iTechConnect (beta)

The YB Call Center in the Philippines studio went live with the release of the VOIP system on May 1, 2010.  The first day of operations for this YB Call Center is May 4, 2010.  VOIP - voice-over IP - allows for this Manila 150-seat state of the art Call Center that will be an extension of the US center.  The project started in September 2009 with Mandy as PM.  Mandy worked with David, US Adworks Ops, Philippines Adworks Ops and SM, India SM and YB IT as well as several vendors bringing together all of the necessary components to ready the Call Center.  Hours and hours of phone calls to numerous time zones were required to bring this project together.  Congratulations Mandy on carrying out this successful deployment.  

Margaret

On Saturday April 17, 2010, Clipper 5.4 was deployed into Production.  PM Mandy, Chris H, Greg V and Sada worked through the installation.  Content of the release is as follows:

1. E420 – Yellow Ink on Sales Proofs enhancements - Limit the yellow print background on proofs to save on ink costs
2. E518 - Sales Proof additional text
3. E517 - SVB - Extending date range for reporting
4. E525 - Gathering Profile Page Natwe from Natwel details when ICE is down
5. P2088 – Fax failures for Sales Proofs
6. R2101 - SND workflow, need to address reject from RWL flow
7. P2072 - Translog cannot process long file names
8. P2102 - Spec Templates and FI FWR disappear when resubmitting in IP Request
9. P2137 - Download reference requests for the same job will inform the user of an already outstanding request.
10. P2126 - Correction to Entry Point special character processing.

Thanks to all involved in making this a successful release.

Margaret

On Saturday April 17, 2010, a nrew Pagentry release was installed into Production.  The features included:

1.  Sold Filler

2.  Separation of Massage Theraputic and Non-Theraputic class headings

3.  Pizza menu border - default behavior

At the same time, the Pagentry system was upgraded to Perl v 5.10 and Oracle 11g.

PM Tom was assisted by Chris H and Bill K on the deployment.  Numerous Ops personnel were involved in UAT activity.   Thanks to all in helping to test and deploy this upgrade.

Margaret

Todd L has become a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) following training in March.   Todd is already looking for ways to incorporate some techniques of what he has learned into projects.  Congrats Todd!

A link to some info as to what it means to be a CSM:  http://www.scrumalliance.org/pages/certified_scrummaster_csm

Margaret

Wondering who uses Cognos reports?  Which reports are used and at what frequency?   See stats for February and March 2010 here —->    cognos-usage-adworks-summary-2010-feb-mar

(Thanks MB!)

Margaret

System performance targets have been established by the BNW team for the applications.  Attached is a document that describes the expected system performance of the BNW system from an end user perspective and from a work distribution perspective.   For example, if an artist presses the New Job button in the BNW client application, and that job was already pre-loaded onto their workstation by the work distribution module (allocation), then that artist should wait less than five seconds to begin working.

Here is the entire performance target document –> bnw-end-user-performance-metrics-v2

The joint development teams (US, UK, India) are working towards resolution of performance slowness issues.  These efforts are expected to result in the delivery of BNW Sprint 11 on March 26 at which time we can take up integration testing and ultimately back to UAT.  Here are the promising results so far bnw-performance-improvements-to-march-5-2010

Margaret

Changes were made to the Expo ETL for Cognos Reporting and deployed on March 1, 2010.  These modifications allow for New Media Products to be identified appropriately in the data warehouse, in particular, foundation pages, free profile pages and direct mail.  Thanks to Tom, MB and Brad Y for this release.

Margaret

FotoFusion version 3.1 was deployed into production on March 5, 2010.  The contents of this release includes these changes and additions:

• E476 - split preview from rendering in FF in order to reduce overall rendering time.
• E450 - add Android hint to videos.
• E508 - add new effects to Adobe AfterEffects; designate templates as active/inactive; allow projects to be created with multiple compositions; improve categorization of templates to aid search.

Thanks to Todd, Kevin, Patti and the Wipro team for their efforts on this release.

Post deployment, increased rendering failures were addressed with patch 3.1.1 which was installed for the start of production on March 4.  It appears that this patch reduced rendering failures and has allowed for increased video output of dispathed ads of over 400 daily.

Margaret

eCopySheet version 1.5 was deployed into Production on Thursday February 25.  This delivery is aligned with Media Pro Sprint 13 which was deployed on the weekend of  February 27.   This eCopySheet release consists of these changes:

The backfill of yellowbook.com data onto eCopySheets is at 98% complete as of March 8.   Thanks Mandy, Mike F, Sudarshan and the Wipro team for contributing to this effort and deployment.

Margaret