Blogin arkisto: In English

Case: Tecnotree.com

We have, together with Frantic and Exove Design, renewed Tecnotree’s web site.

Tecnotree is a global provider of a wide range of telecom IT solutions focused on charging, billing, customer care, messaging and content services. Tecnotree empowers communication service providers to create and monetize a broad marketplace of digital services, and augment value across the customer lifecycle.

Exove and Exove Design designed and implemented the renewal of www.tecnotree.com for Tecnotree in collaboration with Tecnotree and Frantic.

Exove Design created the concept of the site based on the strategy, product portfolio, and marketing needs of Tecnotree. The work was done in close collaboration with Tecnotree personnel. Based on the concept, Frantic provided the visual design.

Exove then implemented the site adapting the concept and the visuals into the site structure, Tecnotree’s distinct look’n’feel, and content blocks. The content management system used is eZ Publish, a commercial open source CMS by eZ Systems. eZ Publish was selected based on the ease of use and management, support for various content types, and flexibility with the site structure and layout.

Timo Laaksonen, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Tecnotree, describes the result of the project as follows: “We knew we had a mountain to climb: Ultra-fast planning and implementation schedule of ~8 weeks, complete renewal of the site (concept, visuals, content, platform), no visual material and only high level design guidelines available, lack of own staff to participate in the project – to name just a few. This meant that the concept and overall implementation was iterated in real time, on the fly. Thanks to the professionality, service attitude and sheer perseverance the team – Exove, Frantic and Tecnotree – the project achieved all of its goals. Maybe the best web project I have ever been a part of.”

Partnered with eZ Systems

We have made a partnership deal with eZ Systems, the provider of commercial open source CMS eZ Publish, and will from now on provide the commercial version of eZ Publish to our customers in Finland, Estonia, and other Baltic countries.

We see eZ Publish the best choice for sites with large amount of diversified content, multiple languages, distributed content management organisations, or a lot of structured data. For example, if you have a multinational corporate site, a product catalogue, or magazine site, eZ Publish could be a perfect fit for you. It also provides excellent connectivity to mobile applications and sites, thus making it a natural selection for sites spanning from web to mobile phones.

Working as a platinum partner of eZ Systems, we are now able to channel their expertise on the system and Internet publishing to further benefit our customers. Together with them, we will continue to design and implement beautiful and functional sites that enable our customers to conduct better business on the Internet.

Exove has produced the largest and the most compelling eZ Publish powered websites in Finland. They include several companies, for example:

• Several dozen sites for Fiskars, including sites in most European countries, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
• Tecnotree site.
• Finnlines main site with several localised versions around the Baltic Sea.
• Tietokone.fi magazine site.
• Sites for The Federation of Finnish Commerce and The Association of Finnish Technical Traders.
• Finndomokoti.fi, a radically different way to present prefabricated houses on the Internet.
• Several sites for TAT Group.

eZ Systems is in the business of Web Content Management Solutions since 1999. They maintain a global presence in locations in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Their large international business partner network is the foundation of their success in the market. Ez Systems’ team of engineers, consultants and partner managers enables successful implementations for customers and partners.

Office in Estonia

We have opened our first international office in Tallinn, Estonia. The first Estonian colleagues joined the company late last week, and now we are already working in full steam across the Gulf of Finland.

We bring our excellent Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish, and CodeIgniter experience to Estonian market, and we will serve clients in Estonia with the same high level of quality and performance as in Finland. If you are interested in our solutions, please contact our CEO Janne Kalliola, either by mail — janne@exove.ee — or by phone — +358 40 558 1796.

If you are interested in joining our Tallinn team, please visit our Estonian recruiting pages.

Our office is located in Metro Plaza building on Viru Väljak 2, in the middle of the city. More details can be found on contacts page.

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.

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.

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.

Golfgamebook.com

We are extremely happy to announce that we have been working for several months on a very exciting project that brings real-time scoring and social media features to golf. Now the system is live, the iPhone app can be found at the App Store, and golf season is just starting.

Below you’ll find the formal announcement:

Exove has played a central role in Golfgamebook.com concept and visual design, and technical implementation onto Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL technology platform.

The site concept and layout was designed by Union together with Exove and Free Drop Innovations. The emphasis was on bringing the social features of golf, typically discussed mainly in the clubhouses or privately, to larger audience in the Internet. These features were supported by a number of typical social media features fit to the golf environment – such as online friends, discussions, and sharing golf game results.

The service was built on ExoveIgniter, a framework based on CodeIgniter offering a versatile set of social media features. The system was built in a modular fashion that allows easy extensibility and fast upgrades. Based on the concept and visual designs, Exove implemented the required HTML code and integrated it into the system as Smarty templates.

The most important features of the system are live connections to scorecard appliances, including also an iPhone client developed by Qvik, full features social media services, integrations to key external services, and fluid user experience with strong branding.

The implementation project delivered a turnkey solution for the client in a multi-vendor environment.

The co-founders of Free Drop Innovations Kalle Väinölä and Mikko Manerus describe the result of the development project as follows: “GameBook is unique within golf’s marketplace as the only product that provides real-time electronic scoring for individuals as well as golf clubs. The scope and timetable of required server side development and web-services were extremely challenging, so we knew we have to pick the right partner in order to reach our ambitious goals. Exove did not only succeed in execution, but they also acted as a true partner throughout the project.”

Mikko Rantanen, CEO of Free Drop Innovations, continues: “We set the standard for our web presence and on-line community very high as we knew that in international golf marketplace only the best products and services prevail. The end result speaks for itself and further distances GameBook from its competition. We are in particular extremely proud of our web-based community, the GameBook Clubhouse. It provides players opportunity to connect with one another through a sophisticated and innovative community platform.”

If you are a golfer, please check www.golfgamebook.com and register. The best game just got better.

Selecting a framework for implementing web applications

We have been lately working with several web applications and social media systems. Every system has a unique business model and value proposition to the customers and the visitors, and thus the functionality we have been implementing vary a lot between the applications. However, when digging one level deeper, similarities start to surface.

There are a lot of typical features in web applications, such as registration, signing in and out, viewing your details, and so on. On the admin side, one needs to be able to list, add, modify, and remove items — whatever they might be — and to manage users, see log files, etc. If we drill one more level down, there is a need for a common set of library functionalities, such as image manipulation, friend and group management, session handling, and protection against SQL injections and XSS / XSRF attacks.

If you are coding all components mentioned above, you are either in framework business or doing something wrong. There is no need to invent the wheel again. Instead, you should be focusing your energy on selecting the correct wheel for your needs.

There is a plethora of different web application frameworks in the market. Some of the publishing systems, such as Drupal or Joomla! provide their own application frameworks within the CMS. The selection is not easy, because approaches to the challenges of web application development are different, and sometimes even not directly comparable.

When we selected our core set of tools (Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish, and CodeIgniter), we looked at the following items:

• Easy of extensibility. How easy it is to extend the system using the API provided? Or do you need to take shortcuts and fight against the system when there is a need to make anything fancier?
• Availability of third party components. Can you rely on third parties to solve your problems completely or partially? What is the quality of these components? This resonates directly with the needs listed above.
• Separation of content and presentation. Is there a proper template system with easy enough syntax? Does the system enforce good policies for separation, or do components produce HTML directly?
• Performance. How long is the route to your code through the system? Does the system provide mechanisms to cache data in various levels? Some of the systems are notoriously bad in this area, and constant attention needs to paid to the performance throughout the project — others are lightning fast.
• Documentation. How well the system is documented? This can be a real killer, as reading code is way slower than reading through good documentation.
• Fit for the purpose. What is the problem that the system tries to solve? Is this your problem, too? Developing applications against the system is a constant uphill battle and not worth the money and the effort spent.

None of our systems are perfect. WordPress has issues with separation of content and presentation, and the performance is not optimal. However, it is an excellent tool for small and medium scale web sites. CodeIgniter is fast, but you need to implement a lot of functionality around it. There is a good number of third party components, though, and active development going on. Within Drupal, there is typically at least one module that solves similar problems you are working on — sometimes the approach is not valid, or the module is half-baked.

After selection of the systems, we have been steadily gaining knowledge of good modules and extensions that can improve the projects at hand by cutting development time and thus prices. Further, we have been implementing a commonly used functionalities, as mentioned in the beginning, into libraries and components that can be used in any project requiring such functionality. We do not believe in coding for possible future needs, so the components grow based on the needs of the project — and the next projects get more features from the same components. One just needs to keep the solutions generic enough so that they can b reused.

We have been able to use the components so that some projects have been able to implement a large set of functionality, such as group management, with only a few hundred lines of own code.

Haemme PHP-kehittäjää / We are looking for a PHP Developer

9.2.2010: Hakuaika on päättynyt. Kiitoksia kaikille hakemuksensa lähettäneille. Olemme teihin yhteydessä lähiaikoina. / The application period has ended. Our thanks to everyone that sent an application. We are in touch with you soon.

Haemme kasvavaan tiimiimme lisää osaajia ja nyt rekrytoimme PHP-kehittäjää haastaviin projekteihin, joita tehdään pääasiassa Drupalilla ja CodeIgniterilla. Lue tarkemmat speksit avoimet työpaikat -sivultamme ja laita hakemus tulemaan.

We are looking for a new members to our growing team, and now we are recruiting a PHP Developer for projects that are implemented on top of Drupal and CodeIgniter. Read the spec on our open positions page, and send an application.