Yes it is true. After almost 6 years I’ve decided to leave JTeam.
Archive for the ‘Office’ Category
All good things come to an end…
January 27th, 2010 by Leonard Wolters(http://blog.jteam.nl/2010/01/27/all-good-things-come-to-an-end/)
Evolution of a support process (part 2)
October 1st, 2009 by Dennis de Boer(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/10/01/evolution-of-a-support-process-part-2/)
This blog entry is part 2 out of the series, where I discuss the process to structure support and maintenance work, at JTeam.
In the previous part (part 1) of this series, I’ve discussed our first setup for a support structure in our company. As I said, this setup is not used anymore due to several reasons. In this blog post, I’ll clarify these reasons and take you in on our second setup of the support structure.
Read the rest of this entry »
Evolution of a support process (Part 1)
September 23rd, 2009 by Dennis de Boer(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/09/23/evolution-of-a-support-process-part-1/)
This blog entry discusses the internal process at JTeam to structure our support and maintenance work, and at the same time exceeding the client’s expectations.
As you might know, if you are a regular reader of this blog, JTeam is a software development company. We develop enterprise applications for our customers. See for example our blog post about the Paazl project for a description of one of our projects. After implementation, these applications often will be maintained and developed further by the customer’s own development team or is being outsourced. There are however some projects which stay at JTeam. We keep on maintaining the project and implement new features.
These kind of projects require a different type of development and management process than the other projects. Especially the support work for these projects (i.e. bugfixing) is something that involves a whole different approach.
Here at JTeam we’re constantly looking for ways to improve our development and management processes. This is why we wanted to create a better way to handle these support issues.
This blog entry discusses this process. It will feature multiple parts, so you can follow our strategies and conclusions. Maybe it will help you to find the perfect process for your own business.
The BCG Matrix at JTeam – new & cool technologies
April 16th, 2009 by Alef Arendsen(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/04/16/the-bcg-matrix-at-jteam-new-cool-technologies/)
Bram recently updated our website with a list of technologies that we at JTeam find interesting. The list (available from the JTeam website) currently holds things such as Solr, Spring, Flex and Wicket.
The things on the list do not come out of nowhere. We’ve always been a company partially driven by technology and innovation. We are always on the lookout for new technologies that can help us realize our projects in a more efficient yet exciting way. This way we became involved with for example the Spring Framework, which finally resulted in us co-founding SpringSource.
Recently, we decided we should visualize our view of the (technology) world a bit more and the format we’ve used is the BCG Matrix that puts a business’ activities into one of four categories. Paraphrasing and translating this to our business (the enterprise software deveopment industry), the four categories are
- (Cash) cows – technologies with a high marker share in a slow-growing or mainstream sector that can help us big-time realizing our projects. Technology in this areas are regarded as being mature and sometimes possibly a bit boring. They generate money and interest though from a large amount of users in a sector that we find interesting
- Stars – rapidly growing technologies with a high market share in the early-adopters area. We already use these technologies to realize projects in a more efficient way than we used to do. Technologies in this area are cool and regarded as being innovative. Potentially, technologies in this area can become cows if managed correctly
- Question marks – technologies that grow quickly, but still do not generate significant amounts of revenue. Should be invested in in order to make them stars. Potentially technologies in this area could add to our ability to better service our clients
- Dogs – technologies that (in our minds) do not add to our possibility to implement and maintain software enough, do not generate enough money to make a profit from given our current situation and/or are not interesting enough for us to invest time in
After having categorized the technologies that we use and might want to use, we ended up with a pretty solid matrix. The challenge with things like this usually is in my opinion how to make them part of the company’s mindset and to keep them alive. We long though about a way to make this happen and we settled on putting it up somewhere in a prominent area in the office. Not only did we want to put it up somewhere, it should be editable in a way.
To do this, I’ve ordered semi-permanent whiteboard markers. I didn’t know these things existed and found out about them after some Google’ing. They’re only erasable by using a wet cloth. This means if you scribble on the window or whiteboard using a normal whiteboard marker, you can still erase the scribbling, but not the semi-permanent stuff.
I’ve drawn up the matrix on the window near our lunch table. This way, we can look at it over lunch and discuss things. The window looks out over the city so people can also pretend to be looking at it, while in fact they’re enjoying the view.
It’s been up there for about an hour and people already began scribbling on the window to express their disagreement with the way some things are categorized. Also, some things have been added and some renamed. It seems like it’s working 
.
In the future, you can expect more blog entries about individual technologies on this list. Some opinions might be controversial or personal to one individual employee in the company, nevertheless they always add to the discussion about what should be in the matrix and where.
A new email and calendaring solution
March 11th, 2009 by Alef Arendsen(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/03/11/new-email-and-calendaring-solution/)
In 2002 I started JTeam and while at first managing our email accounts with the tools we got from our domain hosting provider, we settled for a Microsoft Small Business Server (with Exchange) somewhere in the beginning of 2003. Dell back then had this offer whereby you’d get the machine practically for free if you bought an SBS license (I could have been the other way around, I can’t remember anymore).
From say 2002 to about 2007, we’ve only had the occasional Linux user and hardly any Mac users, so the fact that Exchange is not a decent cross-platform solution really wasn’t too big of a deal. Lately however, we are starting to get more people that prefer an OS X or a Linux environment. Now I wasn’t aware of that, as I was working for SpringSource the past 4 years, so in fact, I couldn’t care less . But… as you may have heard, I’ve quit my contract at SpringSource and for the time being I’ll be at JTeam (more on that later by the way). In other words (since I am a Mac user), now all of a sudden I *do* care.
According to this excellent blog entry by there is no decent solution for synchronizing Exchange calendar information with Apple iCal.app and from what I’ve heard, the situation is exactly the same for Linux users. For the OS X user the wait shouldn’t be long anymore, since Snow Leopard is on its way and this version of OS X includes Exchange support. For Linux user there is no native solution that I know of.
In the meantime, several people have figured out workarounds that (literally) work more or less. I believe there’s somebody that maintains his schedule in a Google Calendar, is able to send out meeting invitations and also able to accept and reject meeting requests, but his Free/Busy time is not available in the Exchange calendar. There’s also somebody that just has everybody call the office manager to schedule an appointment (that somebody would be me). It all works… but more often less than more…
This lead me to think we should search for a more permanent solution. One that cross-platform, doesn’t require any more maintenance than a full-fledged Exchange server (mind you: we don’t have do a lot of maintenance on it at the moment).
Systems administration is not a task I like particularly well (and it’s also not what I’m going to do at JTeam on an ongoing basis), but I’m guessing it’s going to make a lot of people at JTeam very happy if we get this sorted out, so why not get it out of the way then. I’ve spent a little time looking for solutions and finally settled for Google Apps. For now for email and calendaring only. Maybe in the future also documents and more.
In the next few weeks, we are going to try Google Apps out with a test domain and hopefully by the end of March, we’ll have a final decision on whether or not Google Apps is going to be the new email and calendaring solution.
A little bit of background on the reasons for this change. The most important reason for it is that I think for a software development shop of about 25 people, I don’t think it makes sense anymore to manage all kinds of internal systems for things like email and calendaring. Yes, in the past, when no alternative (such as Google Apps) were available maybe, and maybe if you’re a very large organization… But these days, it makes sense IMO to focus as much as possible on what you’re doing best and at JTeam that’s software development, not systems administration (ah, so now I’ve revealed that we suck as managing systems?? ). A second big reason is spam. We’ve been fighting the spam problem with relative success, but Google seems to do a much better job at getting rid of spam. The last reason might maybe be cost-related, but that’s definitely not the main reason. Yes, I do believe it’s going to be cheaper in the end, but that doesn’t matter too much. The other reasons are way more important.
Concluding, it sounds like all is geared towards getting people to focus more on what they do best and get stuff that doesn’t matter (deleting spam, calling up office managers to schedule appointments, managing useless systems) out of the way.
I’ll report back with some findings later on.