boring.

We are proud of the work we did. What do you think? Check it out and share your thoughts with us. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Election 2011: The web experiment

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:39:18 +1300

Decades ago the first prime ministers and presidents transfixed nations with television, replacing incumbents who couldn't use the power of the new medium. It's now twenty one years since Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, and so high time to put telly to rest and let internet take over as the most influential medium for deciding who runs a country. Not because it's sexy, but for the uncontroversial reason that while TV commands people, the internet better fosters learning, debate, and discussion.

The last New Zealand Election Study is one term behind (i.e. 2008) but shows statistics you'd expect; for example, 70% didn't have internet or didn't use it during the last general election campaign, and that pamphlets, newspapers, and radio broadcasts were primary influences on voters. The 2011 election study will be published in March next year, and will no doubt show internet as having a higher influence. But I'd wager most of that website traffic is no different to TV and pamphlets because it would have been dominated by two categories:

News reported by Stuff, NZ Herald, TVNZ, 3 news websites
Political party websites

The main exception to this, in other words where the internet provided more than what old media can do, would be elections.org.nz and electionresults.govt.nz. These government sites are built to serve the mechanics of the elections: to help people enrol, know the address of a nearby voting booth, and later learn what the vote counts are. They provide a necessary service but don't help voters choose who to vote for or to take more interest in voting.

There were several websites that did set out to do this, such as vote.co.nz, OnTheFence.co.nz, TheyWorkForYou.co.nz and electionresults.co.nz/iPredict to name a few. All were (and are) good ideas and websites but are arguably just experiments in how to use the web for elections because none of them attracted a major percentage of the voting population. There's also obvious gaps:

A full calendar of public debates around the country and running some debates online. (Why not add video archives and transcripts, too?)
A popular mechanism to submit written questions to parties and see their answers, all in public view.
Simple forms of participation. The US presidential race in 2008 saw millions of people text message a key issue (e.g. Iraq, Jobs) to a Google project. This formed an interesting grass-roots political map visualisation, but the actual success is it got a whole lot of people taking the first step to engaging in political thought prior to election day. The trick is then to get some of them to learn and discuss further.

It will be fantastic milestone when all of these types of online resources are available, popular, coordinated with each other, (and politically neutral) weeks ahead of elections. Blogs, Facebook and Twitter also have a role to play. Half the challenge is building a fantastic environment of tools, information and resources, and the other half of the challenge is to get people to care and use them. If we can crack this, television can be left to be the thing you watch with your family and friends while votes are counted. But of course, you'll check the web in the ads to get more detailed real-time counts and discussion concerning your local area.

Thanks ALGIM, for fostering innovation

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:37:49 +1300

In celebrating innovation in local government, the 2011 ALGIM conference shows that while innovating is a real struggle, it is hard work, the spirit of collaboration, and the technology of the web that are its ingredients.

Every year, IT managers and their technical staff representing New Zealand's 80 councils meet. ALGIM, who has run the event for 31 years, provides three full days of presentations, food, and plenty of time for talk. But most importantly, the event encourages and celebrates innovation through showcases and awards. Given the IT department of a council is typically seen as the slow moving cog in an organisation that is already slow to move with the times, some healthy encouragement to take calculated risks and innovate is crucial.

Councils exist to democratically serve their communities and make them wonderful places to visit, live, and work. This costs money, which is in direct tension with rates increases and, is made harder by an economic and political climate pushing cost cutting. (Nelson City Council Chief Executive Keith Marshall expresses this tension clearly in his video presentation about leadership and the challenges coming soon to local government.) It's very refreshing therefore to see at ALGIM sessions how IT, and in particular the web, can actually be the example and inspiration for councils to transform. For example:

Windor city, Canada, is the automobile sister city of Detroit, USA. Zero revenue growth for Windsor city council over ten years is a much harsher economic reality than any New Zealand counterpart faces, and yet, their Executive Director of IT Harry Turnbell explained very clearly how they managed to keep their IT systems modern, including moving their website from brochure towards being a virtual branch open 24 hours.
InternetNZ Chief Executive Vikram Kumar explained (see video) how councils, the public, and social media can co-exist before, during, and after natural disasters affect cities. This is more than just a case of citizens having a desire to use Twitter and Facebook: social media tools cost effectively nothing, are substantially robust, create considerable goodwill, and deliver a valuable social service. These are all benefits to councils (which is also to say, their communities) so long as councils overcome challenges to do with loss of control over communication and having the resources and will to participate in realtime public conversations.
Dale Hartle, Porirua City Council website manager, won an ALGIM award for putting just as much thought into creating a useful new tool, called updates.co.nz as she did on ensuring other councils could pick it up and use it for their own regions. (Please do!)

Making the web useful to citizens is overall an expensive endeavor for councils, but efforts towards collaboration that Porirua City Council have started are right to be applauded - as is using inexpensive web tools and taking advantage of open source: these approaches are currently considered innovative but should be considered normal. This is the only way councils will be able to deliver a better service under increasing financial pressure.

Interested in helping us usability test our sites?

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:02:17 +1200

In order for websites to remain relevant and useful, we believe it's important to usability test them on a regular basis. We don't only recommend this to our clients, but we practice it too.

It's been just over a year since we redesigned silverstripe.com and the best way to check whether it's meeting the goals of our users (you guys!) is to usability test it. We're planning to do this over the next couple of months, initially via a short questionnaire and then with face-to-face interviews in Wellington.

In late July we'll be asking interested users the reasons why they visit both silverstripe.com and silverstripe.org and for details of what they're looking for when they're there. In August we'll be inviting test users to come into the SilverStripe office in Wellington, where we'll run through a series of scenarios to test how they navigate through our sites, and we'll then explore areas that could be improved.

After collating and reviewing all the results we're hoping to better understand exactly what our users want from our sites and how they should be structured to make them as user-friendly as possible.

We're interested in talking with a range of users, including developers, designers and clients. If you're keen on participating then please contact Julian (J) Meadow, our resident usability testing expert, and he'll send you more details. Those that participate in both stages will be rewarded with an iTunes or book voucher.

Of course, anytime you have feedback on our sites you are always more than welcome to let us know by filling in a feedback form, which can be accessed via the the footer on both sites. We really appreciate your comments, so keep them coming!

We'll keep you posted on progress over the next couple of months.

Useful usability testing - an introduction

Wed, 11 May 2011 14:16:37 +1200

Last week at ALGIM Web Symposium, our Senior Project Manager Julian (J) Meadow gave a presentation about usability testing on a budget to a roomful of those responsible for various local government websites.

He discovered that most people in the session had been part of usability testing before, with almost everyone present wanting to do testing on their own sites - but no one had ever run their own testing before.

Here at SilverStripe Ltd, usability testing is one of the many services that we're proud to offer. Usability testing helps you understand how users interact with your site and whether their needs are being met. It helps to uncover any difficulties users are having, and provides valuable feedback on how to resolve these issues. Perhaps you've heard that usability testing is expensive, and you think you can't afford it. The truth is it's not expensive and you can't afford not to do usability testing.

Of course, we understand that your budget might not stretch to bringing in an outside company to do the testing for you. Instead, we’re happy to give you J's slides for free so you can get started thinking about how to run your own sessions.

Usability testing on a budget (by J Meadow)

View more presentations from silverstripe

Some extra points to think about:

If you find a group of people that you use for testing once, you can reuse the same people again - involve them in card-sorting for IA, user focus groups, and any other testing you might need to do.
While it might take you up to three days to do your first round of usability testing (including identifying and selecting participants), subsequent test sessions can be completed in less time.
Do a little a lot - limit the focus of your testing to a specific area or page each time in order to get the most clear results, and the next time you can choose a different area to focus on.

And of course, if you'd like further help from us, get in touch. We also want your site to be as useful as possible!

Tasman District Council - a job well done with an audit to prove it

Thu, 05 May 2011 16:09:55 +1200

As part of the the Association of Local Government Information Management Web Symposium we attended earlier this week, the results of the ALGIM Council Website Evaluation and Audit were announced. This external review of all 80 Councils assesses compliance against the Government Web Standards, information and service content.

In the 2010, Tasman District Council were ranked 71st out of 85 councils* for their website. That's where we came in. SilverStripe Ltd worked with Tasman to redevelop their website completely. By moving the website onto SilverStripe CMS, we provided an open source solution, tailor-made to their specific needs.

Feedback on the site has been fantastic. The document integration in particular has been seen as changing the way the council looks at information as a whole. We were also particularly thrilled to see that after all that work, Tasman District Council now places third in the 2011 rankings, a fantastic result that has seen them rocket from near the bottom of the heap to the top.

Two of the features that we built for their site - Electronic Document Records Management System (EDRMS) integration and Google Maps integration - were nominated at the ALGIM 2011 Web Awards as best feature, with the maps integration, and the overall site placed third for the Supreme Website Award.

We were also pleased to see our other local government clients Nelson City Council, Gisborne District Council and Central Hawkes Bay District Council also ranked in the top 20 of the website evaluations. We know that councils have a lot of important information and services to share with their community, and we love to help them to be more responsive. After all, we're not just a company, we're citizens too.

* prior to the Auckland City Council restructure there were 85 councils - now there are 80.

Some thoughts on SilverStripe as a building block

Mon, 02 May 2011 15:06:16 +1200

SilverStripe is a great CMS, and now that we have our new product marketing manager Kerstin on board, we've taken some time to rethink the best ways to describe just what makes it so great. We're in a bit of an unusual position being a private company curating an open source product which is owned by its community in terms of use and code contributions. Our decisions need to take into consideration not just the commercial interests of SilverStripe Ltd, but also what's best for the software's growth.

Part of our rethinking is to do with today's release of SilverStripe 3.0 preview 1. This version sees a total separation of the SilverStripe CMS from the Sapphire framework, which means we're unleashing the full power of the framework which can be used for more than just websites. For example, we used it to build Dawn. Since Sapphire can be used separately to the CMS, it gets its own logo, but much more than that, we want to demonstrate all the benefits if offers as a foundation framework.

This also gives us a chance to examine what it is about SilverStripe that makes it different from any other CMS. Yes, it's open source, and yes it has a great community behind it. Those are great selling points for anyone looking to adopt a new CMS, but it doesn’t make SilverStripe strictly unique. So we looked under the hood of the code, where some marketers fear to tread. It was so nice and tidy in there! And that's what makes SilverStripe so great. The code is beautiful. Developers have total control, without worrying that content authors or designers are going to trip over something and accidentally bring the site down. You don't have to choose between elegant architecture and user-friendliness - with SilverStripe you get both.

Our code is intended to let you build whatever you want. That could be websites, mobile sites, web applications, programmes - whatever. Sapphire and SilverStripe provide the basic blocks. You assemble them to suit your needs.

We're pushing that idea at the CMS Expo in Chicago by using the concept of building for our marketing paraphernalia. We've got USB flash drives in the shape of a popular building brick to give away to those who come to talk to us in our booth, we're having a prize draw for a Lego Robot at the end of the conference, and as trophies for our SilverStripe awards, we'll be giving out Lego models of the Willis Tower (still known as the Sears Tower), in a nice reference to where the expo is held. We would have preferred a New Zealand landmark, of course, but unfortunately the Lego architecture series hasn't come down under yet!

Just like it's fun to see the amazing creations people build with Lego, it's also a thrill for us to check out what's new in the SilverStripe community showcase, and to see how enthusiastically people speak about SilverStripe. We might not have a SilverStripe Land, but with SilverStripe 3, who knows what’s possible? The building blocks are there, now we - and the community - just have to build it!*

* SilverStripe 3 will definitely not contain a physical amusement park. SilverStripe 4.0, however...

New CEO at SilverStripe

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:36:48 +1200

Changes are afoot with the resignation of Brian Calhoun. Brian and the Board have been discussing SilverStripe's future, and in the course of those discussions decided that now was a good time for Brian and SilverStripe to pursue different directions. Brian goes with the Board's thanks and best wishes.

Our former CTO, Sam Minnée, has been nominated by the board as Acting CEO to replace Brian. Sam was one of the three original founders of SilverStripe, so we know the company is in good hands. We have a huge year ahead of us with the launch of SilverStripe v3.0, and numerous other projects both small and large. We are very much looking to the future.

Sam says: "I am honoured to have been given this opportunity and look forward to building on the foundation created under Brian’s leadership. I am particularly excited to see through the launch of SilverStripe 3."

SilverStripe at the Algim 2011 Web Symposium

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:54:12 +1200

We're all a hustle and bustle in the office right now, because at the same time that some of us will be in Chicago at the CMS Expo, others will be attending the ALGIM 2011 Web Symposium on May 2 and 3.

The 2011 Annual ALGIM Web Symposium is now into its sixth year, attracting a variety of speakers and case studies from across the public and private sector. It's the premier event for website, online services and communication teams in the public sector (local and central government).

We've done a lot of local government work, including sites for Nelson City Council, Gisborne District Council, Taranaki Regional Council, the Metlink site for the Greater Wellington Regional Council, as well as the local elections site. We're looking forward to seeing lots of our clients again at the event. We're especially excited that the Tasman District site we worked on is nominated for three of the ALGIM Web Awards;

Best Redevelopment of New Website
Best New Feature Website (under 50,000 Population): SilverStripe / SilentOne Integration
Best New Feature Website (under 50,000 Population): Google Maps Integration

At SilverStripe, we're all about making websites that not only incorporate new technologies but are actually also useful as well. As part of this, our Senior Project Manager Julian Meadow will be doing a presentation on usability testing on a budget.

This presentation will explain how to run your own usability test sessions, within a limited budget and timeframe. The lessons taught during this session can be used to identify areas to improve an existing council website, not just test the effectiveness of website wireframes and prototypes.

If you’re going to be coming to ALGIM, make sure you stop by our booth to say hi. There's lots for us to tell you about, including the brand new SilverStripe v3.0. We'd be very interested to talk about the ways our open source software can help you reach your audiences cost-effectively and easily, and answer any questions you might have. See you there!

Come meet us at the CMS Expo in Chicago

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:15:21 +1300

In May, SilverStripe is going to the 2011 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference in Chicago.

Hosted by the CMS Association, the 2011 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference will feature over eighty information-packed CMS training sessions. Created for Web Designers, Developers and Business people, CMS Expo is the place to be for the most relevant, timely and actionable information in the fast-growth CMS Sector.

Attendees will learn the latest web skills, while making highly valuable business connections, all under one roof. Over eighty of the world’s top CMS instructors will share their knowledge and insights over these three energizing days. CMS Expo is geared toward all levels of expertise.

SilverStripe will be there to provide an update on SilverStripe CMS 3.0 plans. As well as having an expo booth, we'll be offering four training sessions, participating in interactive panels, organising a meetup, and giving out awards for websites built on SilverStripe. We're really excited to be attending, and look forward to meeting many of you there.

More details will follow, but for now the vital information you need is that CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference takes place on May 2-4, at the Hotel Orrington in Evaston, Illinois. Registration is now open.

Christchurch earthquake and its aftermath

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:15:45 +1300

Like everyone else, here at SilverStripe we are very worried about the devastation in Christchurch right now.

There are a number of ways that people can help with the recovery, via donation of money through various channels.

In addition to that, we would also like to offer our support to any Christchurch SilverStripe developers in any way we can assist. Please get in contact with us to see how we can help you.

Lee Middleton
+64 4 978 7329
lee@silverstripe.com
Skype: leemiddleton

SilverStripe 261st fastest-growing tech company in Asia Pacific

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:50:12 +1300

Deloitte's 2010 Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500 list has been released, and SilverStripe is ranked 261 out of all the technology companies.

The Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific awards program is a ranking of the Asia Pacific region's 500 fastest-growing technology companies, based on percentage revenue growth over three years. Our revenue growth has been 151%.

This is the third year in a row that we've placed in the top 500. We'd like to thank all our clients and staff for helping us achieve this point.

For more information about the Deloitte Fast 500, please visit their site.

PostgreSQL and multiple-server support brings Dawn to the enterprise

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:29:42 +1300

If your website runs across multiple servers or uses PostgreSQL as its database, Dawn™ can now support your environment! This week we’re excited to release a major update to Dawn. Previously Dawn could only monitor a website if it ran on a single server. You can now use Dawn to monitor websites spread across multiple servers. Likewise, previously Dawn could only monitor websites running on the MySQL database; we have now extended Dawn to support PostgreSQL. In addition to database and multiple server support, we've also improved Dawn alerts and reporting as detailed below.

We're pleased that a wider pool of people using SilverStripe CMS to run critical websites can now enjoy the ease and power of monitoring their websites with Dawn.

Multiple web-server support

Dawn now supports website architectures comprising multiple web-servers, each running PHP and serving pages via SilverStripe CMS. Under this scenario, each server has the Dawn Agent and Logger installed, and the dashboard will show each server as a separate set of concentric rings in the dashboard.

For complex websites, you may want to set up your database on a dedicated machine, separate from your web server. This dedicated machine wasn’t previously able to be monitored with Dawn, as it used to require that the webserver and the database were on the same machine. Now you can split these two functions and use Dawn to make sure everything's working as expected.

PostgreSQL

Dawn can now monitor websites powered by a PostgreSQL database, not just MySQL. PostgreSQL is often chosen over MySQL for websites that deal with huge sets of information, or have geospatial data, or deal with transactions (e.g. online stores). Dawn becomes useful to more sophisticated sites than it used to, now that Dawn supports PostgreSQL databases.

Alerts when your site comes back online

Obviously, Dawn will send you alerts when your site goes down. Now, it will also send you an alert when your site comes back online, letting you know exactly when your visitors can reach your site again.

Disk space usage

Now Dawn can monitor the amount of disk space that is used on your server. As alerts are fully customisable, you can choose to be warned if you’re running out of room.

As well as these features, we've also done some tinkering behind the scenes to make it all run a little faster. For more information about Dawn, read our other blog posts, have a play with the demo, or give our 30 day trial a go!

Igniting our imaginations

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:34:40 +1300

We're super excited about the upcoming Ignite Wellington #3, not just because we're sponsoring and we love any chance to meet others in the Wellington creative community, but also because we just purely love the event. Here's the pitch:

Have you ever been to a 60 minute talk and lamented that there was only five minutes of content? Imagine if you could hear only that five minutes... that's Ignite!

What’s so special about Ignite beyond the concept itself? Well, take a look at this picture.

How exactly does one build something out of marshmallows and spaghetti? Very very carefully, it turns out. What you're looking at in that image is the challenge that took place at the first Ignite. Attendees tried to build the tallest possible tower in a set period of time from the materials they were given, and there were some really interesting results generated.

The challenge for the second Ignite event was to throw a piece of paper the furthest through a hoop. Some teams went for a simple paper plane shape, others went for a ball approach, and one team even designed an elaborate biplane, taking out the prize for creativity.

That's what we like about Ignite. You don't know what challenge you're going to be asked to complete, and while presenters and their topics are always listed in advance, you don't know quite what to expect from them either. You might be enthralled by what someone learnt while biking across America, find out what would inspire someone to cover trees with bits of knitting, or you might even end up buying some lunar real estate.

So how does that relate back to SilverStripe? Well, we like to make sure that we poke our heads up out of the code every once in a while to look for new inspiration, and to keep our minds fresh. Sometimes that takes the form of office challenges, but other times, it just involves sitting back, letting someone else do the talking, and seeing where that takes our brains. I really don't want to use the phrase "thinking outside the box," but clearly I need some Ignite inspiration right now to come up with a better way to to express how useful it is to see other ways people deal with obstacles that pop up!

Sounds like fun, yeah? So we'll see you at the Paramount on February 8 if you're in Wellington. Otherwise, keep your eye on Ignites around the world.

All images courtesy of Ignite

Seven things we don't do at SilverStripe

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 11:01:14 +1300

Instead of writing a year-end summary of our awesome 2010, I thought I'd take a different tack and write about some things we don't do. It's often easy to say typical things around what we do, but that can get boring, or at least not all that interesting. A lot of what we are can be defined by what we're not. So here are seven things we don't do:

1. Waste time

Hold your left hand out in front of you, like you're about to shake someone's hand (and that person's left-handed). Now hold your right hand out in front of you in the corresponding manner. Make sure your hands are as far apart as your body is wide. Your left hand is when you were born. Your right hand is when you die. What you do in the middle in between is up to you. But we bet you don't want to waste time.

2. Stay stuck

We all get stuck from time to time while trying to achieve something. If everything was easy, we probably wouldn't get paid for any of it. We try really hard to recognise when we get stuck, and then let each other (or the client) know when we're stuck so that we can all move on and be productive.

3. Fail slow

Related to #2 above is the notion of failing slow. We've all seen this. You're on a project and everyone has a general feeling of dread about an upcoming deadline. As in, "We're not going to make it and I need to cover my ass so I better start blaming others now." Almost like a death march. Not fun. And also not honest. The best thing to do, and we try very hard to do this as much as possible, is to acknowledge failure early and figure out internally or with the client what we're going to do about it. Failing fast is good.

4. Revere money

We need to pay salaries and we need a modest profit to grow the business. That's what money means to us. That attitude allows us to do what's right. For us it means spending time working on our open source product, sponsoring worthwhile events, donating to charities, and throwing the occasional kick-ass party for our staff. We have found that when you remove money as a primary motivator, opportunities open up to you.

5. Chain people

Our sick-day policy is "If you're sick, stay home." Why should someone who's only used, say, two of her allotted six days feel cheated? Like she should have been sick more so she could have more time away from work? That doesn't make sense. Trust people and they'll return the favour.

6. Take on any work

We only take on work that we like. The definition of "like" changes over time, too. For example, lately we've been doing awesome work for some bigger clients. That brings new challenges, but it stretches us in good ways. We like that. We also like to innovate. It's rare these days that we take on work that doesn't have some kind of innovative component to it. Related to #5 above, if people feel like they're grinding away, doing boring work all the time, then that's not very fun and makes for a boring place to work.

7. Give people what they ask for

Internally and with clients we try to understand why someone is asking for something. Often times, people aren't sure why they want something. When you take the time to get to a root cause of why someone wants something you can identify what they're really after and then deliver that. Everyone wants to have their needs met but we're all quite poor at vocalising what we really want. At SilverStripe we take time to dig a little deeper, and invariably it makes for a better outcome for all.

So that's seven things we don't do. Hopefully next year we'll have more things we don't do.

Happy holidays everyone, and we'll see you in 2011!