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Posts Tagged ‘OFBiz Service Providers’

HotWax Media’s Solutions to Project Management Challenges

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Contegix – Partners: Atlassian
In business, like in life, forging partnerships is never an easy thing to do.  As we’ve discussed in previous posts, our partnership with Contegix has made a profound impact on the companies with which we work and how we provide the greatest impact to our customers.
After working with rudimentary collaboration tools – read: not integrated – we went out and purchased a suite of tools that were supposed to solve many of our project management and company workflow challenges.  After working with this software package (no need to name names) for a year and spending countless hours working with their professional services team and our business team, we were unable to make this software even close to the worth the investment.  We learned from our mistakes and took this one to Contegix!
When we did our original research into the project management space, one of the contenders was the Atlassian suite of tools – but just didn’t measure up to the potential promised from the other tool.  In the time between doing our initial evaluation, and the when the competition failed to live up to it’s promise, the Atlassian tools surged forward – and Contegix backed them as their solution to our problems we were facing.
From protecting access to applications and source code to managing documents and documentation – from showing SVN changesets to performing code review – from project management to development workflows – Atlassian has delivered an extensible set of applications that we can build a solid foundation on for our customers and internal teams alike.  Preparing for our next set of posts, the tools we are using at this moment are:
1. Crowd – centralized single sign on – permissions and access – easily pluggable to a variety of applications
2. Confluence – document management and collaboration
3. FishEye – real time reporting of source code repository changes
4. Crucible – code and document review
5. JIRA – project management and tracking
In this post, I had planned on going into detail about our Atlassian support partner, Customware, but we’ll save that for next post.

Atlassian

In business, like in life, forging partnerships is never an easy thing to do.  As we’ve discussed in previous posts, our partnership with Contegix has made a profound impact on the companies with which we work and how we provide the greatest impact to our customers.  Most of you who follow this blog know by now that HotWax Media specializes in OFBiz development.  However, these project management tools can be used no matter what platform you choose to develop in.

After working with rudimentary collaboration tools – read: not integrated – we went out and purchased a suite of tools that were supposed to solve many of our project management and company workflow challenges.  After working with this software package (no need to name names) for a year and spending countless hours working with their professional services team and our business team, we were unable to make this software even close to the worth the investment.  We learned from our mistakes and took this one to Contegix!

When we did our original research into the project management space, one of the contenders was the Atlassian suite of tools – but just didn’t measure up to the potential promised from the other tool.  In the time between doing our initial evaluation, and the when the competition failed to live up to it’s promise, the Atlassian tools surged forward – and Contegix backed them as their solution to our problems we were facing.

From protecting access to applications and source code to managing documents and documentation – from showing SVN changesets to performing code review – from project management to development workflows – Atlassian has delivered an extensible set of applications that we can build a solid foundation on for our customers and internal teams alike.  Preparing for our next set of posts, the tools we are using at this moment are:

  1. Crowd – centralized single sign on – permissions and access – easily pluggable to a variety of applications
  2. Confluence – document management and collaboration
  3. FishEye – real time reporting of source code repository changes
  4. Crucible – code and document review
  5. JIRA – project management and tracking

In this post, I had planned on going into detail about our Atlassian support partner, Customware, but we’ll save that for next post.

-Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media, an OFBiz service provider, as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

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Posted in HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development | No Comments »

The HotWax Media Way: An Apache “OFBiz Service Provider” Partnering with Contegix for Beyond Managed Hosting and Infrastructure Support

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Today we’ll be digging in a bit more deeply on the topic of Contegix’s role in simplifying our business and making hosting and infrastructure first class. As I mentioned in my previous post, the relationship between HotWax and Contegix (www.contegix.com) was forged while we researched migrating our clients’ custom Java applications from a dedicated host (your own server – but you manage the system administration) to a managed hosting provider (this is what Contegix provides for us).

ofbiz service providersmanaged hosting contegix

As Apache OFBiz developers, the opportunity to offload some of the administration and monitoring of these applications seemed like a great option for a small company trying to service more and more customers – while maintaining an emphasis on quality of service. After all, at our core we are OFBiz Service Providers as opposed to infrastructure providers. So finding the best infrastructure experts and partnering with them gives us the best of both worlds — we focus on OFBiz applications, Contegix focuses on infrastructure, and our shared clients win!

The topics that differentiate Contegix from other providers are exactly what made this such an easy decision for us: passionate customer service, expert engineers, instantaneous response time, 24×7 support, 100% Network uptime SLA, attention to detail, etc. After the successful migration of our customers, we carefully looked at each of our applications to see where we could increase our ROI by utilizing more of Contegix’s resources instead of growing these system administration capabilities in house.

Over the past few years, HotWax Media has grown considerably and we have leaned heavily on our relationship with Contegix to help define how all of these disparate applications will work together. We have modeled our application choices based upon how they run their business – knowing that leveraging our partners proven workflows can only provide a greater synergy between our two companies and make us an even more efficient team. These days they manage everything from mail, chat and calendars (with the Zimbra groupware platform) to our global phone system, from single sign on (for all of our applications) to our business to business VPNs, from project management and collaboration software, to staging servers and a large number of production OFBiz installations. They scale with us and we look forward to finding new and creative ways to work together to provide the highest quality service possible.

The next post in this series will focus on the specifics of OFBiz deployment management with a continued emphasis on our partnership with Contegix.

- Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »