Ian's life - comprised of various projects

It's been a while since my last post. I have taken a contract position (as a business analyst/project manager) with a well known television company which has meant that some of the activities that I am most closely associated with have slowed down for the last three months. That said the business as a whole has progressed and I have managed to stick around for the regular steering committees which we use to run the day to day.
We have started to make use of a number of new systems in our day to day work since ksh joined the management team and I moved more to the business side and away from technology. At first the multitude of logins (we haven't yet implemented SSO although a working group is currently looking to deploy Open LDAP I believe) gave me pause for thought as one of the main reasons I wanted to deploy an ERP system was to reduce the complexity associated with this. However the extra functionality that we have inherited at Ethical Shopper is definitely worth it and we have a situation that is stable as we continue to grow.
The new products are a wiki which we are using as a rudimentary content management system and a project management system. I am also currently looking into a VLE for training as this may well be useful for BAFTs as well.
These applications give us a temporary fix for issues which have sprung up around our current Ofbiz implementation. I am hoping to work on the Content Management aspects of this soon and will be trying to document this going forward however the complexity of an ERP system has surprised me. In addition I have recently been working on a commercial enterprise content management system which has opened my eyes as to just how complex this software really is. Managing several years worth of video and other media assets, particularly with regard to their retrieval is something which has been really interesting. I am hoping that I will be able to feed this back into the project and we have now started collecting video and media resources on the wiki so that we might add this service in future.
My contract finishes this week which should give me a few weeks to dedicate to the project again which I'm looking forward to. I'd like to flesh out the CMS capabilities of Ofbiz and I've also got some training to deliver for the ecommerce side to a strategic partner. I'm also finding a lot of interest from related companies now which bodes well for the future.

posted by Ian Gilbert @ 2:01 pm