Polpoly Day 0

Aaah... Monday has arrived and my first day at Polopoly--day 0 of course (I am a SW developer after all)--has come.

Today I:

• Read docs from Anders W: Setting up Polopoly for Performance - System Architect Guide and Polopoly monitoring and tuning - a system operator's guide.
• Listened to a Polopoly intro presentation by Anders W.
• Did all the usual setup and admin.
  
• Looked at which mobile phone to get. There is a huge range of models to choose from. This took longer than it shoud have :). Settled for a Sony Ericsson T650i.

Even though it's still unclear which department I will work in I feel that this will be a great job. There are many intersting challenges ahead and room for ideas.


It feels funny to be back in Stockholm. I guess somewhere back in my head there is a part of me thinking I'm just visiting this cold and dark place and that I soon will go back. But it's very nice to be back in our apartment in Vasastan. Our apartment in Antibes had 'potential', but we were living in quite simple conditions. And I just love wooden floors--I have missed them so.

Polpoly Day -7

Back home in Antibes for my last week down here. Luckily I have a weeks vacation now--the other landed in Stockholm after midnight and are sitting in the office now, refreshed and ready for a new week of challenges... It was an intense weekend, with lots of food, wine, company information and new people for me.

Polpoly seems to be a very diverse crowd of extrodinary individuals that get along very well and that that have a very good team spirit. I guess in a any company you need the set of employees to span all needed skills and tempers; so in a smaller company this spread will be more noteable. It's great to talk to a salesperson one second and a developer the next. Compare that to Amadeus development department, which solves a much more narrow task, and thus, notwithstanding the fact that we are of mixed nationality, people will tend to be more similar.

The conference continued on Saturday with a walk in the beautiful hills
in the morning and more three sessions in the afternoon:

1. Model & POJO - Henrik, CTO
   This session was not generic--it was very ungeneric. However, some of the challenges that emerged were generic, like how to keep backward compatibility while moving forward.
   
   Henrik, who is a very funny guy in his special way, was talking about how to make development easier for implementors by going towards a POJO based Model, if I understood things correctly. I was struggling to make sense of the Policies, the CMserver, etc, but it was still interesting.
   
   
2. The London Office
   The responsible for the London office talked about how they are revigorating the UK business.
   
   
3. Sales - Magnus
   Magnus talked about the sales process and the markets.
   There are three types of activities to increase sales:
   i. Marketing
   ii. Partner networks
   iii. Direct sales
   
   From lead to contract can take 3-12 months with 6-9 as typical value. Improve!
   
   There are very many CMs. There are around 800 registered at cmsmatrix.org.
   
   We can divide the market into three parts by size of customer:
   i. Regional administrations - Ad-hoc, free/very cheap solutions.
   ii. Medium-sized corporations & Government Administration - Microsoft based. Cheap.
   iii. Big corporation - Entreprise Content Management [WebCM, Portals, Workflows, etc.]
   Polopoly focus is (iii) in the media industry.
   

Polopoly Day -9

Last day at Amadeus Thursday, arrived in Termi di Stiglano close to Rome Yesterday morning for an internal conference for my new Employer, Polopoly. Good timing for me, but what a crash start.

Lot's of new faces and new concepts, even though most of them makes sence as they are generic challenges for a growing software firm. We had sets of sessions in small groups talked about

1. Product Road map 2008
   The vision since the start has been that Polopoly's product should be easy to use, but not limiting for the advaced user. Anders W identified 4 categories of people for which it should be easy: Editors, Webmasters, Production, Implementors.
   Conclusion: Productify!
2. Partner Strategy
   Technolgy partners, Implementation Partners
   Conclusion: Improve partnerships
   
3. New Project Methodology
   Conclusion: More and clearer checkpoints
4. Scrum - Peter A
   Conclusion: It's the way to go :)

If that is not generic but crucial challenges so say.