Confiz Weblog

We are pleased to announce that we have launched our new website. Along with the update, we have added more of our completed work in the projects section along with screen shots. More importantly we thank you our clients for writing us wonderful testimonials that appear at multiple locations on our website and don’t forget to watch the video testimonial provided by our client allvoices.com that appears on our home page.

For technical folks out there, our website is built using Drupal, a content management system framework that we have completely fallen in love with. We are working on a number of Drupal projects and would love to help you with your Drupal development needs.

Please provide your valuable feedback about website in comments below or you can always send it through our brand new contact page. Thanks

Nobody likes delays, specially not us. And we’ve come to realize that to keep our development staff motivated and in top form for optimal productivity there can be no interruptions. Any unscheduled break causes an impact greater than the time for which it occurs. As an example, a team in the middle of a production build hit with either internet disconnection or power outage for say 30 minutes will likely suffer a delay in excess of this as it will then have to get back into the ‘mood’, go through a thorough check of steps to ensure the previous half completed build did not break anything requiring a manual fix, etc etc. The same goes for development tasks as well, as developers go through bursts of productivity. If the outage occurs during a burst, the impact cannot be compensated by an extra time amount equal to the outage. All this is besides the hassle a customer has to go through for last minute changes to meeting schedules.

So over the past few months we’ve been investing in our infrastructure to achieve a 99.999% office uptime. This requires that we have adequate backups. And then calculate availability probabilities of all items necessary for office productivity to ensure we continue to get close to our goal.

To date we have the invested in the following:

1. Data storage - remotely backing up data of all code and databases on a weekly basis
2. Power backups - A 55 KVA generator, sufficient for running air conditioning in the summers
3. Internet backup - Along with a dedicated connection into Pakistan’s Internet backbone (PIE), two additional connections from WorldCall (fiber) and Warid (WiMAX)
4. Working from home - we have started the process of equipping our development staff with mac books or Ubuntu based laptops (we dual partition these for Windows, just incase someone wants to get burnt first hand with a virus or the blue screen).

We’re all ears if you have any items that you’d like us to add to the above list!

Picture: Confiz’s 55 KVA Generator on our office’s rooftop

“I have had many people advise me to avoid off-shore Web development teams for various and sundry reason. After working with Confiz, I’m glad I ignored the advice. Confiz has been extremely supportive, reliable and innovative. What more could I ask for? Well, maybe another video on vator.tv, which is how we found Confiz in the first place.” by Bambi Francisco co-founder and CEO, vator.tv.

It’s been a great experience working with Bambi Francisco and Cyril Brignone for last year from prototype to launch of vator.tv. Vator.tv is a very interesting project from engineering perspective and I would like share some details of vator.tv development.

• Built using Ruby on Rails
• Hosted with Engine Yard
• Video storage with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Video processing to FLV using Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)

One of the biggest challenges in this project was to build a custom video storage, conversion and delivery network. We evaluated different options and decided to use web services provided by Amazon to build a highly scalable infrastructure. This approach worked out really well and (minimized) eliminated upfront infrastructure investment and accelerated time to market.

Amazon is providing startups with great opportunity to compete with bigger players with it pay as you go web services. We have built deep expertise with S3, EC2, SQS and currently exploring FPS.

Looking to build consumer internet application? Want to leverage Amazon web services to reduce costs and time? Contact us at info@confiz.com

I made the last post on this blog on 2nd April, 2007 when Syed Ali joined as CTO and since then we have been extremely busy in managing our tremendous growth. We have launched several web applications, added another office, doubled engineering team, built deep expertise with Amazon web services and developed facebook applications.

Starting tomorrow, I would start writing separate blog entries for each update. Stay tuned!

It is a great pleasure to announce that Syed Ali has joined Confiz as CTO effective 2nd April. Ali has worked for over 5 years at Sun Microsystems and more recently he was Director Software Services for TRG managing a team of over 60 developers. For more details visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/asyed

Along with Ali, we have 3 engineers (Zia, Salman and Yasir) who have joined the Confiz Team today.

To cater to our current growth and expected future needs (exponential growth!) we have acquired additional office space and are in the process of furnishing it. Your feedback on its modeling are welcome!

Confiz is thankful for your trust and support, through which we continue to provide exceptional quality to our customers!

Hello and thanks again for using helphee! As usual we’ve been receiving lots of positive feedback and we’ve improved Helphee once again :) We’ve introduced a cool new Preview topic feature. It’ll save a lot of your time and improve usability considerably. So don’t wait and check helphee out!

We’ve added some cool new features to Helphee…

1. Quick save - While editing just press CTRL+S or the save icon and your help topic is saved right away!
2. Automatic notifications - You can now receive reports in your mail or your favorite blog reader!

Thanks a million to everyone who submitted their valuable feedback! More updates coming soon :)

We are very pleased to announce the availability of private beta of Helphee. We have been working on the concept and implementation of Helphee for almost a year.

What is Helphee?

Helphee is a web based hosted help authoring and publishing application.

What are features of Helphee?

1. There is nothing to download, install or configure. You can start writing your help system right away after signup. Unlike traditional desktop based help authoring tools, there is nothing to upload after authoring. You can publish your help system with a single click.
2. Integrated natural language search makes it extremely easy for end-users to get relevant answers quickly. This directly results in lowered support costs. No longer, end-users have to sift through table of contents or remember search engine tricks. They can ask questions as if they were asking a support staff.
3. Multiple reports highlight potential problem areas in your product. The way end-users use your help system provides valuable insight into your product usability. This indirect feedback loop is broken in traditional help authoring tools which do not capture these statistics.
4. Multiple authors can easily collaborate on large help systems. This collaboration is a cumbersome process on desktop based tools, sometimes requiring use of source control systems.
5. Combination of intuitive interface and AJAX based front-end provides rich user experience.
6. Flexible design templates allow the help documents to completely blend with any existing web site.

Is that it?

Helphee is loaded with innovative features and we will be highlighting them in our subsequent posts.

How can I try Helphee?

Signup for our private beta phase and you will be invited very soon.

Still, it can’t be 5 minutes?

Unlike other help authoring tools where you have to sign up, download huge installers and setup, Helphee signup takes less then 30 seconds and you can immediately start writing your help documents. With one click publish, your help system can be accessible to end-users immediately.

Our goal is to make the whole process of help authoring and publishing very simple. At the same time we will capture valuable information from end-users behavior that will become vital part of your product management.

Thank you for your support, stay tuned.

Yes, we promised announcing some sleek stuff in our last post and then there has been complete silence since then. We received numerous emails from our valuable readers, thank you everyone.

Here is sneak preview of what’s going on at Confiz.

1. VeriClient: VeriClient is a joint product with one of our existing client. It is an ideal solution for client identity management and makes use of fingerprinting technology. This application has a desktop application, web service and web application all written in Microsoft .NET technology. Visit http://www.vericlient.com for more information.
2. Simple Applicant Tracking: This is our first application using Ruby on Rails. There has been a lot of hype of RoR on the internet but after first hand experience, we feel most of it is well deserved. This application is intended for use by small to medium sized business. I will post the link as soon as it goes up.
3. Working on different projects of our clients and seems like all of them are pretty happy.

But there is something bigger we want to announce, something we have been working on for a long time and something we developed purely out of repeated need. I would like to use another separate post for the announcement of something THAT important.

Stay tuned!!