Posted
5 months
ago
SilverStripe recently attended and exhibited at GOVIS, a three day, IT sector conference for New Zealand government agencies. Our experience there reminded us why our government has such a hard time using the web
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innovatively.
SilverStripe staff were struck by the absence of a knowledge gap between speakers and delegates. In other words, public sector staff attending GOVIS were largely progressive and self-motivated individuals: not only were they aware of good trends and best practices to do with IT and the web, they were already pushing such ideas within their agencies. In fact, this made some speakers look like they were preaching to the converted on key topics like open data, web-based APIs, open source software, embracing standards, and enabling meaningful services and democratic process online.
But a knowledge gap must lurk somewhere, because most government agencies and IT projects fail to take advantage of the "new" ideas and best practices that the web industry and events like GOVIS have long advocated. This is a shame, because many of these ideas are no longer new—they are proven, and public sector staff and the private sector are itching to implement them. It seems that public sector staff are spending years attempting to gain approval for worthwhile projects from leaders who fail to understand what can be done with the internet, and fail to trust that their staff know better.
Two keynotes at GOVIS discussed the issue of political decision-makers holding back innovation in New Zealand government. Nathan Torkington was very clear in the second half of his presentation that government has a people problem, not a technology problem. In fact, he suggested that political leaders in New Zealand still have a lot of goodwill left they are able to spend, unlike their counterparts in the UK and US who have exhausted goodwill and who now need to actively restore it. Laurence Millar, who for many years acted as Government CIO, talked on the Sisyphean Challenge of Transforming Government. Laurence talked of six levers to drive progress in government, each with pros and cons: legislation, leadership, persuasion, people power, publication, and investment logic.
We're very pleased that all of the material from GOVIS is online at http://richmedia.govis.org.nz. If you're an experienced web professional, most of the content is nothing new. But it's great that conference content can be viewed, discussed and used to influence decision-makers long after the conference has ended. (Note that videos require a Microsoft Media Player plugin.)
If you're looking for presentations that went beyond explaining current trends and knowledge, a good person to watch is Matt Lane. He took a fresh and fun take on the future of the enterprise - we dare you to watch it!
If you are interested in an example of government innovation, check out the session on The National Broadband Map. The map project was created by SilverStripe for the State Services Commission, and it saw good co-operation from the telecommunications industry. There's a great story behind this project, which is now available for everyone to listen to and watch courtesy of Lewis Melville from the State Services Commission.
Of all the speakers, the award for daring to say what others won't goes to Don Christie, president of the New Zealand Open Source society. He was extremely candid on how public money is wasted on software and why our government must take far more advantage of open source software, especially in the education sector. Watch Don Christie talking on open source at GOVIS.
We hope you find the videos useful. If you're working to improve how government utilises the web, keep up the great work! You're not only helping our country, you are making it easier for the next agency to follow suit, and this will hopefully allow GOVIS to progress onto fresh material. [Less]
Posted
5 months
ago
New Zealand's national airline, Air New Zealand, has decided to migrate their main websites to the SilverStripe platform. Website developers and other IT staff at the airline will work closely with SilverStripe's senior staff to make this happen over
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the coming 12 months.
We're very excited to be helping Air New Zealand because we love seeing them successfully innovate. We love their streamlined check-in and boarding procedure, the mPass application for the iPhone, and their How Far Can I Go website—and that they were the first airline to fly a 747 on biofuel (they have some awesome biofuel policies). We look forward to our software and our knowledge allowing them to innovate much more rapidly and meaningfully with their main websites.
We've discovered that Air New Zealand’s innovative approach flows through to their internal processes, too, and participating in Air New Zealand’s software procurement process has been an enjoyable experience. While most organisations procure software through an RFP or a tender, not many truly test the software as part of the process. For this project Air New Zealand combined traditional procurement practices with testing and prototyping, adding more rigour to their selection process:
An internal Air New Zealand team downloaded and used our software. They created a prototype and did intensive research and testing on the actual code (using the CMS, making HTML templates, investigating the ease of customising the code, etc.).
SilverStripe and Air New Zealand worked together to produce a small but important website. Doing business allowed both parties to get to know each other.
SilverStripe were commissioned to demonstrate the feasibility of key deliverables during the procurement process. Sometimes this meant we wrote code and created partly-working prototypes and other times this meant investigation around architecture. This allowed Air New Zealand to better compare SilverStripe with their existing platform (Microsoft CMS 2002) and modern alternatives.
David Shepherd, Development Manager for Air New Zealand's Innovations and Ventures team and project manager for the migration project, confirms that Air New Zealand's requirements for a new CMS were that it should be:
low cost
future-proofed
only as complex as it needs to be
locally supported (and, if possible, locally developed)
We're pleased that SilverStripe met Air New Zealand's requirements so well. We know that the Innovations team at Air New Zealand are no strangers to open source software and a LAMP-based solution like SilverStripe seems to be a good fit for them. Being open source, it will:
allow meaningful contributions by a skilled internal (Air New Zealand) development team to the migration project
allow greater transparency and control over the migration project
allow new features and bug fixes to be contributed back to the core product, removing the risk of Air New Zealand becoming a software vendor themselves
allow licensing costs to be replaced with labour, allowing more focus on usability, design, etc, both now and in future years
The open and flexible architecture of SilverStripe, its support for open standards, cross-browser compatibility, and object-oriented design will substantially reduce the risk of Air New Zealand being locked into a vendor's roadmap. Features like flexible HTML templating, multiple languages, multiple websites, and support to handle bursts of visitor traffic were considered must-haves by Air New Zealand, and SilverStripe's modular architecture will mean that functionality and complexity can be added by Air New Zealand as required.
The fact that all of the above could be delivered by a New Zealand company made SilverStripe Air New Zealand's preferred choice.
Air New Zealand has annual revenue of NZD4.9 billion, 11,000 staff, and carries over 13 million passengers per year (source). This makes them a very substantial user of our software, and one we're looking forward to supporting for years to come. [Less]
Posted
6 months
ago
We're very excited to welcome nine great new staff to SilverStripe—and we're still hiring!
Carlos Barberis - HTML and PHP/MySQL guru
Felipe Skroski - Kick-ass designer
Hamish Friedlander - Parser generators, jQuery user
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interfaces, system administration, and everything in between
Julian Seidenberg - Semantic web guru and our first PhD (and helping with our SilverStripe book)
Kirsten Alexander - Coordinator
Kirsten Moodie - On reception, and helping out with customer support and open source community work
Nicole Tiefensee - Fantastic new project manager
Rainer Spittel - Coding since 6, an expert in GIS, and helping to lead our development team
Tom Rix - Zend certified, and loving development work on the underpinnings of the SilverStripe CMS
Have you seen our video on the issues we face trying to keep up with demand for client work and advancing our software? [Less]
Posted
6 months
ago
The video we made for the recent Gold Awards explains our problem: we have a lot of exciting work coming our way and we can't hire great staff fast enough. That's why we started looking at our inter-species and inter-generational options.
Watch our video and you'll understand our recruitment challenges.
Posted
6 months
ago
Just after we announced the SilverStripe Partner Program, we are happy to welcome our latest SilverStripe Partner: The Star Group.
The Star Group is a creative agency based out of Philadelphia, PA, with four offices in the eastern United
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States. They offer a wide range of digital services, as well as marketing services such as branding, advertising, PR and design. Contact The Star Group to learn more.
Welcome, guys! [Less]
Posted
7 months
ago
The National Broadband Map was a winner in the World Summit Awards, chosen from an international field of around 20,000 entrants from 157 countries.
We're very proud of our contribution to this award—our company built the site for the
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State Services Commission last year. We're also very pleased to see a government project with open APIs and public source code being recognised with such a prestigious award.
Here in New Zealand, a council website that SilverStripe built and launched last month has also just won an award. The Gisborne District Council website won "People's Choice Best Redevelopment: Website" at last week's ALGIM Conference in Wellington. This means it received the most votes from the delegates at the conference, all of which were fellow council IT and web staff.
Karen Hadfield, Web Administrator for Gisborne District Council, took the award and explained, "we are absolutely ecstatic to win, especially the people's choice category. It's the absolute icing on the cake, and means so much to our project team and council."
View these two achievements on our awards page. [Less]
Posted
7 months
ago
We are all very proud to announce the SilverStripe Partner Program! This is a big deal for us for a number of reasons:
Through our partners, we are able to provide local development and support services to the SilverStripe community
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throughout the globe.
Our partners are trusted providers who have demonstrated a commitment and ability to provide excellent SilverStripe-related services to their clients. All together, our partners offer marketing, design, development, and support for your SilverStripe needs.
We're answering the call: more businesses (and individuals) around the world will be able to attend local SilverStripe meetups, talk to local SilverStripe service providers, and get support when they need it.
Here at SilverStripe headquarters we're still providing the same services as always, but starting today, our partners will be able to offer their SilverStripe design, development, and support expertise with the backing of SilverStripe HQ here in New Zealand.
Why are we doing this? You told us to! For a long time now, we've been getting lots of queries from all over the globe from companies who wanted local SilverStripe help. Businesses (and government entities) wanted a local provider for SilverStripe support, but they also wanted that provider to have strong ties to SilverStripe headquarters in New Zealand. Then we started getting to know some awesome providers scattered across the globe and they wanted to know how they could help. The Partner Program is the result of those discussions.
To learn more about the Partner Program check out the press release or the partner page on our site.
Also, when you see the SilverStripe Partner logo on a service provider's site, know that they have the full support of our company and they will work with us to make sure you get excellent service for your new or existing SilverStripe installation.
Thanks for helping us spread the good word about SilverStripe, and here's to our partners helping to do the same!
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Posted
8 months
ago
SilverStripe has been announced as a finalist in the 2009 Gold Awards.
The awards recognise and celebrate the leading businesses in our city, Wellington. Being nominated for the Cyber Gold category was based on the views of 60 respected
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business people acting as judges. We'd like to thank the judges for choosing to recognise us in this way.
The awards focus on the achievements of the preceding 12 months, in which we:
Surpassed 100,000 downloads of our open source SilverStripe software.
Built many sucessful websites for customers including the Democratic National Convention.
Doubled our staff, grew revenue by 70%, more than doubled profit, and substantially grew our international customer base.
Released several new versions of our software.
SilverStripe and the other finalists will learn who the winners are on May 13th at a large black-tie event.
SilverStripe were also finalists last year—see our video recording of the night and our toungue-in-cheek video that described our company's achievements. [Less]
Posted
10 months
ago
New Zealand's Internet Blackout is coming.
SilverStripe supports the efforts of the Creative Freedom Foundation and we will show our support very soon...
Posted
10 months
ago
We're pleased to have three new staff recently join SilverStripe!
Peter Rostedt joins the sales team, bringing years of experience relevant to learning about our customers and shaping ideal websites and applications for them.
To aid
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with our growing project workload, Miranda Kaye joins us as a project manager. She's spent years managing websites, and also comes with a solid English Lit background.
Finally, Ngoc Heng joins us as a very helpful addition on the front desk!
A very warm welcome to all of them!
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