Last week Thursday, I had to fly down to Cape Town the morning and flew back to Joburg in the evening, this time I flew with Kulula.com, my previous time I flew I flew with Mango.

So basically I was very impressed with the service, and on-time flights of Kulula, except for one thing. As Kulula is a private company trying to survive in the aviation world, they must get their funding from somewhere.  When boarding this particular flight, there was advertising on the in-flight luggage holders(above passengers heads) with stickers advertising the Kulula credit card.  After a while getting  bored on the flight, I had a look at the little magazine provided in the flight, where I also was bombarded with advertisements of Kulula partners and other ways to just take my money away from me.   Before we landed the hostesses went on about you can now go stay in this group hotel and can go hire a car at this car rental institution.  All the hard marketing started to really irritate me after a while.

In contrast, Mango is funded partly/indirectly by government, and they don’t have any of the advertising during their flights. I’ll fly Kulula again(they really make good jokes during the flight), but I just have to ignore all the marketing and advertising campaigns which is just too in your face.

written by Arné

Wow, the last couple of weeks have just been hectic.  Not just have I been blessed by a beautiful baby boy, I also have been extra busy with work lately.

As some of you know my official title I was appointed for at my current company, DVT is BPM Consultant where I deal with business processes and enhancing business effeciency by using technology to make the people work effeciently.

Previously up to now I’ve been using one of the best products available for rapidly deploying  BPM into companies, called Metastorm BPM(previously Metastorm eWork), but this has also ended as I’m slowly starting to move away from this product, and focusing on Sharepoint (WSS and MOSS) and a little bit of Radic@l (where I’im implementing some BPM into the package).

Last week I found myself adding some enhancements to the currently Radic@l application whereby I’ve implemented some core BPM principles to enable this locally developed product to be used for more complex business processes with the help of the Business Rule Processor(BRP) and some nifty database structure defining the process flow, this can proof to be a very powerful product.   The package enhancements I’ve done will enable users to perform manual actions and be moved to the next step in the process or will enable the BRP to pick a certain process instance up and move it to a certain next step depending on some current process instance data. This is very effective in sending notifications and especially escalations when someone is not doing there work in the desired timeframe. This is not Workflow, but true BPM. Enough said about Radic@l for now.

Since last year I’ve been involved in the R&D of Sharepoint, or more particularly in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007.  Since then I’ve learned a great lot and have implemented this very successfully according to me.  About 3 months ago I really started looking into the development side of Sharepoint.  Very powerful product.

Although I’ve learned quite alot by myself, I’ve decided to attend training this week provided by Synergy and presented by Milan Gross.  Today will be the 3rd day of this training. So far I’m very impressed by the Synergy curriculum and the presenter of the training. Althought the facilities we are using, New Horizons in Rosebank is abit dissappointing, or maybe I’m just used to the quality of the facilities at DVT and IndigoCube(sharing offices with DVT).

Next week will also be quite busy, and I so need to get my hands on a 3G connection for my laptop as my cellphones GPRS connection is so unreliable and does not always connect and very bad quality.  Already I’ll be in 4 cities(if you can call it that) next week, making Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town the major ones.

So expect my next post when you see it … lol

written by Arné

Ever dreamt of presenting at TechEd! We’ll cover your trip to Durban, hotel accommodation and entry into TechEd. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it’s not impossible.We’re looking for presenters that’s got developer technical knowledge, but is also able to have an engaging conversation with a large audience. All you need to start the process is submit your developer topic and a 5-sentence profile of yourself. We will select 10 guys and gals to come and do a 20-minute presentation at Microsoft, Bryanston on 7 June. You will be rated by your peers and potentially selected by Microsoft to “move to the next level”. The closing date for submissions is Friday, 16 May 2008.

For more information visit DotNet.Org.ZA link

written by Arné

I’ve been in the Software Development realm for about 5 years, and it has been along time since I’ve actually looked back at the theory behind the whole life of Software Development in general. Every now and again you just go back to the books just to check yourself and make sure that you are still on track.

Found a nice blog post revisiting Boehm’s Spiral Model to Software Development.

written by Arné

The reason why I did not post for a few days is cause I’ve been busy at a client site installing some of the products I’ve been working on and fixing some performance problems.

Anyways, one of the main servers I worked on was a Dell with 8 x Intel Xeon CPU’s,with strangely enough 4GB ram …

When performing operations you almost don’t even see a bump on Task Manager, but it is always a pleasure working with effecient equipment instead of the once-in-a-while “desktop”-servers.

written by Arné