2008 is off to an incredible start!

The first quarter of 2008 has been a blur. We're shipping. modifying. deploying and supporting more than we ever have - but also managing to do it better than ever as well. I credit experience. tools and Google Reader for helping to keep us sharp and open to better ways of doing things. It's mind boggling to think how much our skills have evolved.

Oddly enough. all of our recent projects have involved writing more middleware than I expected. No project lives in a vacuum. but we're becoming more adept at writing these interfaces and making sure they can operate autonomously. It's fun. in a strange sort of way.

Successes

A major ColdFusion/Flex benchmarking and data analysis system was due on February 18. a deadline we're happy to have met. More about that system once our client starts publicizing it. but it's quite gratifying to know that thousands of people will use this software each year!

Another project for a longstanding client of ours has (finally) moved to user acceptance testing. The last piece of the project involved integrating our software with their help desk application. All of the Altiris SDK docs are written from the perspective of a pure .NET environment. which wasn't terribly helpful! If anyone needs to tie ColdFusion and Altiris Help Desk together. just ping me - our code is all bundled up in a CFC and stupid-simple to use. Why suffer through that on your own? All kidding aside. the main application made extensive use of Prototype and YUI which saved a TON of work all around.

Last week we were contacted by a company in desperate need of ColdFusion triage ~ their lead CF developer had left and a big integration task was already overdue. We stepped in and were able to wrap up the project in a matter of days using the web service API to send data to their customer's CRM application (Avectra NetForum). We rewrote the sample CFC. figured out the touch points in the client's application and even spent some time optimizing their ColdFusion server (it crashed while we were on site). We've got no problem sharing that CFC either. so just ask if you want it.

In other news. we re-upped support contracts with two clients (thank you!) and signed a new client for our faculty evaluation software. Matt's rewriting a good chunk of that one to streamline the customization and (simultaneously) update the display logic for better performance and maintainability. We're looking forward to deploying that and hopefully rolling it out to the existing clients on that system.

And at the bottom of the list is was migrating company email service from our hosting company to Google. Blame me for that one - I routinely maxed out my 50MB allocation (I'm a big IMAP fan) which seemed to have a negative impact on our other mailboxes. Google Apps was remarkably easy to set up and test (very important!). Flipped the DNS entries over this morning in one last fit of frustration and things seem to be running just fine. I hope the NSA enjoys reading the system diagnostic emails I get on a daily basis.

Upcoming

What comes next? Launching our online community for a preeminent alumni association! Currently we're working out a data integration solution that will likely leverage Oracle Streams to cut down on database traffic. My hope is that we'll use JMS to pass update information back and forth. but that's still very much TBD.

We still have two sites to move from our current hosting provider to the new one. That should be addressed this weekend if all goes as expected.

If next quarter is anything like this one. we're going to have our hands full!