SilverStripe

At the end of August New Zealand's first Open Government Data Barcamp will take place at the National Library in Wellington. The barcamp is an open, participant driven event organised and run by people who have an interest in making government-held ... [More] data freely available. As an open source company and one of the sponsors of the event, SilverStripe strongly stands behind the open data philosophy.  We believe that collaboration fosters innovation and that taxpayer-funded data should be available without restrictions over the Internet. While data itself can do a lot of things, it needs to be put into context to be useful for others; having data freely available allows people to create value and develop innovative services and applications. Government agencies, as part of their work, collect a substantial amount of non-personal data - from geospatial and environmental data to statistics. In most cases public money is spent to research and obtain this data, so it should be accessible for everyone to use. SilverStripe works with a range of government agencies helping them to make their data available for citizens in a meaningful way, enabling them to collaborate constructively and make use of the data on a personal, regional, and national level. To find out more about the New Zealand Open Govt barcamp go to http://groups.google.com/group/nzopengovtbarcamp [Less]

It's only weeks since we welcomed nine new staff to SilverStripe, and it's already time to welcome seven more. With our latest additions, the SilverStripe headcount is now more than 30. Our second office floor, which was empty only two months ago ... [More] , is filling up very quickly! Andreas Piening, Jeremy Warne, Mateusz Uzdowski, Mark Stephens, and Stephen Wake all join as great additions to our development team. This not only enables us to complete customer work more quickly, but it lets us increase our internal product development work. Lee Middleton joins us to manage SilverStripe's busy sales and marketing team, and Julian Meadow provides our customers with further project management and business analysis expertise. A very warm welcome to all!   [Less]

It's only weeks since we welcomed nine new staff to SilverStripe, and it's already time to welcome seven more. With our latest additions, the SilverStripe headcount is now more than 30. Our second office floor, which was empty only two months ago ... [More] , is filling up very quickly! Andreas Piening, Jeremy Warne, Mateusz Uzdowski, Mark Stephens, and Stephen Wake all join as great additions to our development team. This not only enables us to complete customer work more quickly, but it lets us increase our internal product development work. Lee Middleton joins us to manage SilverStripe's busy sales and marketing team, and Julian Meadow provides our customers with further project management and business analysis expertise. A very warm welcome to all!   [Less]

You can now watch an hour-long video explaining SilverStripe's involvement with demconvention.com, the official website for the US Democratic Party's 2008 National Convention. During its 96-hour peak period, the website recieved 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 ... [More] million visits, served 350,000 hours of streaming video, and took the prize of busiest SilverStripe website ever. The video is a recording of Tim Chambers and I talking at the monthly Washington DC Web Content Mavens group. Tim Chambers is one of the founders of Dewey Digital, the company appointed the official website producer for the convention. Dewey Digital is now one of SilverStripe's official partners. Dewey was responsible for the website strategy and design and, as we discuss in this video, the selection of a CMS platform and the delegation of the technical build to an appropriately skilled company. In the talk, Tim elaborates on the most important criteria when selecting the SilverStripe software and company, explaining the seemingly unlikely selection of an open source package from New Zealand: Open source, allowing buyer confidence (the software can be trialled before selection), and allowing the 2012 campaign to reuse ideas, code, and content if wanted. (Oh, and providing a good price!) Scalability, for obvious reasons: this would be the busiest convention website in history. Caching to static files was a required component of this. Easy content authoring, to ensure that the system could be used by volunteers, without user error. Multilingual, to ensure the Hispanic community could be effectively reached with Spanish content. Able to provide blog functionality and integration with Flickr, YouTube, and other systems easily. Commercial support, because there needed to be a professional firm responsible for delivery. Following this we discuss the various traditional and Web 2.0 features of the website, characteristic of a more IT-savvy political campaign. We show and explain screenshots of the content authoring interface, providing insights into how a busy Denver team worked around the clock to update the website with speech transcripts, and other critical information. We also talk about the technical infrastructure: five Redhat Apache servers, a CDN, and separate infrastructure for the Silverlight streaming video. We noted that the interest in Obama's nomination, combined with a Slashdotting, surpassed the 1000/hits per second mark, yet the website remained responsive to visitors. With the talk hosted in Washington DC, the talk also mentions some of the non-technical details such as how the convention needed to contain a Colorado voter focus. It also meant we had a very active audience who asked plenty of useful questions. It was well worth the jetlag to do the talk, so we hope that it makes for useful viewing! [Less]

You can now watch an hour-long video explaining SilverStripe's involvement with demconvention.com, the official website for the US Democratic Party's 2008 National Convention. During its 96-hour peak period, the website recieved 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 ... [More] million visits, served 350,000 hours of streaming video, and took the prize of busiest SilverStripe website ever. The video is a recording of Tim Chambers and I talking at the monthly Washington DC Web Content Mavens group. Tim Chambers is one of the founders of Dewey Digital, the company appointed the official website producer for the convention. Dewey Digital is now one of SilverStripe's official partners. Dewey was responsible for the website strategy and design and, as we discuss in this video, the selection of a CMS platform and the delegation of the technical build to an appropriately skilled company. In the talk, Tim elaborates on the most important criteria when selecting the SilverStripe software and company, explaining the seemingly unlikely selection of an open source package from New Zealand: Open source, allowing buyer confidence (the software can be trialled before selection), and allowing the 2012 campaign to reuse ideas, code, and content if wanted. (Oh, and providing a good price!) Scalability, for obvious reasons: this would be the busiest convention website in history. Caching to static files was a required component of this. Easy content authoring, to ensure that the system could be used by volunteers, without user error. Multilingual, to ensure the Hispanic community could be effectively reached with Spanish content. Able to provide blog functionality and integration with Flickr, YouTube, and other systems easily. Commercial support, because there needed to be a professional firm responsible for delivery. Following this we discuss the various traditional and Web 2.0 features of the website, characteristic of a more IT-savvy political campaign. We show and explain screenshots of the content authoring interface, providing insights into how a busy Denver team worked around the clock to update the website with speech transcripts, and other critical information. We also talk about the technical infrastructure: five Redhat Apache servers, a CDN, and separate infrastructure for the Silverlight streaming video. We noted that the interest in Obama's nomination, combined with a Slashdotting, surpassed the 1000/hits per second mark, yet the website remained responsive to visitors. With the talk hosted in Washington DC, the talk also mentions some of the non-technical details such as how the convention needed to contain a Colorado voter focus. It also meant we had a very active audience who asked plenty of useful questions. It was well worth the jetlag to do the talk, so we hope that it makes for useful viewing! [Less]

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 innovatively. SilverStripe staff were ... [More] 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]

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 innovatively. SilverStripe staff were ... [More] 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]

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 ... [More] 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]

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 ... [More] 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]

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 interfaces, system ... [More] 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]