2012 Retrospective of SSW
Continuing on from December’s “My 2012 as Microsoft Regional Director” post, I thought I might reflect on how 2012 went at SSW.
It really was another great year for SSW with the launch of our new Metro website as well as our new SSW TV site. In 2012, SSW TV went from zero to 30,000 unique visitors – a good start but we still have a long way to go. Our guys and girls at SSW kept performing professionally throughout 2012, building great .Net solutions and business applications.
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We kicked off the year with a new version of the SSW website all Metro’d up by Rebecca and Tiago. We were very excited to launch our new SSW TV site. The SSW TV team released 87 videos with 52,000 views.
The most popular video on SSW TV was the Microsoft Daily Scrum by the TFS team. In 2nd place was my chat about .Net Architecture with Terje Sandstrom and Marcel De Vries, while 3rd place went to Kate Gregory’s “Why C++ is better than C#” talk. Notably, Eric Phan had two videos in the top 10, making him the second most popular presenter on SSW TV (behind Microsoft’s daily standup). Paul Glavich’s WebAPI talk was also in the top 10 showing that recording the User Groups is very worthwhile.
The guys and girls at SSW kept performing professionally in 2012 doing lots of new websites and business applications. The billable award goes to Eric Phan who billed more client hours than anyone else, and the upsell award goes to Dan Hyles who proved that he could sell new projects with the best of them.
The project I was most proud of at SSW was the rewrite of a very large Australian ticketing site. This was because it was a real challenge and this project had so many new things we hadn’t used in combination such as fixed-price with Scrum, plus, it was written with ASP.NET MVC 4 and the Telerik Sitefinity CMS. There’s a little bit more work to go before it gets released to the public, but it’s looking good.
Our sweetest win of 2012 was a client who sensibly engaged both us and our #1 competitor for a week. They simultaneously gave both companies the same requirements to make sure we could walk the walk and SSW came away with the job so we must have impressed. Great job to Mark and Gerard!
SSW’s marketing efforts went above and beyond in 2012. In 3rd place was the new Metro SSW website by Rebecca Liu and Tiago Araujo, 2nd went to the SSW USB keys arranged and given out at DDD Brisbane by Damian Brady, and in first place was our awesome “Scrum in 8 steps” poster produced by Rebecca.
There were some great long–term initiatives as well, including the opening of our new SSW Brisbane office, and the live broadcast and recording of the SSW User Groups by our SSW TV team, Raj and Titus.
In terms of SSW products, our SSW.SQLDeploy.MVC package is now live on Nuget, and we’ve released a new version of Code Auditor with great new rules and Visual Studio 2012 integration. We’ve also been working hard on our new MVC-based SSW.TimePro application, adding improvements such as CRM 2011 integration, and we’re nearly finished with adding provisioning functionality to bring it to the public.
Internally, we’ve upgraded our SharePoint servers to SharePoint 2013, as well as our TFS servers to TFS 2012 Update 1.
So what’s next for SSW?
SSW will continue to stand for “Sweet Sweet Web” 🙂 as we focus on writing more great web apps in ASP.NET MVC.
We’ll continue working with Scrum and TFS, making use of the awesome ALM tools provided by Visual Studio.
We’ll keep focusing on architecture mentoring to fulfill our goal of helping .NET clients around the world produce maintainable software.
We’ll also be helping clients move to SharePoint 2013 and CRM 2011.
With the release of Windows 8 and the Surface Pro, we’ll be writing plenty of Windows 8 apps and having many arguments about whether to use WinJS or XAML!
Cheers,
@AdamCogan