From the category archives:

Elcom

Angus McDonald on User Stories

January 28, 2010Elcom
Thumbnail image for Angus McDonald on User Stories

I really liked Angus’ recent post on User Stories (Wikipedia link about User Stories here) and how he grapples with question of whether they are even needed. User Stories feature prominently in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 releases, so you’re sure to hear more about them (in the Microsoft space that is).
The value in Angus’ [...]

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Elcom Intranet Manager launch

November 11, 2008Elcom

One of the mistakes I made when I started at Elcom was in thinking we were just a web company. You know, web sites and not much else.
But as I quickly learned, we’re also in the business of intranets – in fact we’ve been building significant Intranets for clients for a while now. [...]

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Leaving Elcom – looking for my next role

October 20, 2008Elcom

Last week, following probably the worst IT downturn in the last 8 years I decided to leave Elcom. Crazy huh? Yeah, it may turn out to be foolish, but in this post I aim to explain why, and in the following post, what I‘m looking for as my next step.
I thought I’d put this [...]

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ELCOM: Web Content Management

September 16, 2008Elcom

Product good. Marketing… not so good
It’s been an interesting exercise thinking about marketing at Elcom over the last few months.
In my opinion (biased as I am) I think we have an excellent product. However, something we haven’t been very good at is the marketing side of things. Often people have heard of us, but [...]

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Atlassian and Microsoft Office

August 18, 2008Elcom

The links between Atlassian and Microsoft Office grow stronger with Atlassian’s latest Connector between Confluence (their Wiki product) and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this case the Connector allows content on the Confluence Wiki to be imported, edited and updated from Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Check out the super simple 3 and half minute [...]

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Microsoft’s new Green Strategy – it’s called Vista 64 bit

May 26, 2008Elcom

The Techies at Elcom completely reformatted my machine a few weeks back and installed Vista 64bit. This has been great because I can now access all 4GB of RAM (woo hoo!). But there’s been another unexpected benefit…
It turns out that there’s no printer drivers for our Elcom printers that work on Vista 64. So, for [...]

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ELCOM: New product launch – Elcom TrainingManager.NET

May 25, 2008Elcom

We’re launching a new product this week. This Thursday morning to be exact.
You may know that Elcom, where I work, is a web company that builds products for medium to large companies. We do intranets, extranets, portals, web sites, etc. Plus we do a fair bit of customisation.
Over the last few months we’ve been [...]

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CodeCampOz and SBTUG this month

April 22, 2008Community

I’m heading home from the US of A today, which sees me arrive back in Sydney (hopefully) on Thursday morning 24 April.
CodeCampOz
The next day I head down to Wagga for CodeCampOz. That finishes up on Sunday (27 April) and I fly back to Sydney that night.
Elcom
On Monday I’m back in the office, ready [...]

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Elcom upgrade of Microsoft CRM 3.0 to 4.0

March 14, 2008Elcom

Brad Marsh has a few screenshots of our upgrade experience from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to 4.0
Summary: it went extremely well.
My comment: CRM 4.0 seems to be slower than 3.0 but since it’s running on an old server, it was expected (new server infrastructure coming in the next few weeks – Yay!). Overall, no real [...]

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ELCOM: More Microsoft 2008 Stack testing results

February 21, 2008Elcom

We've done a little more testing of our product on the Microsoft 2008 stack and I'm pleased (and a little worried) with the results.

The pleasing part: we are now showing results on the 2008 stack as being 16X faster than the 2003/2005 stack.

The worrying part: results of 16X faster are very high – what if [...]

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Heroes Happen at Elcom :-)

February 12, 2008Elcom

As Angus notes, we've got a nice little flash animation on the Elcom web site alerting users to our Community Manager CMS product running on the Microsoft 2008 stack. Here's the details of how we installed and tested, and the result: 500% performance increase. (You read that right – 500%)
Technorati Tags: Elcom Technology, Microsoft 2008 [...]

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Brad Marsh on SQL 2008 Database encryption

February 12, 2008Elcom

Brad Marsh, one of the techies at Elcom, discusses his experiences with SQL Server 2008 database encryption.
Technorati Tags: Brad Marsh, SQL Server 2008, Database encryption

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ELCOM: Career Plans for Developers – Part II

February 4, 2008Elcom

Further to my post about career plans for developers at Elcom, I wanted to mention the approach of encouraging staff to build their personal profiles.

It can be summed up in this attitude:

Your job (as a developer and employee) is to be so good that you are being chased by head-hunters all the time.

My job (as [...]

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What does a web CMS do?

February 3, 2008Elcom

I'm not sure if I agree with the simplicity of this, but it does highlight a common misconception about CMS systems. The CMS manages the content of course, but these days it often needs to provide much more 'out of the box'. At Elcom, where I work for example, we are positioning our CMS product [...]

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ELCOM: Career plans for Developers – Part I

January 30, 2008Elcom

Part of my brief at Elcom is to look after all the developers (ie people management). This is something I enjoy, especially when seeing developers grow and improve themselves.
During November and December I sat down with each of my staff and started preparing their career plans. It is their responsibility to work out their goals [...]

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Is the ECM market ripe for consolidation?

January 20, 2008Elcom

An interesting article from Computerworld on the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space (of which my employer – Elcom – is a major player).
Elcom is an ECM company, and we are always grappling with where to best extend our product. Lately we have seen the value of our systems being the platform for a business to [...]

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ELCOM: More on Windows 2008, SQL 2008, VS 2008

January 18, 2008Elcom

Earlier this week I mentioned Elcom had moved everything over to 2008 (that is, our product – Community Manager.NET – is now targeting .NET 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008, and our site is running on Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008 on the back end).
Initial thoughts were that the site was running a bit [...]

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Round up of recent Elcom blogs

January 17, 2008Blog

Brad Marsh has a good post on Windows 2008 firewall settings
Angus McDonald discusses new VB9 stuff
Sam Fu considers the Application Domain
Summer Hu has stacks of stuff, here's an example talking about System.AddIn
Alan Lee talks about Windows Server 2008 RC0
Technorati Tags: Elcom, Bloggers

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ELCOM: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008

January 15, 2008Elcom

Elcom is all 2008.
The Elcom web site is now running on a Windows 2008 Server, with SQL Server 2008 as the back-end and Community Manager.NET completely recompiled under Visual Studio 2008 (targeting the 3.5 Framework) delivering the content.

Community Manager.NET is Elcom’s content management system (CMS), which we have now re-compiled, tested and released on the [...]

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ELCOM: Developers going dark

December 21, 2007Elcom

Microsoft developers (I’m told) have the option to ‘go dark’ at times. At least that’s what Joe Schwetz indicated at a recent Sydney Deep meeting. The aim is to allow them to catch up on projects that are running behind. The process involves killing all distractions (email, blogs, phone calls, IM, etc) and focusing on [...]

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