We have been working for several years with high-performance Drupal sites with a lot of authenticated users. Now we have packaged our experience into an advanced Drupal module, readily available for everyone at Drupal.org.
The name of the module is Cache Control and it is intended for integrating your site with the Varnish HTTP accelarator (and other external HTTP caches) in a fashion that not only allows for caching pageloads for anonymous users but also for authenticated users. It is a novel approach to increasing Drupal performance.
Exove osallistuu marraskuun alussa TalentIT- ja Arena-messuille. TalentIT on torstaina 3.11. Otaniemen Dipolissa ja Arena-messut keskiviikkona 9.11. Kauppakorkeakoulun päärakennuksessa.
Exove participates in TalentIT and Arena career fairs. TalentIT takes place on Thursday November 3rd at Dipoli in Otaniemi, and Arena fair on Wednesday November 9th at the main building of Helsinki School of Economics.
Pop over to our stand and meet a few exovians. Our open positions are available on our career section.
We held our annual customer satisfaction survey in September, and got feedback from our clients. The feedback has been analysed, and this post summarises the key findings. Once again, thank you for all of you who responded.
Our general ratings stayed at the same excellent level compared to last year, and a huge majority (~85%) 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 70% of respondents, and less than 10% think that it is poor or bad. Rest think that we are on par with everyone else. Our ability to keep the fixed budgets in all projects throughout our history shows in the answers.
Our services were rated mostly excellent (~25%) or good (~60%), but also average (~10%) or poor or even bad (about 5% combined). We have approximately kept the scores compared to the last year.
Quality and understanding clients’ needs were regarded very high, around 75-90% good or excellent. There were minor slide in the excellent numbers compared to the last year. As earlier, clients like our staff, and we are seen both friendly and professional.
More than 65% of you think that we are better than our competition, another 30% don’t see differences, and around 5% feel that we are doing worse.
Around 90% of you would buy again from us (of those about 20% definitely). These numbers took a minor hit compared to the last year but they we are still pretty proud of them. They continue our tradition of high customer satisfaction throughout the history of the company.
30% of our clients have already recommended us (thanks!), around 20% would definitely recommend, another 35% would recommend, and the remaining 15% are not willing to recommend us. All in all more than 85% of our clients would recommend us, which is a very good result.
Clients value our professionalism, reliability, and flexibility. We are also regarded as innovative, creative, friendly, honest, passionate, and ambitious. Thank you for these kind words.
If you feel that we could be a good — flexible, friendly, and professional — partner for you, get in touch with Janne Kalliola, +358 40 558 1796 or janne@exove.com.
We are been working closely together with the city of Helsinki to design and develop an open democracy platform to enhance opportunities for citizen participation in the city administration.
The system has been in use for a few weeks at demokratia.hel.fi (in Finnish only, English summary), and yesterday there was a first open meeting (in Finnish, includes video) that citizens could participate in by being present at the town hall, through the site, or by watching the event through cable-TV. For the meeting, we implemented a real-time chat support in the system, and it was used extensively.
Speaking of the system, it is based on Drupal 7 extended with a number of contrib modules, a city of Helsinki look’n'feel template, and a couple of site specific custom modules.
Our growth continues, and we are hiring more people to join our team either in Helsinki or Tallinn office. If you have strong Drupal experience and would like to develop yourself with several of the biggest Drupal projects around the Baltic sea, check out the position and send your application with CV and salary expectations to jobs@exove.com.
Web-first strategies have become a viable strategy for many businesses and we see this more frequently adopted. Lately we have even seen a push for going mobile-first, bypassing the traditional web and other channels. Making the mobile channel the main focus is of course not a coincidence and not just a hype. The fact is that more and more of the Internet traffic is going via mobile and most of us are having iPhonish type of “smart” devices that enable both applications and mobile browsing.
Mobile First: most are doing it wrong!
The thing that bothers me, is that so many have not learnt from the web-first approach and doing just as wrong as they did when moving from print to web. Just look at media industry. I see more and more offers that promises to take your content mobile both for Apps and Mobile Web experience that are based on traditional print systems like InDesign. This is wrong in so many ways.
InDesign is not a dynamic content solution, it is made for laying out pretty print pages and send them to print. The solutions are not good at handling multi media, time to publish is expensive and time consuming. And the whole Social aspects are not even remotely available in such tools, it is made for paper.
Full Apps Experience
If you want to really go mobile first you need to enable the full Apps experience with a native interface and offline storage. This means a low latency and snappy experience for the consumer while still maintaining an efficient publishing process that makes economical sense.
In addition it is crucial that you enable your business model for the mobile world, being it a traditional subscriptions for premium content, retail purchases or simply booking a test drive of the latest and greatest car model.
You need to talk the language
In order for you to really enable a Mobile-first strategy your infrastructure needs to talk the language. APIs and interfaces needs to be easily available to enable developers to build Apps connected to your content in an efficient way.
Pardon the marketing but most systems today are not able to do this as they are purely Web CMS, most often meaning that they store XHTML in the content repository – which is not very much channel neutral as we know.
Mobile Web is not the Web
Handling content for Web is different than Mobile and handling Paper is again very different. For that reason your system needs to be able to differentiate the channels and translate the channel neutral content into channel specific enriched content. And this is only possible if you are truly managing your content in a neutral way. Just make sure you keep that in mind when you build your infrastructure, there are good systems out there and needless to say that I am happy to assist.
eZ Marketing: Solving the multi-challenge
As you know, I am with eZ Systems and our focus has been solving the multi-challenge which of course includes enabling a Mobile-first strategies. But don’t take just my word for it, listen to customers and partners to learn what they have to say.
Scoopshot has launched their mobile apps also in Estonia (they’ve been available in Finland for some time already). Scoopshot allows you to sell your newsworthy photos to media directly from your phone. Apps are available on iPhone and Android platforms.
Exove has helped Scoopshot in building their backend systems and mobile applications.
Eazybreak, the mobile lunch voucher company, has released an iPhone app to redeem lunch vouchers in a snap. The application, as well as the Eazybreak system, has been designed and developed by us.
The application shows your favourite restaurants, and you can also check the nearby restaurants based on your location. Redeeming a voucher takes only a couple taps and then you are ready to order your food. You just show your application to the cashier and then you’ve paid.
