Blogin arkisto: 2010

Seminaari sosiaalisen median palveluista pidetty

Tänään Exoven aamiaisseminaarissa tutustuttiin sosiaalisen median palveluiden suunnitteluun ja toteutukseen. Puhujina oli tuttuun tapaan exovelaisten lisäksi myös asiakkaitamme, Mikko Ristimäki esitteli Suomi24:n uuden Minä-palvelun ja Mikko Manerus sekä Elias Pietilä puhuivat Golfgamebook.com:sta. Kalle Varisvirta Exovelta esitteli Drupalin sosiaalisen median alustana ja Janne Kalliola sekä Juha Jauhiainen (Union) puhuivat sosiaalisen median palvelun suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta tyhjältä pöydältä lähdettäessä.

Tarkempi ohjelma löytyy seminaarin sivuilta.

Alla vielä pari kuvaa tilaisuudesta.

Mikko Ristimäki esittelee Suomi24:n Minä-palvelua.

Mikko Manerus ja Elias Pietilä kertovat Golfgamebook.com:sta.

Mikäli haluat ladata seminaarin kalvot PDF-tiedostona, täytä ystävällisesti alla oleva lyhyt kysely. Vastausten lähettämisen jälkeen lomakkeen alapuolelle tulee linkki PDF-tiedostoon.

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Lataa seminaarin kalvot tästä linkistä.

Pakolliset kentät on merkitty tähdellä.

Seminaarikalvot voi katsoa myös tästä:

Suomi24 / Minä implemented by us

Suomi24 Minä profile service has been implemented by Exove with close collaboration with the Suomi24 team.

Mikko Ristimäki of Suomi24 is speaking about the system tomorrow at our social media seminar (only in Finnish).

About the Project

Minä is the heart of Suomi24, the largest Finnish on-line community with more than 2.3 million of registered users. It is the control panel for updating users status, keeping in touch with friends and being always up-to-date of the interesting information around. Suomi24 also offers Finland’s most popular discussion forum, e-mail services, marketplace, dating services and so on for more than 1.3 million unique users a week.

Exove hold a central role in renewing old profile and network solution. The concept of a community-driven, sharing-based service with high performance requirements was designed by Suomi24. Exove implemented the new service concept onto a existing technology platform consisting of Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL in close collaboration with Suomi24. The HTML/CSS templates of the site were built by Suomi24 and integrated to Drupal by Exove. Perhaps the most notable feature of the system is the tight integration with Apache Solr search engine.

Minä uses about twenty modules, half of which are Drupal contrib. modules and half custom-made modules for specifically Suomi24 needs, implemented by Exove. The most important third-party modules are ApacheSolr, CCK, Content Profile, ImageApi, Friendlist and Heartbeat. Custom modules mostly extend and customise the features provided by third-party modules.

Community section of the service provides users an efficient way to browse interesting user profiles and to find new friends. Search integrates with all social functionality on the site.
In addition to the service implementation Exove migrated the existing Suomi24 Gallery information and centralised user information into almost half a million Minä user profiles.

Pasi Piispa, Product Director at Suomi24, describes the result of the renewal project as follows: “The challenge of the project was to duplicate the functionalities of the old Suomi24 Gallery application on our new Drupal platform and migrate the existing user data to improve the quality of the service. The project was by no means easy or simple, but despite the initial challenges we succeeded in building a foundation for upcoming new features and site wide content integrations, which wouldn’t have been possible on the old platform.”

Overall project and technical implementation was supervised by Mikko Ristimäki, Director of Development and Technology at Suomi24. Mikko highlights the Exove role in the project as follows: “Exove provided flexible and cost efficient way to move Suomi24 community features into our core Drupal platform. The team was experienced and provided good insights and best practises on how to build and manage large scale Drupal platforms.”

Please check http://mina.suomi24.fi/yhteisö and see the service yourself.

Aamiaisseminaari sosiaalisen median verkkopalvelujen suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta

Exove järjestää aamiaisseminaarin sosiaalisen median verkkopalvelujen suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta keskiviikkona 15.12.2010. Seminaarissa käsitellään sosiaalisen median verkkopalvelujen suunnittelua ja toteutusta käytännönläheisesti eri alustoihin pohjautuen. Kummankin ratkaisun esittelyn yhteydessä kuullaan myös asiakkaan edustajan esittämä case äskettäin toteutetusta projektista. Puhujina exovelaisten lisäksi Juha Jauhiainen Union Brandilta, Mikko Ristimäki Suomi 24:ltä, sekä Kalle Väinölä ja Mikko Manerus Free Drop Innovationsilta.

Tule kuulemaan ja keskustelemaan sosiaalisen median verkkopalveluiden suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta.

Seminaarin tarkempi ohjelma ja ilmoittautumislomake löytyvät seminaarin esittelysivulta. Seminaari järjestetään perinteiseen tapaan Exoven toimitiloissa HTC Pintassa, Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki. Seminaariin täytyy ilmoittautua ja se on maksuton.

Exoven aiempien seminaarien ohjelmat, kuvat ja esitysmateriaali löytyvät myös blogistamme: sivustoseminaari, 19.5.2010, web-sovellusseminaari, 12.2.2009 ja julkaisujärjestelmäseminaari, 16.6.2009.

Customer survey results 2010

We have once again held our annual customer satisfaction survey, and got feedback from our clients. This post summarises the key findings. Once again, thank you for all of you who responded.

Our general ratings improved compared to last year, and a huge majority (~80%) of respondents are satisfied or very satisfied with our services and us. Our price / quality ratio is also seen good or excellent by more than 65% of respondents, and less than 5% think that it is poor. Rest think that we are on par with everyone else. Our ability to keep the budget in every project throughout our history shows in the answers.

Our services were rated mostly excellent (~30%) or good (~50%), but also average (~15%) or poor (less than 5%). We have approximately kept the scores compared to last year. Responsiveness, keeping promises, and understanding clients’ needs were regarded very high, around 80-90% good or excellent. There were no major changes from the last year. As earlier, clients like our staff, and we are seen both friendly and professional.

More than 75% of you think that we are better than our competition, another 20% don’t see differences, and only less than 5% think that we are doing worse. More than 95% of you would buy again from us (of those about 25% definitely). These numbers have improved somewhat from the last year, continuing our tradition of high customer satisfaction in this regard.

On the other front, whopping 50% of clients have already recommended us, 30% would definitely recommend, another 15% would recommend, and the remaining 5% are not willing to recommend us. All in all more than 95% of our clients would recommend us, which is an extremely delightful result and shows that we are doing well serving you.

Clients value our professionalism, reliability, and agility. We are also regarded as responsive, passionate, committed to joint success, efficient, innovative, and friendly.

If you feel that we could be a good — agile, friendly, and professional — partner for you, get in touch with Janne Kalliola, +358 40 558 1796 or janne@exove.com.

Haemme PHP-kehittäjää / Looking for a PHP Developer

Päivitys 26.11.2010: Haku on päättynyt. Kiitoksia kaikille hakijoille, olemme teihin yhteydessä lähiaikoina. // Update Nov 26, 2010: The search has been closed. Thank you for submitting applications, we are in touch with you in the near future.

Liiketoimintamme jatkaessa voimakasta kasvuamme, etsimme lisää vahvistusta tiimiimme. Mikäli olet kyvykäs PHP-kehittäjä ja haluat liittyä erittäin kyvykkääseen ja mukavaan tiimiin, lue työpaikkakuvaus ja laita hakemus vetämään.

As our business continues grow in accelerated pace, we are looking for more people to join our team. If you are a good PHP developer and are interested in joining in very compotent and friendly team, read more about the position and send us your application.

Eazybreak in news

Eazybreak is a mobile voucher company that is challenging the status quo in lunch, sports, and culture vouchers market first in Finland, and later in other countries. Their look’n'feel, sites and systems are designed and implemented by Exove.

Their innovative concept has been picked up by Helsingin Sanomat, Kauppalehti, and Taloussanomat. All articles are in Finnish.

Fiskars Garden sites

Fiskars is a leading global supplier of consumer products for the home, garden and outdoors. Fiskars products are renowned for their functionality and cutting-edge design, and the Group has a strong portfolio of trusted international brands including Fiskars, Iittala, Gerber, Silva, and Buster.

Exove has played a central role in designing and implementing the new Fiskars global consumer sites onto an Open Source platform. The service was built on eZ Publish, an open source CMS platform that offers versatile content management capabilities, good usability for content editors, and flexible development tools for developers. The developed system spans 30 countries and geographical areas across the globe.
The goal was to create an integrated environment to contain all Fiskars consumer product categories ranging from crafting to gardening. In the past different product lines had dedicated websites causing cost overhead and content fragmentation.

The concept, layouts and Flash elements were created by the Fiskars’ internal marketing team. Exove handled the technical execution from template design to system customization to deployment. eZ Publish was integrated to external systems such as the ZipBurst store locator and SureSource eCommerce system. Automatic prefilling of customer service forms with product data and customer image uploads enhance the web as a channel for customer service.

As the project schedule was tight, site development and content entry was done in parallel. To further accelerate the content entry process Exove also migrated about 750 product items from the legacy IBM WebSphere platform automatically, freeing up Fiskars’ resources for other tasks.

The project had a few focal areas to ensure best of breed user experience, content promotion, and product findability: system flexibility, rich media support, search, and search engine optimisation.

Flexibility
By default Content Management Systems often limit the end users to do a limited set of tasks. In Fiskars’ case the company had a technically capable in-house team that wished they could create custom content into the system. Exove implemented the system in a way that allows the customer to embed custom content such as campaign pages independently without the need for Exove’s intervention.

In addition to custom pages the system allows content elements in the right column to be managed through the eZ Publish interface. This allows Fiskars’ to independently create unique sets of content for a certain section. For example, the right column can hold promotional banners, external JavaScript widgets and rich text content.

During the specification phase some features – such as web store and store finder – were identified to be available only on some sites. Exove implemented them as site features that can be disabled or enabled. This keeps template development structured and allows Fiskars to roll out features to selected country sites only.

Rich media support and content delivery
In addition to text and image content the platform also supports the publishing of video online. Fiskars had an archive of existing video content ranging from individual product promotion videos to series of videos – such as Fiskars TV. Video objects are placed in the media library and linked to dedicated video pages. Links to video objects in rich text content areas open the videos in a modal window.

Section landing pages on the site hold a Flash element that can also be managed using the default eZ Publish administration elements. The main Flash element is integrated to eZ Publish using a custom XML format specified by the Fiskars’ internal team. The banner can hold images or embedded Flash animations.

To ensure content distribution with minimal overhead Exove installed and configured the Varnish reverse proxy to serve all static content such as video, images, stylesheets and JavaScript.

Search
Designing an information architecture for hundreds of products is a challenge. In addition to navigating to the individual products using the navigation it is essential to provide the visitors with a robust search function. eZ Publish has an integrated search extension (eZ Find) based on the popular Open Source search engine Solr.

By using eZ Find Exove was able to provide Fiskars with site wide search functionality with minimal effort. Using Solr the search functionality yields relevant results in milliseconds. Additionally, eZ Find enables content editors to elevate selected content elements when a certain keyword is used in the search – thus allowing internal advertisements and content promotions.

The search index spans all content stored in eZ Publish, including metadata such as content author and keywords.

Search engine optimisation
To ensure optimal search engine visibility the templates were designed to allow crawlers unrestricted access to all content. Using the progressive enhancement ideology every content item is available even to clients without advanced features such as JavaScript or Adobe Flash. In addition to technical features, project focused on writing proper page titles, descriptions, metadata, and payed extra attention to cross linking and other factors contributing to improving search engine rank.

Automated sitemap generation guarantees that search engines index the available content as soon as possible. The sitemaps protocol is supported by most of the popular search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. Duplicate indexing is of content prevented by using the canonical meta-tag.

Please visit the country sites for garden tools found at www.fiskars.com, under country selector.

Etsimme PHP-kehittäjää / We are looking for a PHP developer

Päivitys 1.10.2010: Haku on päättynyt. // Update Oct 1, 2010: The position has been closed.

Haemme PHP-kehittäjää vastaamaan asiakkaidemme kasvaviin tarpeisiin. Mikäli tunnet kielen, ympäristön ja webin hyvin, tutustu tarkemmin ilmoitukseemme ja lähetä vapaamuotoinen hakemus ja ansioluettelo osoitteeseen jobs@exove.fi.

We are looking for a PHP developer to help us to satisfy the growing needs of our customers. If you are familiar with the language, environment, and web, please check out the position description, and send us a free form application and your CV to jobs@exove.com.

Some recent works

We’ve been busy even during the hot summer months, and released some nice sites for our customers. Here are some selected picks:

Mediscale
Mediscale provides medical decision support systems for physicians to get analyses of their patients’ status. We have designed and implemented their site on top of WordPress. The project included visual design, implementation, and training.

Eran Lagon, CEO at MediScale, describes the result of the site project as follows: “We received great recommendations about exove and I was happy to see that they even exceeded our expectations. The dedicated product team completely understood our business requirements and the work was constantly done with collaboration of our company. Not only that exove definitely know how to build useful and beautiful sites, but they also understand startups and how to work with them. Highly recommended!”

The site can be found at www.mediscale.com.

Gamebooktour and Golfpiste Invitational
We have been co-operating with Free Drop Innovations for a year now, and the main Golfgamebook.com project has spun off a couple golf event related sites. These sites provide a live leaderboard, pictures, and comments during the game, and store the results and the discussion for later reference.

We were responsible for the visual design and site implementation, including integrations to Twitter and Flickr for live comments and photos.

Check out the sites at www.gamebooktour.fi and www.golfpisteinvitational.com. The main site is located at www.golfgamebook.com.

Maku.fi
We implemented www.maku.fi site together with A-lehdet that publishes Maku magazine. The site is a gateway to thousands of recipes that are shown in a fresh and invigorating manner to the visitors. Besides the recipes, the site provides also instructions, ideas, and inspiration for people interesting in cooking.

Drupalcamp presentations

We had a good line-up of speakers at the recent DrupalCamp Helsinki. The presentations have now been uploaded to SlideShare.

Kalle Virta discussed on a very hot topic — integrating Drupal with Apache SOLR.

Janne Kalliola presented our experiences in growing and managing Drupal based organisations.

Ben Goodyear discussed the basic and advanced features of Drupal templating system.

If you are interested in any of these topics or would like to know more about Drupal in general, please get in touch.