John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
When organisations look to rebuilt their intranets, the obvious tactic - or 'strategic leap' - is to revolutionise design and structure and develop a brand new and improved experience for users.
I have recently switched development environment from Mac to Ubuntu. By and large this has proved a really positive experience as I can so closely match my development machine to the production servers we run. I ran into one sticking point during set up - configuring Netbeans to compile SASS. This ought to be straightforward and it is, although I couldn't find any clear documentation.
At Sereno, we use a range of tools to help us keep on top of Drupal development and to keep our clients actively engaged and aware throughout our projects.
At Sereno, we've been using Personas in projects for many years. In case you've never come across them before, personas are short character studies of the people who are going to use your website or application. They're usually fictionalised descriptions of real users, and they help you think through your design process from your user's point of view.
We have been using various approaches to lean or agile project management for some time now. With each Drupal project, we refine our processes. Or perhaps I should say, we simplify them with each iteration. So we use fewer software tools, we have fewer stages, our sign off lists get shorter. And this is making us much better at project management.
There is a gulf between managing learning and development in large SMEs (up to about 1,500 employees) compared to very much larger enterprise organisations but I suspect the gap is narrowing.
When creating a website or application, it is common practice to complete the information architecture with a menu system. However, approaches to menus differ wildly and menus should be handled with extreme care, especially on larger content managed sites.
While we're busy developing website applications and learning tools, we get a lot of satisfaction out of sharing pet applications and discoveries with our clients. As we're so immersed in new technologies, it's sometimes easy to forget how many great (often free) services there are out there that make life easier but that not everyone is aware of.
In this post I'm aiming to summarise the state of play of Drupal and Learning Management. At Sereno, we've either developed our own LMS funcionality from scratch, like advanced quizzing or content sharing tools, or relied on packages like Moodle to do the heavy lifting for us.