Conceptual Clarity

Happy 10th Birthday Ephox

2009-11-06T05:35:39Z

On the 12th of November Ephox will turn 10. It will also mark eight and a half years of me being at Ephox. Unfortunately though, while the team at Ephox celebrate our 10th Birthday I’ll be on my honeymoon. This Saturday (tomorrow) I’ll be marking a personal milestone of my own as I get married.

So, since I can’t be at the Ephox celebration to thank people personally, I thought I’d write this post.

It’s been a tumultuous decade to be a software company. Since our incorporation in 1999 we’ve made it through the Dot-com Bubble and now we’re achieving our greatest growth ever despite a global financial crisis. There’s no doubt in my mind that Ephox’s ability to survive and thrive during these challenging times is because of the fantastic people who I work with all around the globe.

When I joined the team as an intern in July 2001 I wasn’t planning 8.5 years in advance, but I’m certainly glad that the last 8.5 years have been spent with Ephox. Ephox has given me one of the most remarkable opportunities of my life – and this is despite me almost falling asleep while our now CEO (then CTO) Andrew Roberts explained HTML authoring to me on my first day on the job. I started out here as an intern, developed software, worked in the USA as a consultant, traveled the world, and now am the Director of Products – all thanks to Ephox.

Over those years the company itself has grown and faced it’s challenges. From our offices here in Paddington, Brisbane, Australia we branched out to the USA. I can recall when Andrew Roberts started our first USA office – in his apartment in San Jose. From there we’ve grown to have offices in Palo Alto, just outside Stanford University and European offices in London.

Along the way I’ve met and worked with some tremendous people not only here at Ephox but also amongst our partner organizations. Our partners have always been incredibly important to us at Ephox and personally, it’s given me the chance to meet some fantastic, like-minded professionals at IBM, Vignette/OpenText, Stellent/Oracle, EMC and more.

So Happy 10th Birthday Ephox. Congratulations and thank you. I’m looking forward to what the next 10 years hold for us all, particularly if the first 10 are any indication.

FIXED: No Sound on Bootcamp in VMWare Fusion

2009-03-31T01:21:15Z

“YES! FINALLY! FIXED!!!!”

That’s what I sounded like when I finally managed to fix my sound issue on my Bootcamp partition with VMWare Fusion.

Sometime during one of my updates to VMWare or Windows XP somehow my sound stopped working when I accessed my Bootcamp partition via VMWare. Ever since I’ve been battling with Bootcamp and VMWare to get the sound working again and finally I’ve done it.

While I found numerous suggested solutions on forums and web sites none of them worked for me, so I thought I should document the solution that worked for me here…

The Problem

When using my Bootcamp partition via VMWare Fusion 2.0.2 there was no sound. Despite the (software) sound card being connected and the sound icon in the bottom right of VMWare’s window lighting up (showing that it was receiving XP’s sounds) there was no sound no matter what I tried.

The Solution

The solution that I believe worked for me in the end was two part:

Rollback a sound driver update; and
Delete and reinstall the Bootcamp partition from the VMWare

Rolling Back the Sound Driver Update

Firstly I rolled back a soundcard driver update that occurred via Windows Update. The instructions on how to do this can be found on the VMWare Community web site in the article called “Audio Driver Bug in VMWare Fusion 2.0”

Delete and Reinstall the Bootcamp Partition in VMWare

After rolling back the driver, I then removed the Bootcamp partition from my list of VMs and then reinstalled it. This appeared to force VMWare to reinstall all the drivers it needed into the VM.

The default settings of VMWare Fusion do not allow you to remove a Bootcamp partition from the list of available VMs. In order to make the Bootcamp item delete-able you will need to exit Fusion and then run this command in the Terminal:

sudo mv "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator" "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator.bak"

(Thanks to the post from WoodyZ in the VMWare forums for this – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/200649)

When you start Fusion up again the Bootcamp item can now be deleted via the right-click/context menu.

Once I had deleted the Bootcamp item I restarted VMWare Fusion once more for good measure and then re-installed the Bootcamp VM via the normal VMWare interface for this.

And now the sound works!!!!

Finally…Thank You

Thanks to all those on the VMWare forums whose responses helped me track down a solution to this most annoying problem, I wouldn’t have gotten it working without you!

A Black Hole for Feedback

2009-03-27T05:33:09Z

Last week I was called a “bit of a black hole for feedback – in the nicest possible way” by our acerbically humoured CTO Adrian Sutton. I’ve been working with Adrian for many years now, and I find his perspectives forthright and valuable and often they lead to some manner of introspection – hence this blog post.

Before I embark on a journey of introspection though I think some exposition is warranted. The “black hole” remark came up as Adrian and I were exchanging emails about how best to improve our ability to track the veritable mountain of feedback that we receive from staff, clients, prospective clients, business partners and many others. This has become an increasingly important issue as the company has expanded and we seek to move from product design with heuristics to formal systems and processes in order to better cope with our growth.

Ephox is now a global enterprise software company, with several major OEM partnerships, a large number of clients in the Fortune 1000 and offices on three continents. At the same time as this expansion has been happening we’re having an increasing number of conversations with our clients. Adrian, Michael Fromin (my US-based counterpart) and myself talk with clients at every opportunity to discover how Ephox can provide them with better solutions to their content creation problems. Hence the mountain of feedback.

And this feedback is important! As a product company Ephox lives and dies by its ability to deliver solutions that the market wants – request and feature management is a key part of this. In the very beginning we determined what functionality to implement by looking at similar applications to EditLive! in the desktop space. We outgrew this eventually EditLive! matured and the requirements of a specialty web-based editor diverged from that of the desktop one around EditLive! version 4.0. By that time our second feature management system was in place. It was called “the product manager with a spreadsheet”. This system worked surprisingly well, even if I do say so myself, and gave us the basis of what we use today. Today the system has evolved and both components have received some decent upgrades and is now called “the Director of Products with JIRA”. [For the record I am simplifying here, there are more people and systems involved in this…but that just doesn’t make for a good story, and it is still a good analogy.]

Overall, I think that Ephox does a great job of tracking user feedback. We get a great deal of feedback from all of the sources I’ve mentioned previously and all feature requests are tracked in detail, prioritized and reviewed during every release planning phase. Yes this is time consuming but it is absolutely worth it, and to be honest I for one take great satisfaction in knowing we’re delivering functionality that our customers want and need.

Unfortunately though, in certain cases this system is not coping. For what it’s worth JIRA does a fantastic job of tracking discrete issues. While it’s “clicky” user interface may drive me nuts some days (I hope someone from Atlassian’s reading this) for the most part it does its job very well. To Adrian’s point though I think it’s the other part of the system that’s currently not as effective as it used to be.

The problem lies with the high level feedback. Those things that aren’t exactly features or specific requests but things more along the lines of someone saying, “you know, I think EditLive! could do more for authoring for mobile browsers.” Right now, those ideas are on paper, mind maps and spreadsheets. They are then centralized and processed in my head…which is unfortunately not a globally available system with 99% uptime.

So, I think it’s time for Director of Products 2.0. So over the next few weeks I’m going to try and upgrade our feature management to be something more like “Product Management Team with JIRA and some web 2.0 collaborative applications.” I’ll keep you posted.

Appearing in a City Near You

2009-03-27T05:10:25Z

Over the next few months I have a rather hectic travel schedule ahead of me. While I can’t say that I’m looking forward to spending hour upon hour in airports I can say that I’m looking forward to meeting a whole bunch of people who are using EditLive! today. In fact, the whole purpose of my travels in the next month or so will be to hear from you.

I’ve still got some spare time on my schedule, so if you’re an EditLive! user in one of the following cities and would like to share the challenges you’re facing with your content systems then let me know, I’d love to hear from you.

April 6th to 8th – Washington DC
April 9th and 10th – Boston, MA
April 13th to 15th – San Francisco, CA
April 16th – Los Angles, CA (tentative)
April 20th and 21st – Melbourne, Australia
May 7th – Sydney, Australia

Your Feedback Matters

2008-08-29T01:31:43Z

Last week I got out of the Ephox office and into the offices of several of our clients and partners, as well as a few people who were evaluating EditLive! for the first time. This is something I try to do at least once a quarter and I think it’s one of the most important things I do at Ephox. It’s important because we believe in delivering software that works for you and we want to work with you to solve your web content challenges.

It’s not just when I visit clients that we’re busy listening to your feedback. Every week, I personally see at least three feature or improvement requests and every one of those is replied to and logged in our internal feature management software.

The significance of this process really hit home for me last month when I was preparing the EditLive! roadmap through to mid-2009. Every feature that we’re releasing in EditLive! from now until then has been requested by at least one client, most of them have several requests against them. This attention to your feedback and our commitment to engineering excellence ensure that we will continue to deliver software that addresses your business challenges.

We have some great releases lined up for the rest of this year and into next. I know that because they’re the releases that you asked for. They’re packed with the productivity improvements that you asked for. They’ll have the intuitive user interfaces you asked for. Most of all they’ll deliver you the user adoption that you need to see your web content initiatives be more successful. If you want a sneak peek, I’d recommend you check out our latest Quarterly Product Update.

Damien Fitzpatrick
Director of Products

This article originally appeared on the Ephox Blog on August 13th 2008

Formula 1 Software

2007-12-20T02:12:08Z

Don't you just love analogies? Well I hope you do because if you're about to be on the receiving end of one. I was watching an episode of the British car show Top Gear yesterday with a segment featuring Richard Hammond attempting to drive a Formula 1 car. Now if you're like me, or Richard Hammond as it turns out, you'd be sitting there thinking, "driving a car, even if it is a Formula 1 car, how hard can it be?" It turns out that, the answer is "very!"

This particular situation struck me as having parallels with our development of EditLive! and web based rich text editors in general. At the highest level EditLive! is basically a word processor for the web. It's got most of the features that you might find in Microsoft Word or Open Office with some tweaks to make them more applicable to web documents e.g. generating standards compliant HTML for starters.

At the outset this doesn't sound difficult, after all we've had many of these features in Microsoft Word, Open Office or even the browser (when it comes to rendering) for years. Yet that apparent ease doesn't parallel with Ephox's experience in development. We have been, and still are, developing EditLive! in its present form for 6 years now, since I started at Ephox in fact. However, that's nothing compared with MS Office that's been around for over 20 years! The features that we all take for granted in Microsoft Office are (mostly) well designed and the result of the significant levels of investment that you'd expect from Microsoft. It's when you take a much closer look at the web standards and user behaviour that you start to realize how complex the task of creating a word processor is (cue the Formula 1 analogy).

As the product manager for EditLive! I've experienced this effect for several years now when defining the specifications for EditLive!. Whether it's a specification for track changes, how specific keys work in various situations (e.g. "Enter" or "Tab") or even down to the level of how text renders on the screen each area has a surprising amount of detail to consider and nuances to implement. For instance, in HTML try checking out the difference between PTs, PXs and EMs for fonts and did you know that PXs can be considered a relative measurement?

At Ephox we've put a lot of investment into these little things in the past because we believe the little things are important for authors. The fact that the tab key indents a list in some cases and in others navigates a table or adds a table row – important. The use of the Enter key to insert a paragraph in some cases, a <br> in others and in others still a list item – important. The ability to resize every aspect of a table inline instead of via a dialog – important. I could go on as there are many, many more of these small items that are important to all the web content creators out there. However, the most important thing I think you could expect from a rich text editor is that it, and the team behind it, realize the importance of all these little items.

Creating a word processor is much more difficult than it seems just like driving a Formula 1 car and the most important thing in both cases is attention to detail. In the coming months you'll see that attention to detail coming through yet again in our latest release of EditLive!. We've been paying attention to rendering, to font sizes, to keyboard behaviour and many other areas. I'm confident it will be another fantastic release and if you'd like a sneak peek, just head over to LiveWorks!'s Early Access Release and check the latest in EditLive! 6.4 out for yourself. Improvements to date have focused on CSS rendering for floats and getting sizing correct for different units and there's more to come.

EditLive! 6.Performance

2007-08-16T11:49:33Z

It’s been a while since I’ve written an article about EditLive! so I thought that I’d better put one out there about what the team has been working on recently and what we are currently working on.

Since the introduction of the major new functionality of the 6.0 release we’ve been working on performance. “Performance, but EditLive! is a Java applet!?” I hear you say. That’s right, we’ve been finding some great new ways to get Java to stand up and perform. And performing it is. I now routinely experience EditLive! load times of less than 3 seconds! That’s less than most JavaScript based editors out there (BTW that’s because of the number of HTTP requests they perform).

In the EditLive! 6.Performance releases (that’s 6.1, 6.2 and 6.Next) we’ve incorporated a whole range of caching routines that people can take advantage of, particularly with 6.1 and 6.2. In order to take advantage of these things you will have to make some code changes to your integrations, but they are minor and if you have any questions check out the information on LiveWorks! or get in touch with our ever-helpful support team.

As always, we’re running all these improvements on our internal systems as part of our commitment to continual testing. The performance improvements are outstanding, of course I’m somewhat biased as the EditLive! Product Manager, so please, check out the improvements for yourself.

We’ve also incorporated the new Inline Editing functionality of EditLive! with our EditLive! for ILWCM integration and we’re getting rave reviews from those who’ve rolled it out. In particular we’ve had a major client shift from using IBM’s JavaScript-based editor to EditLive! and they’ve cut their page load times from over 30 seconds to 3.

The engineering team has definitely pulled some rabbits out of their collective hats and they’re not done yet. EditLive! 6.Next will contain more improvements. At this stage I’m not going to spoil the surprise, but I think there will be many out there who appreciate it.

So check out the latest release of EditLive! and experience just how fast Java can be. Also stay tuned for what’s coming up in the next few months, there are some exciting improvements just around the corner.

An Age Old Concern

2007-08-03T06:18:36Z

I was reading BRW Magazine this week and noticed a quote from Scott Farquhar, co-founder of Atlassian

Hire young people. Staff enjoy working in a young company. No one says, “Wow, I work in a company with lots of old people”. Young people are flexible and have no baggage or pre-conceived ideas – they are cheaper and they grow with the business.

Scott Farquhar, BRW July – September 2007

Now if you’ve read some of my previous articles you’ll know I’m a fan of what Atlassian is doing, both with their software and for Australian IT. I’ve met their team on a few occasions and their company culture is something to be envied. But, while I know quotes can often be taken out of context, I couldn’t help but get a little upset at Scott’s quote.

At only 26 I’m a fully fledged, card carrying member of Gen Y. Yet, I’ve had the invaluable opportunity of working with many older (I won’t call anyone old) people, at Ephox, Ephox’s partner organizations, other business connections and through my MBA. Those older people have excellent ideas, are definitely flexible and can bring a wealth of experience to many situations. Conversely I’ve met many younger people who can be stubborn, close minded and naive.

While it may sound cliched, I believe the kind of age that Scott is talking about is truly only a state of mind. I don’t think anyone ever wants to be perceived as “old” and certainly not the kind of “old” that carries around baggage and a wealth of preconceptions. However, I think there are many organizations out there who artificially “age” their employees. Organizations whose culture kills innovation with processes and cost efficiencies. Organizations who don’t support their employees and cannot see the value in suggestions from those at the coal face.

If you want innovative people, if you want your people to be unafraid of baggage and to discard their pre-conceived ideas then you need to support them, whether they are young or old, through the culture of your company. If you think I’m crazy then check out the work of Ricardo Semler at Semco and see what a huge difference a supportive company culture can make. Whether the people in your organization are young or not-so-young, if your culture enables them to think freely and is supportive of continuous innovation and improvement then to me that is more of a recipe for success then hiring any number of young people.

Hire the best people, independent of their age. Support those people and their ideas throughout your organization. Listen to them and appreciate the perspectives and experience they bring whether they are young or old. Encourage them to be flexible and to challenge preconceptions. In return provide your staff with flexibility, understanding and challenge your own preconceptions. Your business and it’s people will grow together.

Damien Fitzpatrick, Conceptual Clarity – August 2007

Getting the Best Mortgage Deal – Part II The Loan

2007-07-27T02:31:20Z

So now I was prepared for the debt, it was time to go out and get me some debt

Deal Directly with the Banks

Sorry to all the mortgage brokers out there but I found it much better to deal directly with the banks. The impression that I got was that the brokers couldn’t offer me anything better than what the banks gave them to offer. Unfortunately, the ones I spoke to, did not seem to be able to wheel and deal with the banks on my behalf. So I took a few recommendations from the brokers, a few of my own and I went shopping.

Get the TOTAL Monthly Repayment (INCLUDING fees)

Now’s the time to check your research. Note that some banks “avoid” publishing some comparison rates by using “extras” packages. These can escape the comparison rates rules because they aren’t fees – they’re “extras”. That doesn’t mean that they are bad loans, I have an extras package on my loan and it still worked out cheaper (as I wanted the features). What you need to do is ask for the comparison rate that includes the extras package. I found that not all banks have this instantly accessible…but they do have it if you ask for it.

You should also be able to get a monthly repayments figure off the bank at this stage. This will tell you exactly where you’re at and is the key to comparing the loans for you. It will take into account your deposit, the value of the house, the mortgage insurance, the fees etc and wrap it up into the single number that’ll tell you if you can afford things or not!

Make Them Work for Your Business

So after doing all the other things here’s the bit where I got the best deal. I made the banks work for my business. While it might seem like they’re doing you a favour by lending you all that cash, I found that it was a very competitive market out there. The banks are very eager to get your business. I found that each lender had a loans officer and they were exceptionally helpful. While this might seem counter intuitive, I received the best customer service experience by far with the major banks. In the end it came down to two banks for us – the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac.

So what I did was play these final two banks against each other…remember, they WANT your business. Each time I got an offer from one, I went back to the other with the offer and asked them to beat it. I went through this a few times until finally, I had the best offer. In fact, the offer was good enough that the competing bank advised me to go with it because they simply couldn’t do better (I love a bit of honesty in sales!).

The End

So you might notice I’ve not mentioned who our loan is with. That’s intentional as the service I received from both of those final two lenders was outstanding and in the end, the difference for us was around $25/month. Yes, one offer was better than the other, but it’s close enough that anyone reading this and employing the same techniques may get a different result…and who am I to stand in the way of competition.

Either way, I did manage to save over $100/month from the advertised rate. It might not sound like much, but over 30 years that’s a lot of cash.

I hope the advice has been helpful to you, and good luck getting the best deal on your loan.

Getting the Best Mortgage Deal – Part I The Research

2007-07-25T11:57:44Z

Since I’ve been through the wonderful experience related to getting a home loan in Australia a few people have asked me about how I shopped around for the best deal on our mortgage. For those who haven’t heard as yet, I managed to get almost 0.2% off the lowest advertised fixed rate I could find and a 0.8% discount on the lowest advertised variable rate I could find. To put these savings in terms of “real” dollars that amounts to savings of around $100 per week on the lowest advertised rates.

So here’s how I did it – note that these are just my experiences, it’s a wide and varied market out there so you may be able to do better than me…

Be a Knowledgable Consumer

The most important thing to remember is that while a mortgage does involve a lot of money, you have to approach it as you would any other big purchase. Survey the market, work out what features you want in a home loan and go into the process with your eyes open. When you’re doing this there are a few options to keep in mind:

Decide on variable vs fixed vs split loans (I obviously went with the split because I like having a bet each way)
Think about features like offset accounts, credit cards, redraw and accessibility to ATMs and branches. Usually these cost extra but they might be worth it for you
Be careful about honeymoon rates – look at what the rate returns to after the honey moon is over

As a consumer the most important thing you can be armed with is knowledge. I found the Infochoice web site to be very useful here.

Look at Comparison Rates and Fees

You need to be able to compare apples with apples and that’s what comparison rates give you. In Australia, by law, all the lenders have to publish comparison rates. These rates wrap up all their fees, charges and costs into a single rate. Comparison rates give you exactly that – the basis for which to compare one loan with another.

Talk to Multiple Lenders

It’s important that you talk to more than just a single broker or bank to get the best deal. I talked to 4 brokers and a few banks during the time we were looking for a mortgage. While most brokers were great, one was particularly pushy about getting our business and tried persuading us not to talk to anyone else through various selling approaches. A few things that I found helped when talking to different lenders:

Tell them that they are in a competitive situation – if they get stand-offish or try to tell you not to talk to anyone else then I would advise you talk to someone else
Ask them directly for their best deal keeping in mind all the features you’ve decided on
In the case of brokers make yourself aware of the commissions that they get for various loans. While they always have to disclose commissions on the product you decide to go for (if you go with them) make sure you are aware of whether they get flat commissions independant of the loan you decide on – Mortgage Choice has this kind of policy

By the time I had done all of the above I felt well and truly prepared for all the debt I was about to get into. Stay tuned for Part II – The Loan