Technology, Productivity and Automating Everything…
At work I have been the champion of an Integration Framework for our Archive One product. This is a set of API’s, events and open file formats embedded into the Archive One products that allow customization ‘around the edge’. The kind of thing that can be done with the Integration…
At work, we use SupportSuite for support case tracking. This is a real neat product but the support is dreadful. I was running version 3.0.0.80 and there are a few problems with it, they recently announced version 3.1.40. I set up a testing copy and tried an upgrade – no…
At work we are heavily into MAPI (we provide email archiving solutions). MAPI is Microsoft’s mainstream supported and recommended protocol for accessing Exchange. There are currently two main versions of MAPI – ‘Exchange MAPI’ and ‘Outlook MAPI’. Exchange MAPI is the version that is installed when you install Exchange System Manager…
In the first version of my GPS Library software (written in VB6) I had a ‘Protocol’ property that indicated which protocol we were using (for example Garmin, Magellan, NMEA etc). Then, every time we needed to do something at the protocol layer (Sending or Receiving data) we had an if…
In the first version of my GPS Library (written in VB6) I had a big horrible multiple nested if statement that handled the intelligence behind what to do when a new frame of data was received – if we were sending Waypoints to the GPS and the frame was an…
About 4 or 5 years ago I wrote a GPS ActiveX control in VB6.0.Although it work really well (and fast), it was difficult to maintain – to be honest it was pretty messy, a large monolith with some real horrible 283654276354 line functions.I sold it as Kapie Systems for a…
One of my gripes with dasBlog is the reporting. To get to reports I have to browse to my blog, login and then view the reports online – bit of a pain doing this every day (yes I am so vain that I like to see my stats on a…
I recently persuaded Sarah to let me buy a High Definition (HD) TV, a 32″ LCD job. After much research, I decided on a Vistron model from eBuyer – there are over 50 customer reviews on their site and it seems most of them are pretty good. It was delivered…
So this is blatant plagiarism of The Joel Test… This is specifically targeted at Technical Support organizations, or anyone providing support for a technical product or service. Do you have a fault / issue tracking application (extra point for providing customers access to it). Do you have a knowledgebase (extra point…
This is the forth (and last for the moment) article on Writing Supportable Software, helping all those customers and support engineers work with our software products and troubleshoot them themselves (i.e. going as far as possible down the troubleshoot path before referring it back to you). You can the first…