We also need the following:

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

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

Update: we’re using eSupport

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

_ Kindo – Some new features & improvements to kindo

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

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

Our family

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

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

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

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

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

Bye for now!

Living and breathing what we’re doing every day sometimes means that often we don’t see the wood for the trees. Having people external to our team try out what we’re doing then give us feedback, is such a valuable process, and we’re hoping that it will help us to discover new bugs, problems, and cultural differences that will enable us to give our users something truly exciting. Of course, we are already aware of many bugs, but having our friends help us to find more is both important and rewarding. We like to think of it as continually polishing our masterpiece.

To do that we’ve created an area we’re using to discuss everything related to what we’re doing, because we want to keep things real. We’re hoping that as we grow and develop further, you’ll help us to make the right decisions about what features we add, and tell us what you think we’re perhaps doing the wrong way. After all, we’re only people, and we’re making the assumption that getting things right for users is going to be an interactive process involving everyone!

So today, while getting the Alpha out the door, it felt incredibly rewarding, both to be working with such a cool team, but also to actually get something out that people are using and testing.

Our initial stats show that the trend we were hoping for is in fact happening, which is also very rewarding. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to take something very complex, and turn it into something visually simple and easy to use. I’m not saying we’ve achieved that, but we’re certainly most of the way there.

So, it’s almost time to go home and do some more work, but it sure feels like today (even though it feels like we’re in a heat wave) was a good day

Must say that the last few months have been a blur…
Since January of this year, Technovated has gone from 4 people, to 10, to a venture funded project with 14 people in all, over three office moves and many many late nights and long weekends.

There’s a blog post coming up about it all soon, but the long and the short of it is as follows:

1. I’m responsible for getting our venture funded application out the door soon, so I’m stacked as it is
2. I’ve battled to find dates this year that get the right mix of African and international speakers together at the same time
3. I’ve battled to find the right kind of sponsorship early, which would mean the difference between something good and something mediocre – mostly related to point 2 (since sponsors like to be linked to speakers and topics)
4. I’m convinced that it would be a loss maker if we didn’t get the right speakers – there’s a very fine line between raising enough sponsorship to make the cost for attendees affordable as well as afford to bring out good speakers; all before you have fixed numbers that are all paid up… and without a pot of cash to dip into, it’s harder to take risks

So, in truth I’m not 100% happy about it ‘cos I’ve been talking about it for a while and I’m the kind of person to do rather than talk wherever possible, but I’ve taken some good advice from people who are helping out, and the consensus is that we should be aiming for around March / April next year rather, to give us more time to get points 1 through 4 above right. I certainly don’t want to spend time, effort and potentially my goodwill only to get great speakers out to SA and the event is a dismal failure and costs me more money than I have or can afford!

Anyways, this isn’t a sob story if you were thinking you were gonna be reading one.

A lot of people have either told me to give the idea up, or told me that I’m crazy, but I believe that they’re wrong. I’m pretty sure now that the original format and idea that I had bubbling in my head is going to have to be re-thought to take into account the difference environment, the cost of long trans-Atlantic flights, and the relative expense that something like this is when compared to someones monthly salary.

That said, I think the direction to take is to adapt and give more time to finding the right dates so that the right speakers can congregate for the event. Once that is done getting sponsorship will be easier and therefore the chances of success higher.

So, bottom line is that I’m still personally 100% committed to getting this off the ground and happening in Africa, even if it has to be delayed some – I would rather delay by 6 to 8 months and make it a good one where everyone benefits, than rush to make it work in October and end up with something that is mediocre…

So, I ask you to bear with me, and to stay tuned. It will happen.

The site which I am talking about is http://bd4d.com, which stands for By Designers 4 Designers is built using the seagull php framework with the new cms module

General comments

Media Temple Installation

During the live installation I encountered a few problems, most of which related to permissions of files on the server:

The main one however were the permissions of the /var/lib/php/session/ folder – it has to be writable

Plugins that I found really useful during development

There were two firefox plug-ins that I found very useful during development of the site:

Colorzilla – gives you # codes for colours on any webpage
IE tab – allows you to open up ie7 tabs within firefox, which is great for cross browser compliant xhtml/css

Thanks to the developers of these two add-ons

Paypal

The site has a payment gateway for listing jobs and events which has transaction processing done by Paypal.

In terms of project mistakes, this was one of the biggest we made. The support that James received from Paypal was extremely poor and the general documentation which they supply is often out of date and incorrect. I am amazed that they have become such a successful company, when it is so difficult to integrate their transaction processing into one’s site.

However after a lot of waiting for accounts to go live, numerous queries, emails, phone calls and a lot of frustration, we did eventually get the transactions working. It is working fine now, but it was definitely not worth all of that hassle.

I would be interested to here about other experiences from developers using Paypal – hopefully you had a better one than we did.

Site Features

Showcase

The section of the site that I am most proud of is the Showcase section, which has flash and movies of some really cool clips which the bd4d guys have done. The section allows comments to be made on each of the movies and I think it looks pretty slick – even if I say so myself

To get the section functioning, I used the following:

A comment manager which Dmitri initially developed and then I adapted that code to be used for the site.

To prevent spam on the site I used captcha package from the php pear library

And I used the following code in the template to hold the movies/flash files:

< object width="550" height="400" >
< param name="movie" value="{webRoot}/themes/bd4d/showcasemovies/
{oItem.media}" >
< param name="quality" value="high" >
< embed src="{webRoot}/themes/bd4d/showcasemovies/
{oItem.media}" quality="high" width="{oItem.width}" height="{oItem.height}" autostart="true">< / embed >
< / object >

Events

The Events calendar uses the default seagull events module as a basis, but there where a few enhancements made to fit the requirements of the site. The majority of the development of this section was done by James and I think that he did a pretty good job of it.

The calendar looks pretty slick and works really well, also the backend of the seagull events module provides a lot of flexibility for administrators wanting to manage events.

Job board

The Job board uses custom managers in the default module and as I have mentioned in my section about paypal, it allows members of the site to post jobs for a fee. The transaction processing handles straight paypal payments as well as credit card payments which are verified by paypal.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction this site took way longer than expected and there were a number of hard lessons which the whole team learnt. But at the end of the day, the site looks pretty good and works as expected, so in some way it can be seen as a success.

If you know any business analysts looking for an exciting gig/role, then please get in touch with me

Job description below, can send word doc if you like.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Business Analyst – Job Description

Openads is seeking a highly skilled Business Analyst with a level of technical expertise, to work within the Product Management group.

Candidate will help formulate and define the scope and objectives of systems and technology. Based upon user needs and a thorough understanding of the business and industry requirements, the candidate will assess and present the business case. Must help assess the implications and impact of deliverable on the current and future business environment.

Working closely with the Product Owner, the candidate will be responsible for translating the project vision and consequently lead developers to solve business requirements. The analysis of business and user needs, then translation of those requirements into system specifications will be an important aspect of the job. Will also be required to build relationships with users, functional managers and consultants regarding specific deliverables.

Must be happy to pick up knowledge and expertise quickly in a fast-paced environment. Ideal candidates will have experience in the advertising industry and Agile Project methodologies.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with Product Owner
Will help translate key requirements from the Product Owner and translate them into a form that developers can work with. Will also aid the Product Owner in making key decisions

• Strategic Planning
Sit between the development group and the Product Owner. Must be able to provide input as required, communicate decisions and strategies and then help implement that strategy on specific projects.

• Process Improvement
Work within and help refine the requirement processes.

• Business Consultancy/Liaison
Play a supportive role in advising areas of the business and technical staff on the implication of new initiatives and ideas on existing applications.

• Business System Selection
Play a leading role in the identification and assessment of business systems solutions for specific projects. Ensure that the solutions are in line with Product Owner’s requirements

• Business Systems Development
Provide input into the development of new business systems through detailed analysis. Write specifications for external parties and internal staff to develop projects.

• Business Systems Delivery Mgmt
Play a lead role in the implementation of projects for business systems solutions. Assist in unit and integration testing, and manage sections of acceptance testing. Ensure components are delivered to satisfactory levels.

• Testing
Will play an active role in testing and identifying defects in deliverables

Mandatory Skills:
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Extensive experience of leading business analysis
• Good experience of process analysis
• Good experience of data analysis
• Ability to resolve issues without clear or predefined solutions
• Motivated, quick thinking and have an interest in learning various technologies.
• Must be happy to work within a structured Agile project methodology

Desirable Skills:
• Experience of Advertising industry
• Experience of working with Agile project methodology, ideally Scrum
• IT Development background
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks in advance if you do
Gareth

Anyone got any serious problems / reservations / issues / red flags with those dates?

I’ve had one well known person, with a massive following, come back to me and say that he’d love to speak at the conference; another individual is going to be too expensive (I mean really, really too expensive – we’re not doing this one to make a huge profit, ‘cos we want to make it as cheap as possible for as many people as possible); and another one is expecting a child to arrive, so has other priorities on his mind (which is to be expected – good for him!)…

So it forces me to ask whether there is a point where we don’t do this? I’m an optimist, much to my colleagues dismay sometimes, so I’m sure it will all work out fine, but I am worried that for any number of reasons the conference won’t measure up to my expectations.

Now, that’s not a totally bad thing.

I’d rather have 50 passionate people in a room where we get to really thrash out African web and emerging tech, talk about innovation and business opportunities, swop some code, share ideas, make new friends, and then go on to change the lives of Africans all over the continent; than have millions in sponsorship, get too many speakers, not have enough time to do them all justice, have too many people with too high expectations, …. blah blah blah – you get the picture.

I’m after qaulity, not quantity. So I’m not afraid of small numbers and less speakers than I would like. But I do want quality, and unfortunately flights cost money…

We all know that success is borne of perspiration and sheer dedicatiion to a task, so it may take 5 years for the conference to reach some sort of success – question is, are you happy with that? Would you come if there are only going to be 50 to 100 people? Are you willing to share your ideas with the top 75 innpovators in Africa today?

We’ve always been committed to a bottom up type conference, so your thoughts in this are much needed and appreciated – what are your expectations, and what can we do to make them a reality?

Get commenting, we’d love to hear from you

PS – we’ve got one keynote speaker bagged, so when we have a firm date decided, that will be announced.