Web Strategies for business: Simon Surtees

Ideas for business and general life thoughts, as I trawl through the digital space. 
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December 17, 2009

Using Drupal with your ERP (MRP)

First, some numbers 
Over the course of the last year, we have worked on 34 Drupal projects: some in development, some completed. What surprises me is not the number; a web development company with a growing portfolio of clients has to have a healthy number of projects. No, what surprises me is how we are beginning to extend the power of the Drupal platform.

When we made the decision to move from our proprietary platform, Sitesolved, last year, our rationale was to embrace a system which did the cool stuff we wanted to do: interactive blogs, media handling, dynamic forums, twitter & facebook integration etc. The groundswell of the 'tech' crowd using geeky systems is evaporating - as interfaces and software becomes user-friendly, the barriers to entry for non-tech users also disappears. I see it everywhere, and it's truly a great thing. As such, we knew we pull our socks up, provide a platform that our business users would appreciate, and ultimately, create something which brings real operational value.

Where's the value?
Real operational value. Ah, now that is where the lines have blurred. Moving our CMS was not a decision we took lightly, and we deliberately only used simple sites as our learning ground. Pages, media, forms. A bit of a lightbox effect here and there thrown in. Nothing particularly complex, but enough to show that Drupal was our particular way forward (I intend to blog more about this process to assist other developers & agencies separately). After doing a few projects however, things noticeably changed. Blogs, check. Funky Jquery integration, check. Useful catalogues, check. As we've gathered steam, we've hit all of our intended goals much earlier than planned: which is testament to the team & Drupal. We've fulfilled our brief. Or have we?

Website vs web application
I digress. Websites are our 'bread and butter', but we've always had a healthy crop of web applications in our portfolio. Due to NDAs we can't always talk about them, but after a quick SWOT analysis, I can see that they contribute to almost half of our web turnover. HALF! But, here's the point. All of these have been done with JAVA, PHP, FLEX, and a range of other technologies. Until now.

Extending to drupal to MRP
I recently came across the attached PDF from The Orchestra Team http://www.orchestrateam.com/blogs/were-presenting-pacific-northwest-drupal-summit as it's fair to say it's struck a chord. It's exactly what we've been doing for the last few months. 

(download)

Our clients want business solutions, and these are now extending to full end integration with their chosen Inventory management system. I'm really interested to see how others are approaching this, and the Orchestra team seem to have nailed it. Strangely, we've only implemented this with Microsoft so far (via the XML / RPC protocol), but I've had 4 such requests within the last 6 weeks alone.

Maybe 'websites' won't be our bread and butter after all for 2010.

I'd love to hear from anyone else who's working on similar projects.

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Filed under  //   Drupal   MRP  

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November 27, 2009

Who is Using Drupal? - 70 high profile sites

In the midst of doing some background research for Drupal, I've encountered a few lists of high-profile sites which are using the platform.

Wow.

We've thrown our hat at this particular peg, and it's great to see the level of adoption around the world; we're in exceptionally good company!

http://www.slideshare.net/agnian/high-profile-websites-powered-by-drupal

High Profile Websites Powered by Drupal


More here: http://websites.usandv.com/  (apologies for duplicates)

 

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Filed under  //   Drupal  

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October 7, 2009

An Omniplan Template - for professional web projects

Reciprocity

I've long been an advocate of reciprocity within the social and developmental areas of the web; giving something back to the wider community, has, in my opinion, been the most significant factor in moving web tools from the 'geeks', to those who can use them on a daily basis to assist with their business or personal experiences. Open Source, Javascript Libraries, APIs and even Google, are good examples of it in action. Heck, even this Posterous blog is.

However, I never cease to be amazed at how many great applications are being created each and every day, which are distributed FREE! Whilst I voraciously use as many as I can to help develop i-KOS' business (and by implication, our clients), I've never really been in a position to 'give' anything back. I'm a strategist at heart, so my expertise lies in evaluation and communication, but not really ever in the 'doing'.

Consequently I only ever seem to hone my skills to a certain level (in any given software or application), before passing my knowledge on to those best suited to extend it further (yes i-KOS wireframers, I'm thinking about you here). So today marks a new approach for me.

Brief History

Back to reciprocity (where I began) and a bit of back story.

It's rare that I fail to discover something that someone hasn't already done before, but I found recently that I couldn't locate a good Omniplan Document which would serve as a benchmark for web development projects. In the absence of an official Project Manager, I'd taken up the baton on some of our most significant projects, and really needed to demonstrate a good graphic representation of project statuses (is that statii???). Armed with a PDF of a MS project doc, I set out to replicate the original plan in Omniplan, and update to make it current.

Needless to say, this didn't quite go according to plan. As an Omniplan virgin,  with limited experience of formal Project Management disciplines, the terminology seemed daunting. Constraint Start & End, Variance of start, Dependencies. Duration as opposed to Effort. 'Ho hum, shall I leave this for someone else?'

Not really my style, I have to say. And besides, how hard can it be (I've met a few project managers)? Nice, to a man. Efficient, definitely. Budding genii (got it right this time), err, maybe not.

On to Omniplan

So I got cracking, and after a rapid learning curve, I've reached a point where I can kick open the Omni, and be confident of setting expectations from the outset. The Gantt chart even bears a close resemblance to our reality, for what I class as mid-tier web dev projects(£10-£25k). I've leaned heavily on the sample file available on the Omni website www.omnigroup.com, so many thanks for the colour styling theme.

Screenshot of file below:

I'm keen to get some feedback from anyone who regularly uses Omni, as I'm sure I'm missing many many tricks, but for any other Newbs to Omniplan, then I hope the attached file helps. Hey, you can always bin it if not. I plan on adding an overlay of project management time shortly as well - so consider this as version 1.

DM me on twitter @simonsurtees

Obviously this will need to be adapted for your specific needs; I doubt everyone uses wireframing as much as we do, nor for that matter will you have a team specifically developing in Drupal. But I hope it will kick start some of your projects, and give a guide for delivering a well balanced development project. In today's financial climate, cash flow is king, so I've paid particular attention to the financial milestones being accurate and 'in balance'.

On a personal note, I've realised that the request for copy & imagery must be done early! Have fun playing.

Click here to download:
SimonSurtees-OmniplanTemplate.zip (23 KB)

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Filed under  //   drupal   omniplan   projectmanagement   projectmgmt  

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July 27, 2009

Cracking Drupal - A Drop in the Bucket by Greg Knaddison:

via amazon.com

A worthwhile read for anyone interested in Drupal development, putting the default security settings through their paces.

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Filed under  //   Drupal  

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July 23, 2009

Migrating the Economist website to Drupal - an insight from the economist team

via vimeo.com

One of the greatest challenges facing the Drupal community is the accessibility of the interface, as at present, it's just too darn hard for the average content producer / website owner to get to grips with it. On the flip side, agencies such as i-KOS face the challenge of promoting Drupal as a reliable scalable CMS, and having to ensure that the 'polish' is applied in the right places.

Internally this is a challenge we have wrestled with on several occasions, and is still a work in progress, so I'm delighted that a heavyweight site such as the Economist has entered the Drupal arena and is addressing some of these areas. Over the coming weeks, they're focussing directly on the interface with which the numerous content editors, journalists etc interact, and are attempting to provide a bespoke solution which I think we can all learn from. If you haven't already done so, check out the video as to their rationale behind opting for Drupal.

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Filed under  //   Drupal   Economist  

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July 13, 2009

A holiday rental website to be proud of

We've just completed with a client on a personal project of theirs - to design and build a website which showcases their villa in spain. Situated in the heart of Catalonia, and with sumptuous views of the Med in the distance, we knew we had to create a site which reflected the tranquil nature of the location, aimed squarely at the professional market.

As part of the brief, we requested that our clients listed 3 websites they liked / disliked, so we could get a flavour of the style they wanted to display.

More to follow



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Filed under  //   Drupal   Portfolio  

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