jab's joblog

Impressions from Velocity 08 and Structure 08

2008-06-30T14:28:00.013+02:00

Last week me and one of my colleagues attended two conferences in San Francisco focused on web applications, Software as a Service and cloud computing. Spending dozens of hours on airplanes to attend events in a time zone that’s nine hours behind you might not sound like a fun week – but now that my jetlag is fading away I can honestly say that it was well worth the trip. I will not in this post be sharing any thoughts or analyses on how what we saw can impact our industry (need some more time to think...) but I’ve embedded some of the more interesting presentations given during the conference below:

Sean Quinlan (Google Inc), "Storage at Scale"
This is a brief but interesting talk about how Google manages storage (and db-like storage) in the scale of petabyte. Should be interesting both for developers and system engineers.

Harald Prokop (Akamai Technologies), "How to Accelerate Non-cacheable, Dynamic Sites Leveraging a Globally Distributed Platform"
Akamai (the largest commercial CDN available today) talks about their new offering - acceleration of non-cacheable, dynamic sites. Snake oil or the real thing?

Luiz Barroso (Google), "Energy Efficient Operations: Some Challenges and Opportunities
Another speak about google that is relevant to those of you that run and manage data centers or are concerned with the rising energy consumption from data centers.

John Fowler (Sun Microsystem), "Innovation That Drives Opportunity for the Web Infrastructure"
Focused on Sun's hardware platform but it contains a lot of interesting thoughts on the development of cloud computing and web architecture.

Artur Bergman (Wikia), "The importance of operations and performance"
This speak emphasises the importance of operations and performance for web applications and should be watched by developers, system engineers and even business focused managers.

Scott Ruthfield (whitepages.com), "Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation"
As web applications become more and more "heavy" on the client side, it gets more and more interesting to measure performance on the client side of web application. Scott from whitepages.com shares some of his experience and launches a new open source project.

A variety of presentations from GigaOM Structure 08
The speaches from Structure 08 are unfortunately not as accessible as above. But the videoplayer embedded below will make it possible for you to browse some of the presentations given (select "on demand" to access the different episodes).

You can also access blogposts on each of the sessions on http://gigaom.com/2008/06/25/live-coverage-of-structure-08/

Do you really want to know about the bugs that inhabits your bed?

2008-03-07T19:52:00.006+01:00

I cannot say I'm crazy about documentaries that teaches me about the all the bugs that inhabit my living space. Sometime ignorance is bliss, right? But I hope our customers don't get too itchy about the fact that we're now publishing information about known bugs in our application. We recently reengineered most of our IT management processes and as a part of that the bug management process has now become much more transparent that earlier. For those of you interested, here's the answer to a few of the questions you might have:

Q: Do you publish all bugs?

No. There is a degree of editorial control to the bugs list. Only bugs actually verified by a developer/tester are published. Minor bugs are left out not to clutter the list. Security related bugs will also be left out of this list.

Q: Why can you not give us the actual date for when the bug is fixed?

Let's just say that software development and release management is a complicated process! The scope of a release is changed continuously during a development cycle and last minute testing can also affect the outcome of a release. Since new bugs reported potentially could reshuffle the priority of other bugs we feel that giving out an exact date is, well, dishonest. However, the status of a bug is a rough indicator of when you might expect a bug to be fixed.

Q: Can you explain what the different statues really means?

Approved: The bug has been confirmed by a developer/product manager and is put into the backlog of development work planned.

In progress: The bug has been assigned to a developer and most likely a fix would be released in one of the upcoming planned releases.

Ready for testing: The bug has been fixed by a developer but is awaiting QA/testing. Potentially this fix could be included in the next release but it might also be stopped in the QA process.

Fixed and verified: The bug is fixed in the version indicated by the field "Fixed in version". (Please note that even though the bug is fixed this particular version of it's learning might not have been released yet. The current version of it's learning is stated clearly on the login page, bottom left corner.)

Q: Why the heck do you make bugs in your application?!
Bugs are unfortunately a natural part of development and product lifecycle management. Denying it would just make things worse. Our job is to both minimize the number of bugs making it into our product and managing the ones that got through. Making our bug management process more transparent will hopefully make us better at that job.

Enterprise software as a service growth

2008-01-13T21:26:00.000+01:00

According to the economist, revenues in the enterprise SaaS industry will reach $6bn in 2008, accounting for 17,5 % of all enterprise application sofware. The article is also an interesting read on NetSuite recent flotation and the business of enterprise Software as a Service in general. Read it here.

The prime minister, the astronaut and me...

2008-01-08T18:20:00.001+01:00

Don't ask how, but today I was lucky enough to participate at the annual conference of NHO (Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise) in Oslo. Even though I knew that this must be the most prestigious conference you could possibly find here in Norway, I was slightly struck by all the familiar faces of politicians, journalists and billionaires that got crammed together in a fairly intimate conference hall. (The conference hall itself was a bit out of the ordinary with a 360 degree canvas showing images, movies and presentations being played around a rotating stage. )

The theme of this year’s conference was education and enterprises role in education. After an inspiring introduction by the American astronaut Robert Curbeam, OECD's vice-secretary general Aart de Geus presented the cold facts from the last Pisa survey that sadly shows that Norway is well below the OECD average in terms of skills in reading, math and science (A fact that everyone that took stage later, including a wide range of politicians, agreed was a serious issue). His advice to the Norwegian educational system can be summed up as follows:

Ambitions (on behalf of the pupils and students)
Autonomy (to the schools and educational institutions)
Accountability (school leaders must be responsible for the end results)

Other speakers ranged from three different Norwegian ministers, a former labor minister to the Clinton Administration, a Danish minister and a range of researchers, CEO's and other politicians. The whole conference was wrapped up by the prime minister himself, that I think surprised everybody (certainly me) by giving the perhaps the most charismatic, personal and humorous speech of them all.

Some of the presentations and videos from the event have already been published here:

http://konferanse2008.nhosp.no/category/Multimedia/category.php?categoryID=27

Now I'm off to sneak into the equally prestigious annual dinner party :-)

Radio silence has ended; happy new year!

2008-01-02T21:00:00.000+01:00

Seasons greetings! I apologize for the prolonged silence to the few of you that follows my blog on a regular basis. Desember was busy as always, but now that next years budget is nearly finished I will try and post on a more regular basis.

I have to confess I didn't spend much time in front of my computer this holiday. But here's a few of the things I did this christmas that could be worth sharing:

1. Converted to using Google Reader as my main rss reader. About time? I used to think it was a mediocre but the massive improvements made to this piece of software over the last year has made it into the best online applications I've ever used. I will try to post items worth sharing here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/02565532683670666986

2. Read a brilianty simple and short article about privacy which I hope all of you will find time to read trough: An Inalienable Right to Privacy.

3. I learned to use keyboard shortcuts in gmail.

4. Upgraded my work-computer to Windows Vista. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised (even the "horror" of the new security feature "User Account Control" hasn't bothered me much), allthough expectations where low considering all the flack it has received over the last year.

Consumer SaaS vs. enterprise SaaS

2007-10-08T10:32:00.001+02:00

First; for those of you not familiar with "SaaS" - Software as a Service, here's my simple definition of what it is: Software as a Service is the business of delivering software via a browser over the internet, typically enabling a range of customers to use the same single instance of the application. (I have written a few blogposts related to this topic previously without really explaining what it is, sorry:-)).

There are plenty of famous services on the internet that can be labeled SaaS. Over the last few years we have all become users of SaaS solutions like Google Apps, hotmail, youtube, facebook and del.icio.us. The service my employer offer, itslearning.com is also a typical SaaS solution, but there is a slight difference between the earlier mentioned services and our own. Our customers are educational institutions, or enterprises, while the more profiled solutions are consumer-based. But even if Facebook get's all the coverage, a significant industry is now developing for enterprise-based SaaS software (the most famous being salesforce.com).

From time to time opinionated people in the educational sector seems to think that services provided by the likes of company will be wiped of the face of the earth by the more profiled consumer-based services. Where it so easy. There are a number significant differences between Consumer- and Enterprise based SaaS that will require a good solution. But if you want to try and prove me wrong and put us out of business with a learning platform based on consumer-based technology, here's a list of differences between customer and enterprise SaaS that you might want to think about:

Characteristics	Consumer apps	Enterprise apps
Revenue model	Ad-based.	Subscription fees.
Sales	word-by-moth, trends.	Tenders, DM's, knocking on dors.
Data privacy	Vendor "owns" your personal data.	Enterprise keeps full ownership of data.
SLA	No (remember skype going down for two days?)	24/7 Availability guarantees, response time guarantees, financial, guarantees. The list goes on.
Support	Not directly. Community driven discussion groups, blogs, etc.	professional help desk.
Training	Hey, if you can't use it - why sign up for it?	professional training services.
Integration and customization	Generic API's.	Consulting services, 3rd party integrators.
Development road-maps.	Innovation. What will be the next trend that signs up more users?	A mix between innovation, strategic development for expanding market shares and pleasing existing accounts.

Technorati Tags: SaaS

What did you do last summer?

2007-10-07T19:45:00.000+02:00

In our line of business, the summer holidays are basically the only time of year when we can catch our breath and do heavy duty maintenance and prepare our data center for a new season of crazy growth. This summer we where painfully close to filling up our existing storage units so for months ahead we planned expanding our storage solution with a new piece of equipment from Dell/EMC, known as a CX3-20 SAN array. Being by far the biggest investment ever done by our company hardware wise, i thought I might share a few interesting (?) facts about this piece of machinery that you don't need a computer degree to understand...

It can be set up to be connected via fiber channel to 128 servers.
In theory it has 1000 times more bandwith than your average USB disk drive.
It supports up to 120 disk drives (either "cheap" iSCSI disks or very expensive Fibre channel discs - depending on your I/O requrements).
It's maximum raw data capasity is about 83 TB.
If the SAN detects that a piece of hardware is about to fail an e-mail is immediately sent to Dell Gold support in Dublin. A harddisk can actually be changed remotely since there are several spare harddrives in the storage array.
You could change one of it's power supplies without turning it off or in any way affecting it's operation.
You could easily configure one of these to cost you as much as this one or approximately 2500 of these. :-)

it's learning is great!

2007-10-01T19:09:00.000+02:00

it's learning is great. It's a terrific product, it's a good service and it's a great place to work. Maybe I'm not a very objective or credible as a source for this information having been one of the managers of this company for the past 4,5 years. Being one of the people with the initial idea to the product back when I was a student might also have clouded my vision. Perhaps there are even days when I don't feel this is true myself. (It doesn't happen very often, but we sometimes have days like this or this)

But that's not really my point. What I am trying to achieve is to counter-balance something that has been bugging me for quite some time. If you search for us using Google, one of the first results points to a web-site that compares our product/company with manure.

If you're a potential customer or just looking for some info on us, please read this:

The mentioned web-page is, in my opinion, about as full of it as it claims it's learning to be. Please get a demo of our product before you make up your own mind.
Last week we had more than 250.000 unique users logged in to it's learning one or more times - a proof that a lot of people find the software quite useful.
Not only do we have the dominant market share in primary and secondary education here in Norway, we are also the supplier of virtual learning environments to some of the biggest universities in Scandinavia (To mention a few: University of Copenhagen, University og Malmö and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
We're a company still largely owned by the former students that originally founded the company back in 1999 and our financial situation is very robust.
We're qualified for the BECTA Learning Platform Services Agreement in the UK after a very througout tender process that looked at a lot of different sides of our product and services.

If you're an existing customer, a partner, a friend, a blogger, a competitor or just an opinionated fellow, please do the following:

Comment this post. Let us know a little bit about who you are and what you think about or product, services or company. (I do moderate my comments because of random spam problems - but I will of course let critical remarks pass!)
If you find this post interesting and feel slightly sympatetic please link to it or pass it on to others. This way mabye we can actually get this article up on Google's ranking to counter-balance some of the bad karma from the prevously mentioned post.
If you do not think we deserve to be known to the world as escrements, please do not link to any web-site describing us in this manner, it will only increase its google ranking.

Thank you, yours sincerely,

John Arthur

So how many users do you have?

2007-09-27T16:00:00.000+02:00

The potential customer asks: "So, how many users do you have on your system?"

System engineer 1: - "Well, perhaps 25.000 concurrent users during peek hours."

System engineer 2: - "We have 80.000 active sessions during peek hours".

System manager: -"Every week, more than 350.000 unique users logs into the system".

Product Manager: - "We have more than 1.000.000 active users!"'

Sales manager 1: - "We have 4.000.000 users!"

Sales Manager 2: - "We have 10.000.000 logins a month!"

Managing director: - "We have 100.000.000 page requests a week!"

So who's lying? Answer: They might all be telling the truth. The problem is not the answer but the question. To illustrate my point; imagine you wanted to choose the vendor with most users. You asked five different vendors and they all responded differently as above. The vendor most likely to give out the highest number would probably win - even though this might have been the vendor with the least users.

(disclaimer - these numbers are fictional and not related to it's learning. But i will give you a number that is not: We had 262.240 unique users logging on to itslearning.com one or more times for the past seven days.)

IMS Enterprise Services

2007-09-24T22:31:00.000+02:00

We have recently made a few changes and enhancements to how it's learning can be integrated with external applications and services. Allthough we have more than sixty userdata integrations (think: users, groups, courses, etc) behind us, all of these integrations are batch-based. This means that all the chances happening to your user-data is only imported into it's learning once a day. With the support of IMS Enterprise Services v.1.0 (SOAP based) it is now possible to build integrations that allows for on-the-fly updates of userdata within it's learning.

Q: Does this then mean that we can now offer all of our customers IMS ES?

A: Nah. It takes two to tango. An integration between learning and and external student administrative system involves two parties - the "sender" of userdata (the administrative system) and the receiver (us). Not that many administrative systems yet support IMS ES. There are some honorable exeptions. Capita's SIMS in the UK supports it (if you allow for a slightly loose interpretation) and several customers are currently implementing support for their own homebrewn systems.

Q: Is it possible to customise the IMS ES solution?

A: Even though IMS ES is a pretty clear and precise specification, it allows for extentions. The way we have implemented the IMS ES specification we have taken into account the need of customisations. This means that we can allow for extentions and different interpretations of the IMS ES spesification.

Q: Is it free?

No. In addition to mabye needing the help of one of our consultants you will need a maintenance and support agreement. But investments in integrations usually pays off pretty quickly - the manual labor required to maintain it manually is usually not free...

Q: What technology is is build upon?

The interface (and also the specification) is purely SOAP based, so support with a wide range of platforms and technologies should be guaranteed. To move messages around, transform data and add customisation capabilities we use MS Biztalk 2006.

Downtime, part 2

2007-09-12T19:07:00.000+02:00

My last post touched on some of the reasons why we scheduled planned downtime when updating it's learning to version 3.2 Thursday evening/night. Unfortunately, the following day we got some unplanned downtime and had to temporarily roll most of our customers back to version 3.1 while troubleshooting and sorting out the bug. Fortunately we quickly found a resolution to the problem, but it is a textbook example of how easy it is to mess up your performance in a large data center.

To explain what happened, I have to start off with the basics of how our hosting environment works (simplified version!):

1. Content switches. This is the entry point of any request to our web-server. The primary function of the content switches is to route you to a pool of web servers based on what it's learning "site" you belong to (our customers are divided into 4-5 different pools of web-servers at the moment - maybe a subject worth blogging about at a later time). The content switch also terminates https traffic; load balances web-servers and caches static files.

2. Web server(s). Every pool of servers consists of 5-8 web-server. This is where the actual application is installed. Based on the load on the servers in the pool a request is assigned to a server. (so for every page you click inside it's learning you could access a different server).

3. Session state server. HTTP is a stateless protocol. Every request from your browser to the server is initiated and terminated. To keep track of who you are a session ID is created. This session ID is stored in a cookie on your computer and on the server. Since we have a lot of web servers and you can be assigned a random server between requests, all sessions are stored on the session state server. When you access http://www.itslearning.com/ you are assigned a session on the session server. This session will continue to live on our session state server until 20 minutes after you close your browser. So with the amount of traffic we receive new sessions are created and expires every second.

4. Database server. This is where the customer databases are stored. Depending of the size of the customer there could be one, two or a heap of customers residing on one database server. It's learning is a very database dependent application, and the amount of traffic makes it important to have finely tuned database servers.

5. File server. The file server(s) act as a client for the SAN where all the files uploaded into it's learning are stored. These are directly connected with dual fiber cards to a very, very expensive hard drive.

So what happened? The problem came with a new security measurement introduced to it's learning. you can now only access files and similar from a separate domain (files.itslearning.com). What we didn't realize what that the implementation created a new session on our session state server for every file that was opened by a user in it's learning. This simply was to much for the session state server, and it froze. We ended up with one of these guys on our servers:

Why downtime?

2007-09-06T22:33:00.000+02:00

So if you have been trying to access it's learning for the last few hours, you have probably been gotten a glimpse of the following message:

A few of you might be wondering what exactly goes on behind the scenes when we take down it's learning and start upgrading. So for the most curious of you, here's a simplified list of what our eager staff of system engineers and developers (I currently count eight of us here!) are currently doing:

Backup. Every update starts with a full backup of all customer data. This typically takes a couple of hours, including verifying that the backup has run properly on every customer database.
Patching. Before we start reinstalling we make sure that every server is patched properly.
Databases are updated with necessarily changes to the new version of our application.
Optimalization scripts are run on each database (new indexes, obsolete data is removed, etc).
The core application is installed on all of our web-servers.
Connected applications are upgraded (like exam, mobile, community and importapplications).
Backup verification. We make sure that all backups are running properly after upgrade is finished.
Documentation. All of our configuration documentation is updated to make sure it is now reflecting our new data center configuration.
Testing. A crew of testers make sure that the application is installed properly before customers are let back onto the servers.
We let you back in. And funny enough, even four in the morning hundreds of users starts logging in :-)

it's learning 3.2 is just around the corner...

2007-09-05T19:55:00.000+02:00

Yup, tomorrow is the big day. We're upgrading it's learning to version 3.2. I am sure that feelings are mixed amongst our superusers at the moment; some of you probably remember that our last upgrade took the entire site down for a day and left a few of our customers with performance issues for about a week. Others feel that the timing could have been better - if the upgrade had happened a bit earlier teachers would have been better prepared for the new features.

I am not brave or foolish enough to give my 100% guarantees that the upgrade will be unproblematic. There's still some known minor bugs in the new version of the application and we know from experience that the swarm of it's learning users out there collectively are even better at digging up bugs than our professional testers... But I know this: Never have we spent more resources on preparing for an upgrade, never have we done more performance testing than this time and never have we had more beta-testers submitting feedback to us during our beta period. 2500 users have been involved in beta testing and a whooping 689 posts have been made to the beta-forums! In addition to this we have done significant investments in testing and verification environments over the last few months (VMWare and Dell are sending us love letters) and rewritten our change- and release procedures.

So what's new in it's learning? For this upgrade we've focused on the basics. We have identified some of our most used and popular tools and given them a proper upgrade. There's a new editor coming based on dhtml that is much less troublesome than the existing activex and java editors. The message/email system has had a complete makeover, the same for the discussion tool. More features are added to the mobile application and some useful improvements have been done to the assignment tool. The online help has been completely rewritten and SCORM content has now better support within it's learning. There are also a few changes happening under the bonnet. Some extra layers of security are added and minor performance tweaks are also a part of release.

So come Friday morning all of our customers should have a good impression of how well the upgrade went. Please don't hesitate to share your feedback and thoughts here on my blog!

Rising Star?

2007-09-05T16:45:00.000+02:00

We seem to be heading into the award season again. Yesterday it's learning was awarded the Rising Star price, a local award for companies in the Region of Hordaland. Amongst the prominent jury was Victor Normann, Ph.D. in economics and former minister of Trade and Industry.

http://www.deloitte.no/

Presenting Sofware as a Service

2007-08-24T15:40:00.000+02:00

So I guess I haven't exactly updated my blog frequently for the last couple of months. Besides spending quality time off work, moving offices and putting out bushfires I've also spent a bit of my spare time lately trying to compile a good presentation on Software as a Service. But how good is it really? Well, if you drop by the Norwegian .NET User Group in Bergen next week you can judge yourself.

Sign up here:
http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Bergen/Moter/Brukergruppemote-August/

New office and vacation

2007-06-24T22:51:00.000+02:00

The last week has certainly been a busy one. We just move our company from old (and tiny) offices to larger and brand new offices. We even got ourselves a purpose built server room. Here's a few pictures of the work in progress:

Our new canteen. Still waiting for the furnitures.

My new office to the right...

Room for lots of developers :-)

I'm now off for three weeks vacation, and will spend the first two driving around California. I can't promise keeping away for blogging but I will try to stay offline as much as possible...

Bulding data centres

2007-06-05T19:21:00.000+02:00

Being in charge of it's learning's data centre I quite often think about how to make sure that we can manage growth and keep track of all the hardware and software we stuff into our hosting environment. Well if this guy can do it i'm sure we'll manage. :-)

It seems like the world of Saas makes Data Centre Manager a pretty safe career move.

Free. Gratis. Given away.

2007-05-13T22:09:00.000+02:00

It is not an uncommon thing to meet potential and existing customers wondering about our pricing policy on storage. I have compiled a list of the most common questions an made an attempt to answer them:

- Why do you charge for storage, i can get 2GB on Gmail for free!!!
No you can't. Gmail and other services offers you mail and storage functionality in exchange for being allow to target you with very efficient text advertisement based on the content of your e-mails (This has made Google a very, very profitable company). There's no advertising within it's learning, and i very much doubt our customers would like to see that change!
Also many of these 'free' services do not provide you with an SLA. Our company guarantee an availability of 99,7%,overnight backup to two physically separate locations and we'll keep the backup for three years after you delete the file.

- I can buy a 300 GB hard drive online for less than 1000 NOK, which is only a fraction of what we have to pay you for storage!
Comparing a hard drive for your private computer to enterprise storage is like comparing a bike to a Rolls Royce with a private driver, free petrol, a mechanic and another Rolls Royce driving behind you just in case the first one breaks down. Your hard drive will ultimately fail you and if you don't have performed a backup yourself you'll loose...everything. When a hard drive in our storage unit is about to fail, a technician in Ireland calls us to tell that he has deactivated it and enabled a spare disk - over the internet. A new disk is automatically dispatched and no data is lost, not even for a second.

- But even if your hardware is much more expensive than low-end hardware, the number doesn't really add up. You must be making a fortune off this!!!
Remember that it is not hardware we're providing you with. It's a storage service. In addition to the physical storage unit (and all the redundancy that comes with it) the storage service includes electricity, personnel costs, backup, training of personnel, network connection, management of the service and even support (the more your users use our platform, the more support you will be needing from us). There are also other overhead costs such as selling and invoicing you for the service...

- We have a big storage unit locally at our it-department. Can we use it for storing stuff that goes inside it's learning?
Yes and no. It is not difficult to link external content into it's learning and make it work together fairly seamlessly. But it is not possible to store content under the same application context externally. It would make it really difficult for us to guarantee availability and response times (not even mentioning backup) if a large part of our solution was dependent on hardware and network resources outside our control. And at the end of the day, the total cost for a customer to build a high performing enterprise storage solution would probably be much more than actually buying storage from us.

- Storage is increasing rapidly, will the cost of storage with it's learning decrease at the same speed?
Over the last few years our standard storage price has dropped significantly. I am sure that this is a trend that will continue as hardware costs go down and economy of scale kicks inn. However, actual storage has exploded so there is no question that the total storage cost has increased. But is that really that strange? Over the last few years there has been a massive growth in the computer-to-pupil/student ratio. This has increased the need of investment in many areas, storage being just one of them.

My favorite blogs

2007-05-06T21:46:00.000+02:00

I find myself spending less end less surfing the net and more and more browsing my list of feeds these days. Here's a small roundup of my current favourite blogs, please let me know what I'm currently missing. :-)

tech-bloggers
http://www.gizmodo.com/ (witty gadget blog)
http://www.lifehacker.com/ (geeky productivity blog)
http://www.downloadsquad.com/
http://solsie.com/feed/ (Mobile tech blog)

Management and marketing blogs (loose term)
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/ (Guy Kawasaki, former Apple marketing guru and inventor of software envangelism)
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ (Seth Godin, marketing guru)
http://tompeters.com/ (Tom Peters)
http://www.blueflavor.com/blog/
http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/
http://blogcabin.37signals.com/posts/ (37signals blog)

Software as a Service blogs
http://thinkitservices.blogspot.com/ (Jeff Kaplan, THINKIT services)
http://www.saasweek.com/
http://www.saasblogs.com/
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699384.aspx (Microsofts SaaS Centre)
http://blogs.msdn.com/gianpaolo/default.aspx (Microsoft SaaS architect)
http://blogs.msdn.com/fred_chong/default.aspx (Microsoft SaaS architect)
http://blogs.msdn.com/eugeniop/default.aspx (Microsoft SaaS architect)

Erik's last day (not really)

2007-04-26T18:39:00.000+02:00

One of my greatest colleagues, our Sales Director Erik, had one of his last working days today. It is in many ways a sad day since Erik is both a huge asset to the company and a great colleague.

But all isn't lost. Erik will still have a major role to play in it's learning in the future too. He is joining our company's board and will still be involved in growing and evolving our company in years to come.

Still, we can't deny the fact that Erik has been responsible for bringing in a majority of our customers and business single handed. Luckily we now have a large enough team of great employees to fill the gap!

The 25$ ERP system

2007-04-19T22:54:00.000+02:00

My last post touched briefly on an observation I suddenly realised could be something to write about; some well-known figures in the SaaS industry seems to be in high demand in India and China. This suddenly reminded me of something interesting I've been reading a few articles about lately: the growing car industry in the two largest countries in the world.

For the last couple of decades India and China has been very eager on attracting the biggest car manufacturers in the world. Most of the bigger players in this industry are well established the region and are now competing in what effectively is the worlds second biggest car marked. But the Chinese had a plan; by attracting foreign competence, they have also successfully managed to establish a significant local car industry. There are now for instance hundreds of Chinese car companies, and it is believed that the Chinese car industry is about to surpass the German industry in terms of volume.

This enormous, growing marked has also sparked another race. A race to produce really, really cheap cars in order to open up an enormous market. India's Tata Motors plans to launch a $2,500 car next year, about what a moped costs here in Norway.

So why is this relevant to the computer industry? India and China is attracting an enormous amount of IT companies these days. And just like with the car industry we will soon see that India and China will be some of the biggest players in the global computer industry, just like they will be a massive exporter of cheap cars in a few years.

Another, and in my opinion even more significant, reason takes us back to the start of my article. How do you produce really cheap cars? Or cheap clothes? Or cheap electronics? Or cheap toys? Really low production costs. Labour cost is of course the most common discussed advantage of the East. But if you want to create a really large company that sell really cheap cars in a global market place you also need a lot of computer systems supporting your operations, also known as ERP systems. And just as with labour, you want it to be cheap. Oracle isn't cheap. SAP certainly isn't known to be cheap.

So my prediction: in a few years we will see Indian and Chinese 25$ ERP systems - based on the low cost SaaS delivery model.

Is Microsoft getting it?

2007-04-17T22:28:00.000+02:00

In December I published a post that slightly slagged off Microsoft Learning Gateway for being outdated and not getting the message from Ray Ozzie: Software as a Service. And Indeed it seems like Microsoft is pouring resources into their services strategy. Microsoft SaaS Architectural team seems to be receiving a lot of focus. They just released a sample application, Litware, and Gianpaolo and Fred Chong is spending a time in China and India (which I believe is quite significant but I won't go into that here).

Microsoft's latest announcement is SaaS Incubation Center Program, a global initiative to help independent software vendors (ISVs) adopt the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model. I've noticed that some ISV's have allready been working with Microsoft on this, for instance at the Danish Microsoft Innovation Centre where CMS vendor Sitecore worked on a SaaS proof of concept a few weeks ago.

But still, it seems that Microsoft's previous technology dominance is forever lost (If you haven't already done so, read "Microsoft is dead"). And even if my employer might be the biggest, Microsoft technology based Software as a Service vendor in Norway, we aren't exactly being run down by Microsoft. The only Microsoft representative that keeps calling me is selling software licenses. There is some cruel irony to that.

What do you think, will Microsoft climb back?

Advertising in the school

2007-03-30T08:26:00.000+02:00

Norway's Minister of Education and Research, Øystein Djupedal, is banning commercial advertising in the Norwegian school.

It's a pragmatic ban; Djupedal states that he doesn't want to see advertising in school books, but he says he accepts that pupils are exposed to advertising when surfing the net for educational purposes.

But here's a dilemma for you; what if I sell your pupil an online, digital school book, can I freely put advertising in it?

Probably not. My interpretation of this is that whatever resources that are under the schools control (think procurement) should not contain commercial advertising. So no "Google Apps Education" for our pupils then?

Here's the story: (in Norwegian)
http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/innenriks/1.2150726

The digital video marketplace

2007-03-27T08:41:00.000+02:00

Interesting news for us digital media addicts; Microsoft claims that their Xbox live video market place has grown to become the second biggest distributor of digital video just four months after launching it (you guess right, itunes still rule).

Microsoft has finally come to their senses and understood what a potent media center their xbox 360 is (You could say it has taken them a while considering just how good their old Xbox runs with the illicit Xbox media center). They are even adding IPTV support for the 360.

The question is; how long will we have to wait before they manage to negotiate digital video rights here in Norway... I suspect that we still unfortunately have to live in the grey area between piracy and crappy tv-industry solutions.

Security and learning platforms

2007-03-19T18:44:00.000+01:00

Sven Andreas is trying to spark a discussion surrounding security, learning platforms and full disclosure (the practice of making the details of security vulnerabilities public). I've contributed to the discussion (Norwegian), feel free to join in...

Recruiting and linkedin.com

2007-03-11T20:47:00.000+01:00

So one of the things that kept me busy before going on holiday was finishing off yet another round of recruitment. Since we're not a very large organisation we don't have an HR department to facilitate the process. Department managers handle most of the recruitment themselves. I like to take the 'shotgun' approach on getting the best candidates. This usually means (online) classifieds and getting candidates in from external recruitment agencies. This year added to the ammo something new: linkedin.

Most of you probably have heard of linkedin, the social network that allows you to set up connections to colleagues, ex-colleagues and re-unite with friends from university (if you haven't, visit www.linkedin.com). I have, as most users, infrequently maintained my profile for the last few years (click the linkedin profile on my blog to see my public profile), without really taking much advantage of the social network capabilities (other than keeping updated on what my old friends are busy with). So after reading Guy Kawasaki's praise to linkedin I decided to experiment with posting one of our job openings. I must say that I didn't expect much response, Bergen with it's 150.000 inhabitants isn't exactly Silicon Valley.

A few minutes after i posted the job opening I received three applications. Over the next couple of weeks more kept coming in. Unfortunately all of them where from places that would require significant relocation cost, not to mention the cost with just interviewing somebody from South America. But then suddenly: a Job application from someone actually living on the west-coast of Norway! To make a long story short, he got the job.

A job classified in the newspaper costs somewhere along the line of 3-5000$. A traditional online ad - 900$. Recruitment agency - 10.000$. Linkedin? 100$.

I know what you might be thinking and what my contacts in the recruitment agency will say; 'It's just a cheap classified ad, a full recruitment process will give you much more'. Wrong. Linkedin is a social network. Recruitment happens through your extended network and gives you the same possibilities and advantages as traditional recruitment through your network - but the effect and the scale of the network is enhanced ('on steroids') by using modern social software techniques.

Will I still use recruitment agencies? Yes. As a growing company we need the best candidates regardless of the source. But they will now hopefully be under some competition from linkedin.com...

The world is flat

2007-03-05T19:59:00.001+01:00

So i guess I sort of promised to stay away from blogging during my holiday. I had naively assumed that I could escape modern technology here in South Sinai, Egypt but not so. Free wi-fi in the hotel allows me to check my e-mails, do blogposts and talk to people for free using skype - all this from my windows based mobile phone.

One thing I am not going to use my phone for? Making phone calls. This is quite a paradox and I believe this is a significant observation. The over- regulated, mobile industry is becoming passe. Quickly. They are not so much a key factor in the flattening of the world (have me excused, I am 200 pages into Thomas Friedman's epic book on globalization 'the world is flat') as a hinder. It would cost me hundreds, probably thousands in roaming fees to receive and make phone calls, answer my e-mails and text messages and browsing the net using GPRS.

So just for the record, here's my prediction: mobile companies not able to transform their services to an open, cheap, deregulated and global platform will suffer a slow death.

Old classics

2007-03-03T09:00:00.000+01:00

Yup, this is pretty much the weather forecast for the next week (and actually for 200+ days of the year) in my hometown. Lucky for me then that I am spending next week on the beach somewhere far away...

There will probably not be any postings in the coming week so I thought this might be the opportunity to revisit some of my earlier posts (cheap trick?).

Personal data (august 05). Might help you understand some of the basic challenges with upholding the Personal Data Act and going web 2.0.
The business of software (October 05). My finest work, as if that matters :-) Pre-Ray Ozzie thoughts on Microsoft, SaaS and open source.
I want a new button part 1 and part 2 (January/April 06). How complex it really is to develop new features even without getting into the incomprehensible technology stuff...

Google Apps Premier Edition Followup

2007-03-01T00:17:00.000+01:00

So I've read a quite a few analysis on the significance on Google going enterprise through their new Google Apps Premier Edition. The funniest of them all comes from Fortune:

Google's enterprise ambitions are modest. It's unlikely to dislodge more than a
fraction of the 450 million users of Office. Even a rousing success would barely
move the needle for Google. If all 100,000 of its current users signed up, for
example, it'd mean an additional $5 million in annual revenue. That won't even
help defray food costs at Google's cafeterias.

So even if every current single one of their current users signed up, it would not even cover the expences of running Google's infamous, free gourmet cafeterias...

Perhaps not the best analysis written, allthough it scores high on entertainment. But they have a point; the biggest treat is probably not to microsoft but to a range of other up-and-coming SaaS offerings like 37signals collaboration suite. (point taken from SaaS Blogs).

Here's a few other comments worth reading up on:

Google Apps Premier Edition

2007-02-25T22:39:00.000+01:00

Two months ago I discussed the possibility for Google Apps to get a foothold in the Enterprise market and called for some changes for a few changes to their strategy to succeed in this marked. This week it seems that Google has moved a step closer to success in the enterprise marked by launching it's Google Apps Premier Edition. For $50 a year / account you'll get 99,9% uptime guarantee, 10GB e-mail account and an Extensible API for integrating your existing IT systems.

Allthough details are a bit thin it looks like Google also have dealt with my biggest objection against the enterprise using Google Apps and made ads "optional". But how cheap is 50$/year? For the commercial enterprise it is not bad. But for educational institutions I belive it is not cheap enough. It's for instance probably about three to five times the average price for a managed learning platform.

So my next prediction is that in a few months time we'll see a "Google Apps Education Premier Edition" that will give you no-ads, guaranteed uptime, limited support for 10-15$ a year/student :-)

I love customers

2007-02-22T22:16:00.000+01:00

Suppliers on the other hand I have no fondness of. Before you jump to conclusions; no it's not because you make money of customers and bleed money to suppliers... There is more to it than that...

My work has recently started to involve more dealings with suppliers and slightly less interaction with customers. It's an important and probably necessarily change; our company is growing to the point that we need more expertise and help from the outside world. It has unfortunately also thought me a few valuable lessons about why you should not complain about your customers but care for them with great affection. Here's why:

1. Customers educate you, by listening to them you will learn how to evolve your business. Suppliers needs to be educated to understand your needs. And they do not always want to learn.

2. Great customers pick you, but facing potential suppliers you have to pick out the good once from a heap of rotten apples.

One of the most horrendous examples I can think of is the content switch technology we installed last year in our ASP environment. After a few months use we started experiencing really poor performance, affecting thousands of users. It took us several days of support calls, problem solving and sheer agony to discover that the reason behind this was that we had reached a cap of 100 new SSL transactions per second on the content switch. (Which we easily fixed by buying more licenses). What did our supplier do wrong here?

1. They did not educate us on how their hardware calculated the use of SSL transactions so our own calculations ended up far from target.
2. The supplier provided us with no monitoring capability to actually see the status of the current SSL transaction thus living us in a very blind spot.
3. There was a physical cap on the licensing without alarming or logging when the limit for the license was about to be reached.

What if our company billed our customers for a number of licences they couldn't calculate themselves? And had no tools for actually logging the number of licenses used? Or started rejected logins without a warning if a customer reached his/hers maximum number of licenses? We would been seriously bashed by our customers and potentially out of business. F5 on the other hand is one of the worlds leading suppliers of layer seven content switches...

"Web 2.0" and education

2007-02-21T08:35:00.000+01:00

A lot of people with strong voices in the educational sector today preach "web 2.0" and social software as tools for modern education. If you look past the hype i believe that there is a lot to learn from social software such as flickr, myspace, digg and del.icio.us when building educational applications. Does this mean that the future software platform for education will be hosted by Google? Probably not, but that's a different discussion.

There are however two questions that should be raised to the evangelists of these applications in education.

1. How can we protect our students and pupils personal data and avoid giving away control over such data?

2. Is it OK to let our students and pupil be the subject of advertisement in order to take advantage of free services on the net?

Fell free to comment!

blackboard, patents, open source and more silliness

2007-02-06T22:01:00.000+01:00

In the latest chapter of the drama unfolding after Blackboard patented learning technologies, breathing and the latin alphabet, our American friends has issued a new statement pledging not to sue open source software.

Why? Because some of the strong forces behind open source learning technologies are big educational institutions and customers of Blackboard. I imagine they have received an amount of flack on this issue not seen alike since The SCO group sued a group of linux vendors.

And here's another funny thing about the pledge; feel free to earn money on supporting, hosting, training, maintaining or developing open source solutions. Just make sure it's not propreitay, OK? So commercial vendors built around a business model of open source is good but if you propreitary they will sue you. Silly.

Oh, and the plea also goes for "Home Grown Systems", meaning software developed by educational institutions themselves. Cool, they even invented a new word to make sure that their customers get it; We will not bite the hand that feeds us.

Todays presentation...

2007-01-11T19:56:00.000+01:00

For those of you attending our seminar in Holland today, here's todays presentation. I have experimented with the use of slideshare.net, feel free to use the "comment" function if you want to raise any questions.

(it's also possible to get a larger view of the presentation if you follow the link to slideshare.net)

Going local?

2007-01-11T19:36:00.000+01:00

One of the questions I hear quite often when I speak about our software to IT people representing potential customers is: 'can we install it locally?' I imagine that this is a question that can make any 'software as a service' vendor squirm and hesitate. I have certainly done so myself. So for future reference, here's my best answer to the question:

It is possible, but...

this is why you should strongly consider a service based model:

Look at all the successful social networking software that has dominated the net for the last couple of years. Youtube. Flickr. Del.ici.ous. Myspace. Digg. What do they have in common? They all greatly benefit (both financial and in functionality) from being centrally hosted. The future of the learning platform is to combine it's enterprise solutions with community services using tricks from social networking software. Ergo is the future of the learning platform a hosted solution.
A learning platform is a high availability, 24/7 platform that needs being looked after around the clock, weekends and bank holidays. It requires special competence and expensive hardware solutions. Leave the technical difficulties to a 3rd party and keep the focus on the pedagogical implementation.

The year in review

2007-01-04T22:40:00.000+01:00

Happy new year! I hope you all had a great new year celebration! I spent new years in Edinburgh together with wife and friends. Edinburgh is known for their great new year celebration that is in the same league as Sidney and New York, with 100.000 sold tickets for the street party in princess street. Just a shame that the whole ting was canceled an hour before the party was about to start... :-)

I guess this is the season for looking back at events that has taken place over the last 12 months. I have to admit myself that I'm often way to impatient to stop and reflect over how things develop, so as a mini-new-years resolution I've taken it upon me to compile an unofficial "year in review" of the (mostly) positive stuff that has happened with our company for the last year.

Feel free to comment and suggest updates to this list!

January

It's learning is, as one of two companies, added to the conformance list at IMS Global Learning Consortium .
It's learning anounces it's partnership with UK company Viglen at the BETT SHOW 2007.
For the third year, it's learning and the norwegian directorate for education and training agrees on working together to let pupils perform their graduating exams on the learning platform. Around 3000 exams are later handed in using it's learning.

February

First agreement signed with customer that allows it's learning to be integrated with Microsoft Learning Gateway using LDAP Authentication, Web-Services, Web-parts and ISA Server for true single-sign-on.

March

The city of Tromsø is the location for our annual norwegian user conference, attracing about 160 visitors from all over the contry.
It's learning and viglen starts the process with qualifying for the BECTA learning platform framework agreement in the UK. Amongst the keynote speaker is professor Wim Veen/Delft University of technology and professor Arne Krokan/NTNU. They will later form up with it's learning to offer a popular leadership training programme for principals and management in schools.
Our hosting center installs it's most expencive and advanced piece of hardware so far: a DELL/EMC CX-300 Direct Attached Storage to meet the requirement for capacity, reliability and speed.
Øyvind joins it's learning as a technical writer in the product development team.

April

Birte joins it's learning as a user experience specialist in the product development team.

May

Gjermund joins our technical consulting team.
Kjetil joins our sales team.
Torbjørn unfortunately left us and moved on to become a lead web developer in CMA Contiki AS. We still keep an eye on him via his blog kjempekjekt.com ...

June

Tine joins our Service Desk to expand our efforts do give our customers 2nd line support.

July

It's learning and dutch company ephorus announces it's seamless integration between the dutch plagiarism control application and the it's learning learning platform.
I got married :-)
We install two BIG-IP content switches as a part of our ongoing effort to improve the scaleability and robustness of our hosting center. The content switches will help us with load balacing issues, server pooling, SSL termination and cacheing.

August

Beate joins our team of pedagogical staff as a training coordinator.
New functionality is released in it's learning, including the support for learning objectives, national curriculum and full support for the Danish language.

September

Bergen Kommune with it's 90 schools in primary education chooses it's learning.
Support for Spanish is added to it's learning.

October

It's learning and NTNU is featured in Dagbladet, one of Norways largest tabloid newspapers, for it's innovative mobile learning project.

November

Beta testing of the new edition of it's learning (version 3.1) starts. The new version includes support for blogging and eportefolios, mobile edition, support for proxy tool and better internationalization.
[UPDATED] it's learning is by Deloitte rated on the top-10-list of the fastest growing ICT companies in Norway the last 5 years. it's learning also ranks high on the Deloitte EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) FAST 500 list.

December

University of Copenhagen, the biggest nordic university with 50.000 users, chooses it's learning as their new learning platform.
After nine months of work, testing and waiting, it's learning and Viglen Ltd. qualifies for the BECTA Learning Services Framework Agreement .

Will consumer-based technologies invade corporate computing?

2006-12-27T14:25:00.001+01:00

The Economist ran an interesting piece in their special Christmas double issue about how consumer technologies are migrating to the enterprise. As an example, Arizona State university has migrated 65.000 students from its own in-house groupware applications onto Google Apps for your domain.

I believe strongly that this is a significant move that indicates what the future of enterprise computing will look like. But it's hardly new; learning platforms have for several years been a mostly software-as-a-service driven service and many large educational organizations has (perhaps without realising) taken the first steps towards migrating their systems to web-based services.

This raises one question; why has the learning platform in many cases been the "pioneer" in getting large organizations to choose Software-as-a-Service? The answer: the IT Directors, or more spesifically- the absence of the IT director. The purchase of learning platforms are largely run by end-users (teachers, school administrators, etc). This makes the organization focus less on hardware and technological perks.

So if you are a company that today (like Google, flickr, del.icio.us, digg, etc) get your business directly from consumers, is all you have to do find a way to circumvent the IT Director? Hardly. I see three major hurdles that must be faced for a consumer based company to successfully invade corporate computing:

Pricing
Most of the successful consumer services today get their revenues from text ads such as Ad-Sense. But a large company will probably not want to have their employees being distracted by adverts. For a university (at least in Europe) it would be politically difficult to finance their services through allowing their pupils and students to be subject to adverts.

Sales organization
Selling to the enterprise is something completely different than selling to the enterprise. You will need a sales organization that can handle large tenders, do key account work and "kick in doors".

Ownership
If you sign up for flickr you grant them a limited ownership of your personal data. They can expand their services an capitalize on you as a customer within the boundaries of the responsibility they have as a data controller. I believe that the enterprise, being a university or a large company, will not want to (and might very well not be legally allowed to) pass on their ownership of the data.

So will Google succeed with their Apps for your domain strategy? Probably - but it will need some modification. More on that in an upcoming post...

We're in!

2006-12-22T17:59:00.001+01:00

Months of hard work has finally been crowned with success; BECTA announced today that it's learning together with our UK partner Viglen has qualified for the Learning Platform Services Framework agreement!

What does this mean? A huge market for learning platforms will now open up in the UK. Ten suppliers has qualified for the tender so there's no free lunch; there's still a lot of work to be done before we can say we have succeded in the UK maket. But with a government target of providing all learners with an online personalised learning space by 2008 there is no doubth there's a potential of growth for our company. And the more customers that will join us - the more resources will be available for furter development of the product!

Microsoft Learning Gateway

2006-12-18T15:48:00.000+01:00

Before you read on, I need to make one thing clear. This post is not me trying to bad-mouth a competitor. I wouldn't do that in a blog-post, nor would I do that in a sales meeting or anywhere else outside our offices four walls. Microsoft is in many ways a partner of us, we use their technology extensively, we integrate towards many of their products and we do joint projects with them in several of our markets. Sometimes (mistakenly) what is known as Microsoft Learning Gateway might be considered a competing product to our own - but it's not. This blog should therefore only be considered a friendly advice to our friends in Microsoft.

"Microsoft Learning Gateway" in it current version has not become a success in the educational markets that I have a detailed insight into (and probably not anywhere else). Why?

1. It's a concept, not a product. It's a concept consisting of quite a few products; MS Sharepoint, Active Directory, ISA Server, SQL Server, Class Server, Exchange Server, Communication Server and Windows Server. The concept is to big and complex for anything other than very large educational organisations. (Please note that several of these products are very successful in the educational market so my criticism in not directed against the different products but the concept itself).

2. Integration. Integration between the different products described above is not something that is provided out of the box. There are available components for integration but they are not "out of the box" and you will probably have to write a whole lot of your own code to get the different servers to work together in a way that satisfy your requirements.

3. Delivery model. So how do you deliver 5-10 different server products to school? - "Here's the installation files, see ya!" No way schools of even medium sized local authorities or universities have the competence to implement and maintain this solution themselves. Microsoft simply doesn't offer hosting as a part of their solution. They have to turn to partners to supply this type of service. This makes the whole process

4. Lack of multi-language support. In Norway we have two official languages. There is no way you can commonly implement a learning platform that doesn't support the use of both languages. MLG does support different languages - but not on the same instance of the application.

5. Class server. The only piece of software in the MLG platform specifically engineered for the educational market is Microsoft Class Server. It is a very old fashioned piece of software that requires a client installation (for teachers) and basically doesn't do much more than create assignments.

6. Where does the MIS fit in? If there is one piece of software that you will find in pretty much any educational institution in Europe it is the "MIS" - or "student administrative system". This is the back-office administrative software that creates classes, prints diplomas, stores assessment data, absence, etc. The MLG solution simply does not take this into consideration, leaving a gaping hole in the "complete" architecture MLG is trying to provide.

7. Price. Keeping in mind the number of products and services you need included in this service and you might be up for a surprise when the actual cost of the solution comes on the table.

8. Sharepoint. I'm not saying that sharepoint isn't a good product - but it is no more than a framework for building up complex intranet and collaborative solutions. You have to fill it with these structures (sites, groups, etc). This is far to complex for any teacher to do themselves.

And I could probably go on even further... But what is the solution to these obstacles? The answer is simple; start listening to your own boss! 28th of October 2005 Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie outlined Microsoft's new strategy in an infamous internal memo. It marked the start of Microsoft's pursuit for a piece of the emerging "software as a service" market. (More than a year later I still think that Ray Ozzie's strategy might not have found it's way to every corner of the Microsoft universe...) I strongly believe that if Microsoft want to succeed in the educational sector they need to build a strong enterprise "software as a service" solution, not unlike what we see the contours of with the office live services launched last month. Building these services will be the easy part- not cannibalizing on existing partners will however be hard.

"Just install it on a server and it's up and running".

2006-11-19T21:55:00.000+01:00

These words fell on a conference I attended about the digital learning environment earlier this week. The speaker was talking about the convenience of Moodle an open source learning platform that has been pushed forward by the "free software " hype. I could expect this kind of naive statement from salespeople (wich in general think that IT staff only are in the server rooms to break stuff) but from an IT organisation? Come on, you know better...

Hosting a learning platform, being open source or not, is hard and expensive work that require special skills from IT professionals. A learning platform isn't an e-mail server or a home page, it is a enterprise critical application that require 99,9% uptime 24/7. From time to time servers fail, power supplies fails, the network fails, harddrive fails, network card fails, router fails, application servers crashes, web server crashes, etc. Even so, your hosting environment must keep running, 24/7. No student preparing the night before the exam will forgive you if your learning platform crashes because of hardware or software failture. (read my previous post on redundant systems here: http://jabsjoblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/redundant-systems.html)

I'll let you in on a secret - our hosting environment, www.itslearning.com today consists of more than 50 servers. We have staff on duty 24/7 to deal with issues that happens (and issues DO happen) hopefully before they have any consequense for our users. The job isn't over when your learning platform, being open source or not, is installed on your servers. It has just started.

It's learning 3.1 beta launched

2006-11-19T21:37:00.000+01:00

The beta program for the next release of our software it's learning has been opened. If you wish to participate in the beta go to:

http://beta.itslearning.com

Some highlights from the next version of our software:
- Blogging and ePortfolios! It's learning now offer students and employee to integrate their ePortfolios with standard blogging functionality. This makes our VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) just as much a PLE (Personal Learning Environment. I might have to move my blog again...
- Mobile edition. Access your course content, calendar and messages from any mobile phone.
- Digital Exam. Our exam tool is now open to all of our customers, not only the ones participating in the government-run digital exam project.
- Better international support. Studying abroad and allways missing the deadline of your assignments? Not anymore.
- Lesson Planner.
- Proxy tool support. It's learning now supports IMS tools interoperability guidelines. This will make it possible to integrate 3rd party tools with the native it's learning tools.

So what are you waiting for, sign up for the beta!

I've been censored!

2006-10-03T21:51:00.000+02:00

The frontier of freedom of speach, blogging. Don't we all feel unjust and rage when we hear stories about imprisoned iranian bloggers or Microsoft and Google sucking up to the Chinese government. Well it happend to me. Posting an innocent rant in Norwegian on my more casual, private blog, Microsoft accuses me of profanity...

Well, apart from the fact that this is a silly bug - what does this tell us?

- Censorship is a bad idea.

- Automatic something that is a bad lets it even more redicilous.

- Microsoft Live Spaces hasn't done a very good job when it comes to localization of their software.

SaaS and education

2006-09-14T23:22:00.000+02:00

Here's a few thoughts on why a single instance, multi-tenant solution is an ideal architecture for the educational sector.

1. Price vs. SLA.

Educational institutions need enterprise solutions without paying enterprise solution fees. It is very expencive for a school, university or even Local Authority to offer 24/7, robust, high performing software.

2. Uniformity

Schools or universities are largely run in the same way. This makes it much easier to run a single instance application across several institutions. Even integration requirements are often the same and can to a large extent be solved using industry standards. And think about the rise of federated authentication that is already finding it's way into the educational sector.

3. Competence

It is virtually impossible for a small school to have the competence available for running a complex piece of software with hight demands to performance and robustness. Even local authorities and universities will not be able to recruit, train and dedicate the resources needed for running this type of solutions. And not to mention - they are often loosing out in competition with private companies over the smartest brains.

4. Distributed work space

Students and teachers are not working 9-5 in an office building. The work from home, different campuses, from abroad, go on field trips, etc. The Internet is the ideal distribution channel for the applications they need to access.

5. Risk

Educational institutions are in general even more dependent of a predictable cost model than a private institution. Unpredictable expenses are a bad thing. Many SaaS vendors will give you a very simple and predictable price model that means that it is easier to budget than software, hardware and services.

Jumping the gravy train?

2006-08-29T22:12:00.000+02:00

This one is for us developers and IT geeks out there. Rarely have I laughted, felt embarrased, nodded and lowered my head in shame from reading an arcle. This one is brilliant:

http://www.hacknot.info/hacknot/action/showEntry?eid=89

Here are some memorable quotes:

"Of all the failed and troubled software development efforts you've been involved in have one thing in common element ... you."

"How many companies, do you suppose, are now left with monolithic J2EE systems containing entity beans galore,that were written as the result of some consultant's fascination with application servers, and their compulsion to develop a distributed system even if one wasn't required."

"You've got legacy VB applications that can only be maintained by the VB guys, legacy J2EE systems that can only be maintained by the J2EE guys, a few .NET applications that only the .NET guys can comprehend, and that python script that turned out to be unexpectedly useful, which no one has been game to touch since the python enthusiast that wrote it resigned last year."

mySQL interview

2006-08-28T19:35:00.000+02:00

mySQL is one of the most successful open source companies around today. They are also probably some of the best companies around when it comes to making the open source business model work. Running mysql as a core part of our own product we certainly know - we're being pick pocketed by the energetic Swedes in all possible manners :-)

Here's an interesting interview with the CEO of mySQL, Marten Micklos.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/08/ten_questions_w_2.html

A few interesting facts to mention that might bust a few myths about open source development:

- A majority of the key developers are working full-time for mySQL.

- Most of their bugs are fixed by their own team.

- The NASA mars rovers runs mysql :-)

Software-as-a-Service

2006-08-27T13:39:00.000+02:00

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) seems to be the buzzword of the year. Quite funny actually having been in the SaaS business since 1999 to see it suddenly being on the map as the next big thing.

Still, looking behind the hype there are now quite a few useful resources showing up on the Internet that explains both the business- and the technical side of the SaaS business. Microsoft just put up their own SaaS architecture site on msdn and I have to say that so far it looks very interesting. And being more into the enterprise business than the consumer market (that seems to receive all the hype) it is very pleasing to see that they seem to focus on the enterprise side of SaaS.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/saas/

(There will be more posts following up the SaaS subject- Consider it a soft start...)

Portals in education

2006-06-16T13:27:00.000+02:00

Portals is the new buzz in education. We recently had a portal seminar in Oslo and invited both customers and others to contribute with their experiences regarding portal implementations. Here's some of my thoughts on portals in education and challenges surrounding implementing them.

So what is really a portal
One of our speakers last week had a good analogy for a portal: it's like an empty book shelf. It doesn't look very impressive before you start filling it with content.

In my head a portal is about collecting content and services in a personalized view, organized in a way that resembles real-life organizational units. Sounds easy enough? So how come it's so difficult to implement portals? Here are some of my thoughts on the hurdles that you will meet in a portal project and need to conquer:

1. Identity management. If you want a personalized portal you will also need the services within the portal to be personalized. This requires that every service within the portal can relate to the same identities as the portal itself. You will have to make sure that your identities are the same in the catalogue service, group ware application, VLE/LMS, etc. etc. This will typically require some sort of basic user data integration.

2. Common authentication regime. So if your portal is personalized not only will you need to make sure identities are handles across all of your personalized services. Personalization also means authentication and if you want your services to work together seamlessly you must ideally implement some sort of "Single Sign On" (SSO) mechanism. And all the services you want to fill into your portal will have to support the same the same mechanism. This is especially hard if you have products that have proprietary authentication systems.

3. Portal compatible services. Not every service is built for integrating within a portal. And even those who are might support different standards like "portlets" or "web parts". If you start off your portal project thinking that "everything" will be available inside the portal window you will be disappointed when you discover that most applications are not build to be broken into portal components and seamlessly integrated into a fancy portal tool. Don't assume anything in terms of compatibility between your portal tool and other applications. The portal vendor will probably tell you that since they support a "standard" integration interface all applications can be integrated. This is a flat out lie.

4. Organization Chart. Just as you need to have all your users managed between your portal and services you will also need to have a common "organization Chart" to relate to within your organization. This will help your users identify with the correct parts of your organization and information can be sent out filtered on the righ groups of users. If every piece of news you present in your portal is distributed to everyone it will loose it relevance and be discarded. The question is - what is the right organizational chart and where to you maintain these data. And often the answer is: The organization chart is not very clear and master data about the organization is distributed between different systems.

5. Information strategy
It is hard to make information clear, precise and relevant for a group of, say, 10.000 users. Even if you manage to solve challenge 1-4 you will still have to put a lot of time and effort into establishing a good information strategy. Define responsibilities, roles and routines that encourages your organization to follow a common information strategy. Identify threats to your information strategy and try to eliminate them by improving the process surrounding publishing information. And of course - make sure that everybody involved knows how to use the tools involved in publishing information.

6. Top-management involvement
Since a portal involves so many parts of your organisation having a successfull implementation will be very hard without commitment from top management in your organisation. Different departments might have different agendas and priorities and perhaps even more inside public organisations.

Retro

2006-06-05T22:22:00.000+02:00

Looking through some old powerpoints I came over this screenshot from the time it's learning was only a student project (spring -99). Great colours :-)

A failed conformance program?

2006-05-28T20:47:00.000+02:00

Last December I wrote that we where the among the first two companies that where enrolled in the IMS Global Learning consortium conformance program. Six months later we are still one out of just two vendors enrolled in this program. Why? Is the program failing?

It's probably to soon to say. First of all I hope that IMS has a few more compliant systems being presented at their annual conference "alt-I-lab" taking place in June (It's in Indianapolis so I doubt our travel budgets will do anything other than prevent us from going there). I guess a program like this will also not gain momentum before in reaches a critical mass of vendors (It's the chicken or the egg dilemma).

But most important of all: Our customers must speak up and demand evidence of compliance. I've just been through a pile of tenders without seeing much interest for interopability or conformance. With a couple of honorable exceptions our customers are not very involved in the standardization work going on.

Tore Hoel at the Norwegian e-standard project also points out that we haven't been very good at marketing this ourselves. Consider this a small contribution on my part.

Dear customers - your open source software isn't free!

2006-05-19T17:15:00.000+02:00

First things first: I have nothing against free/open source software. Even if I'm working for a software developer I do not think it drives us out of business or makes us all communists. In fact; I think it can be a reasonable business model (Read my previous post on the business of software if you find the topic interesting).

But one thing fires me up - the misconception of open source software being free. It's not. It might not even be cheaper than commercial software. Shock! My employer typically meets three types of competition when we offer our software platform (offered as a ASP service): Other commercial vendors, open source and home-brew software. And I believe that for many of our customers the commercial alternative is the cheapest.

Why? Because of what is commonly known as "Total Cost of Ownership". The software license is usually a small part of the equation. There are a number of other cost elements that must be added to the equation: Training, hardware, maintenance, monitoring, cost of down-time, etc.

So if Open Source is not free, why choose it? Actually, there are several good reasons for doing so:

1. You can download the code, modify it and share it with a broad community. But ask yourself - will I be doing this? Will I be allocating resources to do this work? As software developers - we can benefit from this. But as an educational institution? Software development is a complex process - and certainly not free.

2. Other people will develop new functionality and fix bugs that you will benefit from. But say you have a live environment with the software running perfectly and somebody releases new functionality that you really want to merge with your existing solution. Will you go through the process of downloading this new piece of code, merge the code, test the code and put the code into a production environment. No. You'll end up hiring consultants for this part of the job.

3. You can develop functionality that suits your own needs. This I hear a lot when customers complain about feature requests not being implemented... But again, unless you have a team of system architects, developer, testers and project managers this will not happen.

Does this mean that open source software is not a competitor to more traditional companies as my own employer? Absolutely not. Just as we offer our product as a hosted service there will be companies that offers hosted open source software. But please don't listen to the sales pitch saying that "open source software" is best. Compare cost and functionality - companies that need to sell their software by focusing on it being open source probably don't do well in these areas.

Don't be shy folks!

2006-05-17T17:50:00.000+02:00

Google Analytics says you're out there. So does my feedburner statistics. Don't be shy to leave a comment!

For the Norwegian readers - Happy 17th of may / gratulerer med dagen! And if you want to leave a comment in norwegian that's OK too...

Love Me Tender

2006-05-15T18:48:00.000+02:00

Public Tenders [2]. Love them or hate them. Basically every company with customers in the public sector have a relationship to them. The idea behind a public tender is that since it is really the tax payers money that goes into the purchase it is important to find a mechanism to make the decision as objective as possible. This will also prevent public corruption and make it possible for up and coming vendors to get engaged in new markets.

In the EU/EEC region there are clear regulations on when a purchase must be put out as a tender - and every nation can adopt their own national rule as long as they are in accordance with the EU/EEC law. Here in Norway we are tender crazy - and the national limit was just raised from 200.000 to 500.000 (less than half of the EU regulations).

I have nothing against tenders in general. The idea behind tenders is great. Unfortunately many tenders are really bad. And bad tenders does not only lead to a hell of a lot of work - it also completely undermines the purpose of the public tender - to be a tool to prevent corruption and unnecessarily public spending.

Here are some of the most common issues I find in public tenders:
1. Tenders tend to be WAY to voloumus . We have a famous saying in Norwegian "More chefs leaves more of a mess". Sometimes it seems like nobody has had the heart to say NO to any of the functional requirements that has been proposed in the preparation of the tender. Why come with 200 functional requirements for a purchase estimated at perhaps 70-80.000 euros?
2. They lack a clear message. Some tenders tend to be really unclear on what they ACTUALLY want to solve. A ton of requirements doesn't necessarily give a clear picture of what is supposed to be solved.
3. Functional requirements contradicts each other. It is actually one of the most common problems with tenders. Requirement no 34 could be: "the system must authenticate their users through the central LDAP server". And then in requirement no 35: "every password stored in the application must be encrypted with the MD5 algorithm".
4. Functional requirements are not relevant. If you are looking for a web-based software why ask if it runs on a terminal server client?
5. Vendors get away with it if they lie. If you answer "YES" to a question that might have been really be "NO WAY" chances are that you will score a point for that. Requirements should be througherly analyzed - cheaters should be disqualified.
6. It's all black and white. So either you have a blog functionality or you don't, right? Rubbish. I'm sure some vendors that would only let you upload html files would describe this as a blogging functionality. But other vendors might think that you'll need a WYSIWYG editor, the possibility for commenting and perhaps also RSS support to answer yes to a question like that. Again analyze the answers and give grades based on the quality of the actual functionality.
6. Price tends to be too important. If you want a cheap car - say so. But don't ask for a Rolls Royce solution if you are not prepared to pay for more than a Kia. Worst case you'll get something that looks like a Rolls Royce but doesn't even run like a car after two weeks. You'll be better off asking for the KIA then.
7. You are asked for things that possibly couldn't be done. Sometimes a requirement would be that the solutions must be integrated with a 3. party product. But what if the vendor of the 3. Party product refuse?
8. Total cost of ownership. I will be the first to admit that calculating the total cost of ownership is very hard. But if one vendor says that training is 10.000 euros and the other vendor says that training not necessarily because the product is "so easy to use" - do you really think you'll save 10.000 euros by signing up with the second vendor..?
9. Presentations. Some tender does not allow for presentations. Would you ever hire a person without meeting him/her? No. You should not hire companies either without meeting them. Use this opportunity to go into detailed questions on the requirements to understand if the vendor really
10. Negotiations. A lot of tenders does not allow for negotiations. I just don't get the logic. If you want to get the most out of your money the strongest card you can play would be negotiations.

Politics and technology

2006-05-09T21:38:00.000+02:00

As a previous student politician and student lobbyist during my years at university I know that there's often a knowledge vacuum in the Ministries and the different committees in parliament. This vacuum is usually eagerly filled up by bureaucrates and lobbyists and this doesn't necessarily need to be a negative thing. It's part of the democratic process.

One of the areas I believe to have the biggest knowledge vacuum is technology related topics. The lack of actual political (and bureaucratical) understanding of the new media, internet and new technologies sometimes makes it too much of an easy prey for lobbyist's and other special interest groups. In my opinion one of the worst examples of this must be the decision to build out a new digital terrestrial network for television in Norway. Why? Because the infrastructure is already out there. It's called the internet. (I've even written a post earlier about the next digital revolution - Wireless IP).

And even worse - the new network has serious technical flaws compared to the internet. It doesn't have return path so in effect it's not interactive (unless you combine it with... Say... Internet). It has also a fairly limited capacity, costs a lot of taxpayers money to set up and will require everybody to buy a digital set-top box to receive the signals. It is also broadcasting, meaning that it's not going to support Video On Demand (VOD) and other type of personalization.

So why have three major Norwegian players (NRK, TV2 and Telenor Broadcasting) within TV production and TV distribution stuck their head together and lobbied through this solution (which they are also going to own)? Simple. They are very afraid to loose control over TV distribution - much like the music industry is about to loose control over the music distribution to solutions like iTunes and MSN Music. If TV distribution suddenly started to shift to IP traffic this would be especially bad for the TV companies that are more distributors than content producers. Suddenly independent production companies would choose to get their content distributed over the internet - this would especially be bad for Tv2, Telenor Broadcasting and Viasat.

So why am I writing this? Apart from letting off steam I also believe that this is a bit of an analogy to some of the stuff that we sometimes see on a departmental or governmental level in the educational sector. It's not always the best solutions that wins - knowledge can be a subjective thing.

Want to learn about blogs, wikis and podcasts?

2006-05-02T23:29:00.000+02:00

So I'm on the road again - currently stuck in a small but charming place in Sweden called Karlstad. Since Sweden doesn't have a very built out domestic airline network I flew to Oslo and drove a rental car over the border. The woman at the Avis desk obviously had her first day in her new job (apparent by the college hanging over her shoulder) so I tried a bit of charming cheek - "you know, at some point you have to teach her to upgrade a customer so why not do it now"? It didn't work. And even worse, two college's standing next to me got an Mercedes E-class upgrade.

So I had a bit of time to do some thinking on my way to Sweden in my rented Peugeot 207. One of the random things I realized was that I still haven't credited my number one source of reading when it comes to business, technology, internet and new media. Wired? Business 2.0? Red Herring? Nope. The Economist. I have been a subscriber now for a couple of years and quickly realized that most of the glossy mags where a waste of time compared to this old fashioned magazine.

Here's an example of an in-depth analysis of the New media (wikis, blogs, etc). It doesn't assume that you know much about this to start with but still analyzes the effect of this far deeper than many other articles.

What do you believe in?

2006-05-01T23:00:00.000+02:00

I must admit I love to discuss religion with the faithful. As an atheist I believe that science, knowledge and just plain sense defeats blind faith. Especially in the programming community. So that's why I love posts like this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joestagner/archive/2006/05/01/587567.aspx

So the message? It's not about whats "good or evil". It's about what is business-smart.

Pricing a project

2006-04-27T15:13:00.000+02:00

One of my longest running responsibilities at my current employer is pricing projects for our customers. I am continuously receiving request for proposals from our marketing and sales department, customers and partners. It is relatively complex work because there are usually quite a lot of pit-falls on the way to creating a good proposal. Here's some of them:

Is the requirements clear to everybody involved (including the customer)?
Is the customer prepared to pay somewhat near to what this would actually cost or is it an unrealistic request?
Is the request for proposal really initiated in an effort to improve customer service - a cry for help?
Do we have the time, resources or competence to actually deliver this project?
How good are our estimates?
Is the customer demanding a fixed project price and how much risk must be added to the estimate?
If another project ends up extending all your deadlines - how do you minimize the impact on new projects?

Here's a great article I came over the other day on the topic of pricing. For some reason I find comfort in seeing other people struggling with the same dilemmas as I do - especially when they come up with good answers.

I want a new button part 2 (or how to handle feature requests)

2006-04-23T22:10:00.000+02:00

A couple of months ago I wrote about how the complexity of a software development process is not making it as easy as a customer might think to do changes "on the fly". But how should you take into consideration all the feature requests coming in from your customers when developing new releases of an already well established piece of software? This is a question that is probably haunting many software developers - and is indeed the spark to many heated debates inside (and around) the company I'm working for.

There is basically three things you can do with a feature request:
A) Ignore it - not even considering the value of the input.
B) Discard it - considering the request to have less value than already planned functionality .
C) Implement it - considering the request to be of so high value that it should be prioritized in the development process.

If you choose not to ignore incoming feature requests you will need some kind of decision process leading up to a feature request being discarded or approved for implementation. Depending on the size of your organization, customer demand, the complexity of your product, etc. This process can either be quite simple or very complex. The simplest decision process I've ever come over is from the funky 37signals. They simply read the feature request and delete it. They figure that if it's good it will keep bubbling up and those are the important ones. However - it still is a decision process, good or bad.

Our customers are an eager crowd when it comes to suggesting new functionality in coming versions of the product. I have to admit that I have a lot of mixed feelings inside when I meet the most enthusiastic end users. I get very happy because they enjoy our product so much but I also feel a bit uneasy when confronted (as we always are) with the "few" feature requests that would make our product "perfect" - even the most efficient or heavyweight software developers could never fulfill more than a few percent of all the feature requests that hit their organization. But how to control the expectations from an eager crowd of customers? Transparency. I believe strongly that if the decision process is transparent and the result of the decision process is clear to the customer you control the expectations. If they get to see the big picture they might also be more willing to understand that their feature requests discarded.

In this perspective, perhaps the 37signals decision process is not really such a great idea after all - if it is all in the minds of the developers reading the feature requests no transparency is created and your customers will continue to knock down your walls. But there is another dimension to this too of course - the type of market, customers and application you are actually developing. 37signals create software for the single end user - a company that has big organizations as clients might be forced to pay more attention to their customers need.

Some people might claim that if you spend too much time listening to your customer you will not be much of an innovator. And they are of course right - if all you do is try to fulfill customers requests you will probably end up with something that actually doesn't fulfill anybody's requests. But if you leave out your customers from your innovation process my bet is that you will soon find yourself in the same place as these guys...

Cool gadget and great blog

2006-04-20T07:40:00.000+02:00

Like many other grown-up-geeks I love the occasional gadget. The problem is that most of them usually ends up at the bottom of a drawer after a few brief days of excitement. Because of this my every day gadget collection only consist of a simple mp3 player, a pulse watch with internet connection and a cheap bike computer.

But after reading eirikso's last post I am considering getting a new one:
http://www.eirikso.com/2006/04/18/the-perfect-presentation-remote/
Perhaps not even for myself but I know of a couple of college's that could find the vibrating timer pretty useful...

I would also recommend visiting my former colleague and ex-Accenture consultant Eirik Solheims blog. He recently won a "golden blog award" in one of Norway's biggest online newspapers and certainly falls into the category "grown-up-geek".

Customer Service

2006-04-14T10:18:00.000+02:00

For a while I've been wanting to write a blog on how our company has changed it approach to customer service over the last couple of years. Turns out I don't have to; here's an article that basically says it all: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/the_art_of_cust.html .

This has also earned Guy Kawasaki a place on my list of regular readings(Also known as OMPL).

Get to the point laddie!

2006-04-12T14:09:00.000+02:00

Some moderate criticism has been raised regarding the length of my blogs... What can I say - I have a lot on my mind :-) But for once I'll be very brief - Visit http://spaces.msn.com/artvendelay/ if you want to see my latest attempt at organizing my online life. Using Microsoft recent endorsement of RSS feed and the MetaWeblog API has made it much more interesting to consider MSN Spaces as a blog tool.

However I cannot promise that my next post isn't going to be excruciating in length and content.

How to end up with all the blame and none of the praize

2006-01-26T20:09:00.000+01:00

Today I feel the need to let out some steam when it comes to one of the most frustrating things that I have ever had responsibility for: Maintaining integrations between our own applications and ailien systems. This might be due to just one too many of those phonecalls from an angry customer blaiming you for something that is... well... perhaps not exactly our fault.

This all started the day we where competing over one of our first big customers. One of the clear requirements for this customer was "you have to be able to integrate with system X". Being really keen on this specific customer we managed to get the vendor of "System X" to implement a primitive interface so we could fulfill our cusomer's ambition. This integration is an extensive user and usergroups export of data - and is basically the foundation of the user data in our application.

So keen where we to integrate that we didn't really draw up many requirements for this integration. But every night we get a full dump (snapshot) of the master systems user data. It didn't take us long to realize that data snapshots are not very usefull. It was probably a phonecall going something like this:

Customer: Hey! Why aren't any of our users deleted from your application? This is rubbish! Users must be deleted when they graduate!

We could of course have said: "Well you should ask supplier X to deliver us transactional data so that we know when to actually delete data". But we knew that supplier X was probably not be interested or capable so we implemented a snapshot analyzer that compared two snapshots and out of that came the transcational state. Great! So now we could actually see when data disseapeared from System X - and we could safely delete users from our own system.

So if the first customer phone call sounded agitated the next phonecall was probably ten times worse: "Hey! We just lost 5000 of our users! How the *** did you just manage to delete all those user accounts! This is crazy!" And indeed it was. The not-so-reliable system X had managed to crash parts of their snapshot routine so only half of the actual user data was transferred in the snapshot data package. Our fine piece of snapshot analyzer software could only interpret this as a massive delete of all the users missing from the previous day.

So we did what most programmers do - after a couple of phonecalls we decided to code our way out of the problem... We implemented a fairly straight forward system - if there was more than X number of updates the import was stopped an an e-mail was sent to our and the customers support staff.

Not long after we had customers all over the place phoneing to ask why their user data import had stopped. We thought at last that we had a good answer for this: "There are too many changes comitted. If you are sure that these changes are correct we will run the import". Creating exactly the opposite reaction anticipated. The customer was raging: "How the **** do I know how many changes I have committed to my user database the last day?!!? Fix this!"

This was probably when I realised that we where heading down a very painful and irreversible road.

Well - I guess it is through mistakes you gain your best experiences - so here's a handful of my best experiences:

Don't try to code your way out of a functional or architectural problem.
Don't let customer requirements force you into building eternally bad solutions.
Draw up very specific requirements for your integration interfaces and make sure that both customer and external systems understands how to live up to them.
NEVER let anybody deliver you a data snapshot when what you need is the transactional status of the data. Also known as "INSERT", "UPDATE" and "DELETE".
Do not integrate towards any system without full cooperation, ownership and support of that system. It takes two to live in a successfull marriage.

We're hiring!

2006-01-19T18:55:00.000+01:00

We're expanding and are hoping to find seven more gifted people for our organization. Have a look at:

http://www.itsolutions.no/jobb

I want a new button!

2006-01-09T21:30:00.000+01:00

Having been part of a growing company for a few years - and perhaps not at least witnessing the maturing of our product - it's sometimes funny to look back and see how much some things have changed over the last three years. With growth comes the need for routines, organizational scalability and professionalism. Not only being an ISV but also an ASP means that the impact of change grows exponential.

When I first moved into our (back then) very tiny office (it's now only small) I remember one of my team members getting a phone call from a customer wanting a "new button". In the course of a few hours it was developed, built, "tested" and released into our ASP environment. Ok - so perhaps this came as more of a surprise for the dozen other customers running the same ASP application - but these surprises where usually considered pleasant.

Today change is not pleasant. We have gone down from updating our application every fortnight to having ONE yearly release. What used to be a few lines in an e-mail (if anybody remembered to send it out) is now a 30 page document in five different languages. Testing is not longer done on the principle of "if it builds it works" and it is now not possible to phone up a developer and demanding some new fancy functionality (even though some some still try).

Has the whole process gone more bureaucratic? Is the loss of flexibility and need for more robust routines meaning that we cannot deliver the same level of service that we used to do? Yes and No. It is certainly more work involved in any change done to our software or services. But the benefit, the fact that our company grows every day another customer signs up should greatly outweigh the downside of this robustness. Still it is something that is hard to understand for both customers and perhaps also our sales force that used to think that the flexibility was a great sales argument.

So why all the commotion when it comes to developing new functionality? Well here's some of the most apparent reasons why:

Return On Investment (ROI). Is the proposed functionality adding value to you and your customer in a way that will justify that exactly this functionality is prioritize for further development? (usually a management decision).
Functional requirements. It is important to spend some amount of time going through the functional requirements for the software. Even if the customer might have a clear idea what his button should do there could be a number of use cases that must be thought through (Should the button be displayed if you only have limited rights to...).
Impact analysis. In what way will the proposed functionality impact existing functionality and to what extent will the new functionality have an impact on the current use of the software?
Technical design. Even not considering the functional requirements there will be a load of technical requirements that one will have to make sure is covered. An example could be architectural requirements, coding standards or the utilization of an existing code framework. In our application Usability would also be a major technical and functional requirement.
Software testing. There are so many things that need to be tested for before one can even think about releasing a particular piece of software. Are all the functional requirements correctly covered? Is every piece of code tested (code coverage)? Does the user understand how the particular functionality should work? Is it scalable (can it be used by thousands of user at the same time? Is it reliable?
Release management. One thing is having your application up an running in a small test environment. But how do you migrate it over to a massive production environment with minimum impact on the end user? Do you have the proper hardware installed for the new functionality? Is the maintenance organization ready to accept responsibility for the new piece of software?
Documentation. Documentation is a huge undertaking when it comes to releasing new functionality. And there might be many people in need of it. Not only customers (in x no. of languages), partners and external trainers but also maintenance staff, support staff, your sales force and perhaps even your end users.
localization. Have you made sure that the application actually runs correctly in every language/culture that runs your piece of software?
Training. Can you provide training for your support staff, trainers, partners, customers and end users?
Maintenance. Do you have an organization in place that can actually maintain the new piece of software? There will always be bugs to correct, servers to maintain and questions to answer..

So if you thought developing software was mostly about typing in strange secret codes that you need a university degree to understand - how many of these 10 bulletpoints is really about technology?

Lowering your standards?

2005-12-07T17:42:00.000+01:00

We just received word that our product is among the first to appear on the compliance list of IMS Global Learning Consortium. This is not very strange since we where one of the companies begging the IMS organization for a compliance program. IMS has been a round for quite a few years and we have been committed to the standardization almost since the first few lines of it's learning code was written down five-six years ago. But there has been suppliers claiming to support the standards without actually doing it. Hence a qualified compliance list.

But why standards in the e-learning industry? Well, as any other industry, ours consist of different segments of different products. You have the content applications, student management systems (aka. MIS), specialist tools, assessment tools, etc. No software manages to cover every need so there is a great need for standards so that customers can put together software packages that cover their needs. This also accelerates the marked growth in the industry - the need for a content delivery platform (e.g. an LMS/VLE) greatly increases if there actually is some content that can play inside the platform.

One of the criticisms that arise in standardization discussions is that standardization can put a curb on innovation and every supplier must lower their functionality to fit the standard. Hardly. Proprietary formats can live side by side with standard formats. And innovation always finds a way around such "hindrances".

Fast 50

2005-12-03T22:22:00.000+01:00

Yet again my employer made it to the Deloitee Technology fast 50 list (links to pdf document). For 2005 we're apparently the 11th fastest growing technology company in Norway. We're been on the list for a few years now. But with a growth of 1263% over the last four years you we're quite dwarfed by the winner Catch Communication ASA with an apparent 77 600 % growth. Sweet.

The next digital revolution

2005-10-12T20:04:00.000+02:00

Quite a few strange news has emerged in the online business lately. Google is rumored to be building out free wireless network in major American cities. eBay bought the media darling "Skype" for a slump money that reminds us of the happy dotcom days. Microsoft and Yahoo is cooperating to make their Instant Messaging technology compatible. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google is making incredible investments in search technology (not only text but video and imaging too), map technology etc.

So what is exactly going on in the Internet industry these days? Is there any connection between these seemingly different but substantial investments and mergers? In order to answer this, lets begin with a few important observations:
1. Online marketing is a vastly increasing business. Google has proved it to be possible (and very profitable) to deliver large scale ad-financed services.
2. VOIP technology has really picked up, quickly stealing customers from the traditional phone companies (and pretty soon the mobile companies - more about this later).
3. Apple has proved that digital content can successfully be sold even when it's available for free (illegally).

So why does Google want to give people free access to the internet? Probably the same reason they want to deliver free search services to the public - Ad revenues. The brilliance in the Google ads is the fact that google actually can deliver ads to a specific user that is many times likely to lead to a purchase than a random banner on an internet portal. This is possible because they know a great deal about their user - the search is a pretty good indication of what you're looking for... And do you know what else would be? Your location (wireless technology would easily pinpoint your location). So combining your location, their map services and perhaps a search phrase google will be able to deliver very successful direct marketing.

This is probably not all. VOIP (Voice Over IP) is taking over the (land line) phone marked all over the place. In Norway like many other countries we will soon have more subscriber to VOIP than traditional land lines. This is killing (or should we say distrupting..) the traditional phone business and soon the mobile business will follow. When wireless Internet coverage is seamless in big cities people will move from "traditional" GSM networks to VOIP phones. Most of the mobile phone companies are already building the devices and successfully tests have been performed by for instance Nokia with roaming between GSM network and VOIP.

The paradox in this is that traditional phone companies will at least have their traditional copper/fiber networks to use as a basis for other services (such as DSL). But the mobile phone network equipment will in 5-10 years be...crap on sticks. Sure, you will see them offering 3G services for wireless data access but I'm pretty sure that WIMAX technology will make data traffic way more cost efficient.

Google, eBay and other internet centric companies understands this shift in the telephone business and sees that these services could be offered for free bundled with other services. EBay is going to use it as a simple mechanism of getting their customers to easily communicate (which is significant when it comes to generating new sales) and Google will bundle this with their other ad-centric services. (Perhaps they will develop voice recognition technology to pick up on your conversation and customizing advertisement based on your previous conversations ;-))

Apple's huge success with the iTunes platform is also transforming the IP based deliverance model. The music industry is now under tremendous pressure from the new internet distributor's and have started understanding what loosing the grip of the distribution will do to their business (this could in fact be worse for them than the ordinary peer to peer piracy...). The same will happen to the TV and film industry quickly enough. TCP/IP based networks (another name for Internet) will take over for the traditional TV network distribution in a few years. So just as with the mobile operators network they will probably find that their "modern" new digital terrestial networks are written off far earlier than they thought....

So the next digital revolution? Wireless TCP/IP networks will make other wireless network (mobile, TV, etc) and open up the distribution allowing for new players to think differently when it comes to payment models for digital content.

The business of software

2005-10-03T07:25:00.000+02:00

The software-business is a strange industry. After having worked for a quite small but successful software developer for a while, there's a few things I whish I would have known back in my days as a computer science student - I could have been a successful Medical Doctor by now...

If you do agree that it's completely legitimate to earn money on software (our kids needs to eat too ;-)), there are basically two models of income; Licensing and Services. Licensing means that you build a piece of software and charge others for the right to use that particular piece of code, not too unlike writing a book or making a dvd. Services on the other hand is the revenue you get from services that's related to your piece of software. This could be consulting, hosting fees, maintenance and support, etc.

Lately, with the introduction of Open Source and GNU gaining popularity, the model of licensing software has been under considerate attack. It is now perhaps considered more fair to charge for the services surrounding the product than the actual code (although there are certainly companies within the open source sphere that sell software licenses). There might be a few good arguments for this in a social/political context but in this article I will look purely on the business side of it. So nerds back off...

So what is the biggest difference between these two income models and why does, after all, most Independent Software Vendors provide a mixed business model? I think one of the most interesting parallels to draw in this context is a risk/reward scenario. An income model based on licenses requires a high degree of investment up front, and the risk of the software actually not gaining enough popularity to get return on investment . However, if it gains enough popularity it can easily be distributed and every sold copy comes with a profit. This can potentially also create a huge reward.

A service based business model is usually much more labor intensive. In terms of risk it is more controllable since you most often get paid as you deliver the specific service. On the other hand this is a much less scalable model and since every service sold often has a constant cost, the reward can not grow to the same levels. A service-based company would probably have problems with a yearly growth more than 50-60%, but there are plenty of license oriented software vendors that can push show exceptional growth rate (as an example, Opera Software grew 993% from 1999-2003).

The two dominating companies in the software market today are IBM and Microsoft (no it's not sun, it's not Linux, it's not Oracle - these are all niche players/applications compared to IBM and MS). So how does IBM and MS come out in terms of a services/license ratio? Not surprisingly very different. IBM, reported revenues from it's Global Services division at 12.6 billion $ (including hardware maintenance) while their software division reported sales at 4,5 billion $. Microsoft, with their phenomenal growth for the last 30 years, has chosen to mainly let their partners deliver services surrounding the Microsoft platform. Microsoft reported revenues for the quarter ending march 2005 to be 9,6 billion $. Since more than seven billion $ out of this represents their segments "client" (Windows operating systems) "Information Worker" (Office) and "Server and Tools" (Windows servers, SQL server, Exchange, etc. etc.) It should probably be fair to argue that Microsoft's revenue model is basically the opposite of IBM's.

If my analysis this far I correct this might explain a few things like why Microsoft has managed to have such a formidable growth over the last two decades. It could also explain why IBM now embraces "Open Source" - they have considerably less to loose than their biggest competitor Microsoft. After all the best way to cripple a competitor must be to attack their model of income? (Don't mistake this for a defense of Microsoft - this is just business and they would probably do the same given the opportunity).

So what is the future business model of successfully software companies? It's probably what it has always been; flexible. Most successfully software companies starts off with a large part of their revenues coming from services - a few employees sewing together a software bundle largely by their customer's request (providing that the company isn't sponsored by a loaded VC) . As the company's customer base grows the product starts to standardize and in order to gain market shares quickly, more of the revenues comes off licensing. When the marked is matured and the company has no more market to expand it again shifts focus to a service based income model in order to capitalize on an strengthen loyalty in one's existing customer base.

Personal Data

2005-08-22T20:14:00.000+02:00

The other day a got a quite cute post from a fairly anonymous hotmail address saying:

Hey,

" about 2 hand in my paper but I forgot my psswrd. Can y plz mail it 2 me?

Thanx"

So except for the obvious problem with finding this user in one of our 300 customers databases based on his/her hotmail address (a small domestic animal + the number 87) why shouldn't I just be helpful and give this poor pupil a break? If I had a way to really identify this person and had access to the data, is there anything stopping me from giving it away?

The most important reason of all, but a reason that seems to be difficult to explain to many users (and customers) is that you can't give away something that isn't yours. We provide the application, we host the servers and we sell the product but we don't own the data. We are what under the "Personal Data Act" (an implementation of EU Directive 95/46/EC - so this is basically the law all over the EEC) is described as a data processor. The data controller, the customer, is the owner of the data and is the one that both can determine the purpose of the processing of personal data and is responsible for making sure it is done in accordance with the law. A data processor can merely act on orders from a data processor.

A common mistake when it comes to storage of personal data is to think that this is very data oriented - So what data are we allowed to store? The law is not really about what personal data you can store (with some exceptions), but for whether you have a good purpose for storing them, how they are used and what kind of routines you have implemented to make sure the law is being followed. So while people often tend to be nervous about what data it is that's being stored they often forget about the routines and documentation that's really required...

For a university or school the use of a national Number (often given to you at birth to follow you through the rest of your life) often sparks a bit of controversy. It's a very convenient piece of data when you want different applications to work together with the same data. It is often mistaken for being what one (at least in Norway) classify as sensitive personal data. It is not. Sensitive data is data relating to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious belief, your dodgy criminal past, medical history, sexual orientation(s) or ... Trade union membership.

This does not mean that it shouldn't be treated with the outmost respect. You cannot use any personal data for other than the specific purpose that's been determined (this definitely also include transferring ownership of the data).

This is really a topic where one should tread lightly if one don't have a law-degree so I'll leave it at that... But again: If you store personal data you're a data controller. If you're a data controller you better be sure you know about the legal obligations that comes with it.

[disclaimer: Don't take my word for it. Contact a legal advisor for more accurate information;-)]

The curse of success

2005-06-05T23:51:00.000+02:00

I'm a realist, or perhaps in the eyes of our marketing department, a pessimist. This could probably explain why I would be able to put the word "curse" and "success" into one heading. But alas, sometimes your success can be a curse to you or your customers if you don't have a proper income/cost model.

A typical ISP company these days probably sells both services and software. Quite a few of us provides the software as ASP services for our clients (I'll write more about this in a later blog). Providing your customer with one extra license for you software comes with very little cost since the investment (development) is done up front. But the ASP service is different. For every new user, you will have the cost of hardware, maintenance, and other services surrounding your server park.

Still I think you will find that many ISPs/ASPs will include their ASP costs in the license cost. For the example, lets say that you price you agree with your customer to pay say 10Ã€ for each user/year. Three of these are earmarked to cover the cost of the ASP service you provide them. For 10.000 users this would mean 30.000 € for your ASP center. What makes this a profitable deal for you ASP department? That nobody uses it. Best case scenario would actually be zero users on your ASP environmentalthoughgh the customer will never renew the deal...) because you didn't have to invest in any hardware, etc. On the other hand, huge success, all of your clients 10.000 users decide to use the software AT THE SAME TIME. Say for the sake of argument that the actual cost per concurrent user is 100 €/year. You would then LOOSE 70.000 €.

Some might argue that you know your customer pretty good and knows what their concurrency ratio would be. "Out of experience our users will have a concurrency on between 20-30%". But say that you're icompetitivetive marked and you can't afford huge margins on your ASP service, how do you find rightrigh ratio? It's a gamble. And still worse, where's the incentive to actually increase your customer use of your service when you actually will loose money on it? See, this model is stupid.

A much better model would of course be to let the customer pay their own concurrency. Find the total cost of your ASP services, add a margin and charge per concurrent user. Your service should be providing your customer with an increasing income or decreasing cost per concurrent user. If they don't why would they buy your service in the first place? Wbelievelive it or not, some of us might have customers that doesn't have a profits or cost savings on their mind when they buy an ASP service. Say, for instance a governmental institution buying a LMS/VLE... They might come to the table with a fixed budget. They buy your service anticipating 10% concurrency and suddenly the project is a big success, 20% concurrency and their budget is hugely overdrawn. Curse.

But even if your non-proorganizationtion doesn't want to see it, there is actually money to be spent, saved and earned there too. Help them understand that a bigger number on next months invoice doesn't always have to be bad. However this is not very easy if the project itself isanchoredored very high up in organizationtion. Just convince the part of the management that can see both the increased costs and the savings. Good luck to you.

Translation vs. Localization

2005-05-23T14:05:00.000+02:00

- "It looks great, but when will it be translated to Swedish?".

This is a rather famous quote from one of our earliest sales presentation abroad (a couple of years ago). The funny thing is that we had just spent 50.000 NOK on translating our application into... Swedish... The reason for this was simple, whoever had translated all of our labels into Swedish did not have any technical understanding of our application and just translated everything word-by-word. If you do not understand that the Norwegian word used for a weblink is a different word than what the Swedes use, a direct translation will look like gibberish to a native Swedish speaker (BTW. We got the customer in the end and they helped us clean up the translation).

But making your application available in another language/country is certainly not only about translation. It's about localization. Every culture (NOT necessarily the same as a language) has it's own way of describing dates, currency, titles, weights and measurements, etc. In Norway we would represent a certain datetime like 14:04, 23.05.2005, but to make sense to a US user you will probably have to format this like 2:04 PM, 05.23.2005. Timezones is particularly interesting for vendors like us that delivers the same ASP application to different timezones. How will your application understand that for the UK user the clock is now 1 PM, but for the Norwegian users it is 14.00?

In the current generation of programming languages all of the above can fairly simple be solved if you use the libraries provided for this - AND if you design your architecture with localization in mind. (Right, what startup company will do that?!?) But there are a few other much more tricky issues that can arise when dealing with true globalization (after all much "localization" is done without any consideration to other than Latin languages). The Arabic language is both a completely different character set than the Latin one. But the also read from right to left. This actually means that you not only have to mirror the text, but also your menu's, etc.

Here's how our application looks when localized to Arabic (no - it's not a mock-up):

This particular screen shot is taken from the development of our Arabic version. If you are familiar with it's:learning you'll probably recognize some of the elements used here.

But localizing your software is really just half of the job. If so. Then there is the user documentation. It probably contains just as many words as your application - if not more. And at a price of more than 0,5 a word, just translating user documentation can be very expensive. But it certainly does not end there. For every new version all your new functionality and help menu's will be translated. For every patch, quickfix, etc there might be new words that needs translation.

So if you for some reason ever are going to launch your software abroad, do remember that you will need more than just a marketing budget...

Redundant systems

2005-05-12T21:50:00.000+02:00

UPDATE: This is a two year old article but for some reason feedburner moved it to the top of my rss feed after I tagged it. Still, it's an interesting post so please read on. :-)

Our entire ASP-site went down tonight as our ISP had routine maintenance on the power supply that went completely wrong. That's the kind of stuff that makes my day, knowing that a few thousand students/pupils preparing for their exams right now probably would have taken the opportunity to kick my *** if given.

The whole thing made me think about how difficult it really is to make a completely redundant system. Sure, all of our servers have two power supplies, all of our disk are RAID enabled and all of the web-servers are load balanced. But there is always one SPOF (Single point of failure) that will bite you in the *** when you're least expecting it.

It's possible to create enterprise solutions that comes very near to 100% uptime ("six nines", 99.9999%). But in order to manage this you will probably find yourself in a situation where you will need very expensive solutions such as:
- Mirrored sites with realtime mirroring of data.
- Very expensive enterprise storage solutions (SAN).
- Database clusters.
- Hot swap hardware where components can be replaced without interruption.
- Onsite support 24/7.
- Very clever and competent staff-members.
- Last but not at least; robust software architecture built around enterprise services such as transactions, data consitency, distributed applications and security.

These solutions, often referred to as enterprise solutions, are usually found in business critical systems. And when a system is considered critical for business there is also the will of investing into redundant IT solutions.

But what happens when industries such as ours (education) starts demanding the same level of service from our solution? Education is after all as "business" critical as it get for schools and universities? They certainly cannot come up with the same type of money as a big private company. But yet I can already today see users more upset with our service, it's learning, being unavailable then their internet banking service.

Here's my suggestion; introduce differential pricing on hardware, just as you can find on certain software products. Educational institutions (at least in Norway) have a completely different pricing on, say, Exchange Server then a private company. This effectively lets microsoft sell their products in a market that might not have been able to afford it without large discounts.

Do you think it sounds stupid? Wait and see.

Digital exams

2005-05-06T23:06:00.000+02:00

I've wanted to write a bit about the project that currently occupies most of my time, but I fear risking it being "lost in translation". Although the world of education is quite international these days there's a few things that I think may be quite Norwegian. One of them is probably the use of the traditional exams - and especially the volume of them. I finished my education six years ago and fear that much hasn't changed since back then. (Could you believe that my programming exams where actually performed on PAPER? With a pencil?)

The Directorate of Primary and Secondary Education is running a pilot project to digitalise the exams together with the to biggest LMS vendors in Norway (us included). Last year we ran the first digital exam with a class of pupils for one of their subjects. This year the ambition is much higher. A few hundreds pupils will rely on our software for their finishing exams.

The requirements are pretty clear:
- Exam administrators must be able to create exams add existing pupil and mentors from the LMS.
The pupils will use the LMS to access their exams and upload their answers. They will also be granted access to some of their existing content from the LMS.
- The mentors will use the LMS to access the pupils answers and give grades to the different results.

that's the simple part. Because of the current official policy of not letting pupils cooperate or freely access other resources (example: the internet...) the security aspect of the solution is quite important.
- Pupils PC and network must be under total control. Local IT staff will make sure that computers can't communicate on LAN and will grant internet access to only the it's:learning application.
- A mechanism for preventing students from swapping their username and passwords must be created. We'll solve this by giving the pupils a PIN-code when they show up for their exams.
- Mentors will not be allowed to see the identity of the student. The LMS will make sure that the mentor giving the grades can only see a candidate number.

Last but not least; a full integration with three different student administrative systems is also a part of the scope. We'll receive exam metadata from the LMS using the IMS Enterprise format. Results from the LMS will be sent back using the same format.

Here's a few screenshots from the solution (currently only available in Norwegian, sorry about that...)

Add new exams through the administrative interface in it's:learning. Full copies of all data collected at the exam can be downloaded here.

Important properties of the exam; start and stop time, when to inform the pupil of the exam and different other preferences (anonymous? pin? etc).

You can add existing pupils from the LMS and assign them an anonymous id and pin code. You can of course also add an assignment (files or text) that will only be accesible by pupils on the day of the exam.

Want to know more? Send me an e-mail and I'll get back to you...

Accessibility

2005-05-05T11:21:00.000+02:00

For our next software release, our product department is promising to completely rewrite the UI (User Interface) and be in conformance with Web Content accessibility guidelines 1.0 and section 508 (Oh yes we're geeks when it comes to international specifications...). But what does this really mean?

What it basically means is cleaning up the way one presents data in a web-based application so that it makes sense for users in need of special tools to support them accessing it. The most known tools are screen readers or Braille displays but there are quite a few others.

A simple example is the use of images in menu's. If you don't provide an alternative text there is no way any application can interpret your fancy, 3D, transparent button that flashes when you press it... Another example is the dreaded "table" tag, often used to create horrendous lay-out. Forget it. Tables are for grouping data in rows and columns, nothing else. Here's a few other suggestions for cleaning up your applications.

So does this mean that the web-designers are out of work? No. But if they haven't learned about cascading style-sheets yet they might want to move back working with print again (Designing web-pages is NOT like working with Adobe InDesign...). Creating your layout in the CSS means that special browsers don't have to interpret your layout (they just skip the CSS) and can concentrate on the content.

Enough geek talk, lets get political. So what about applications that does NOT embrace the wave of accessibility that is about to hit the webbased-ISPs? Just like there are strict accessibility requirements in the real world, being a workplace, a governmental institution or a restaurant, the same requirements will become mandatory in the digital world. Companies like the one I work for that mainly deals with governmental institutions will soon be obliged to follow the guidelines for accessibility. And why shouldn't we?

If you want to know if your software is up for it, here is a tool for you. You will be in for a surprise. Happy browsing!

Welcome

2005-05-04T16:20:00.000+02:00

Hi,

welcome to my work-related blog. Here I'll try to write down opinions related to my work and profession. If you're looking for my private blog you should go here (in Norwegian). If you for some mysterious reason should be interested in my recipes, try this link (Also Norwegian).

A short introduction; I'm the Director of Services in it:solutions , a Norwegian (Bergen) based ISP (Independent Software Vendor) behind "it's learning", an internet based software that is used primarily in the education market. I'm an engineer of profession and had a few years of experience from a international management consulting company before joining it:solutions. I'm also a co-inventor of the software from my student days but that's a different story.

So what does a director of services do? Lots. I'm responsible for two teams of people. On one side the IT-people hosting and maintaining all of our services and applications, serving our help desk and keeping our office infrastructure running. The other team is the consultants. They work on customer based projects, integrating, enhancing and deploying new solutions. More about this later.

Disclaimer: (Needless to say... )all my postings here are my own personal views and does not in any way reflect an official policy from it:solutions.