Anthony Milner

In setting work goals for 2009 it’s worthwhile to look back and reflect on what we have achieved in 2008. So spending 5 minutes thinking about it I was able to put together quite an impressive list…

• Released 9 major product updates
• Developed 5 new products
  • Intranet Manager.NET
  • Training Manager.NET
  • Induction Manager.NET
  • Partner Portal.NET
  • Government Portal.NET
• Ran 2 product launches and 3 user groups
• Designed and implemented a completely new User Interface for the Community Manager platform
• Designed and developed a new corporate website and attained a PageRank 7
• Established a successful and highly trafficked Elcom Community Portal
• Major infrastructure updates including the implementation of a new phone system
• Improved our internal sales, development and project management processes

There is a lot to be proud of and it makes me wonder how we could possibly outdo that in 2009, but we’re definitely up for the challenge.

We recently launched a site for Aldridge Traffic Controllers and I have to say I was really impressed and proud to discover that Australian innovation is responsible for the research and development behind the world class SCATS Traffic Management System. SCATS stands for Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System. Basically SCATS is an adaptive traffic light management system, think Die Hard 4 where the Mac geek boy controls traffic lights giving guys a clear run of green lights while causing gridlock mayhem for others.

Essentially the SCATS system has the ability to analyse traffic flows and respond quickly by adjusting signals thereby changing traffic flows. Pretty cool. Using special software an operator can actually control a traffic light remotely if required but the system supposedly takes care of things automatically. Apparently we’ve exported and installed this technology in over 30 cities across the globe. In contrast to what Hollywood would have you think most cities across the US do not have systems like this. Their lights just have static signal controllers which cannot be controlled remotely and certainly can’t adapt to changing traffic flows.

There is not a whole lot of information out there about SCATS so if you’re interested in finding out more here are some sites…

• Powerhouse Museum
• Aldridge Traffic Controllers
• RTA

The Aldridge site has a page on the actual Traffic Signal Controllers which are the individual units which sit near intersections and are managed by the overall SCATS system, it’s a bit light on at the moment but we’re working on that.

For some time at Elcom we’ve deployed our Content Management product, Community Manager, as an Intranet. It has excellent content management, document management, forms, corporate phone book, blogs, wikis, workflow and enterprise search features making it an ideal intranet software choice for a mid-sized to enterprise level businesses. In fact it’s capability as an intranet search engine alone would make it a great choice for an enterprise federated search solution.

We’ve recently taken a close look at the marketing of our product offerings and came to a conclusion that companies that were looking for intranet software or intranet search engines had no idea that Community Manager provided this functionality out of the box. So we’ve been promoting the not so obvious and decided to make it a little more obvious. So what did we do, we launched a new product, it’s called, wait for it….drum roll….Intranet Manager (tada).

I’m loving our new logos. Yes I know they’re a bit Adobe looking but that was not intentional. These are actually the 3d blocks from our logo.

This small change has led to significantly more interest and enquiries, especially via the web. We’ve always toyed with the idea of doing this but it somehow felt wrong to launch a product that was the same as another product. However the reality is that we’re now making a market that has a need for a product more aware that such a product exists. We’ve done a similar thing in the past with our Enterprise Search product and now it has it’s own logo as well. In fact we’ve now have 4 products in total with more on the way. They’re not all the same product rebadged, each has it’s own discreet features and functionality however it has been built on the Community Manager platform and reflects the significant functionality and investment that has been poured Community Manager over the last 12 years.

To celebrate the launch of Intranet Manager we’re running a free Intranet seminar at the offices of our good friends and supporters, DSRD. If you’re interested why not come along and hear from industry experts Derek Jardine and Stephen Collins as well as a case study from Orica Consumer Products which will give you a closer look at the product and it’s awesome functionality.

The details are….

When:

IntranetManager.NET Launch

Tuesday 18th November 2008
08:00am – 10:00am

Where:

Hamilton Room
NSW Trade and Investment Centre
Level 47, MLC Centre
19 Martin Place
Sydney, NSW

The Agenda:

08:00am
Registration & Coffee

08:10am
Welcome

08:20am
Industry Expert -
Derek Jardine
“Managing information in your organisation”

08:40am
Industry Expert -
Stephen Collins
“Web 2.0 and your intranet”

09:00am
Leading Case Study – “Orica’s Intranet”

09:20am
IntranetManager.NET Demonstration

09:40am
Breakfast & Networking with the Industry Experts

Hope to see you there.

Craig Bailey our Tech Director and Alan J Lee our Sys Admim recently moved our Community Manager.NET application to the the Microsoft 2008 stack and are experiencing a 16x performance improvement. Read all about it on Craig’s blog.