[I saw this email below from a client that Susan sent out this morning and have to agree that working with Maggie is a lot of fun.  I actually had the chance to work on an tension filled problem with her last week and was impressed on how she kept her cool and sense of humor.  --gregg] 

I was cc’d on the following email this morning.  Great job Maggie!

From Denise

The problem with someone like you is you’re really good at what you do and you get saddled with doing more because you’re so good!  From the short time I’ve talked/worked with you it is very apparent you take your job to heart and it is obvious you are one who has the determination to get it done-and get it done correctly.  

That is why I brought up the concerns in my email.  I knew you’d do the best you could do to make it right.  THANK YOU!

You’re in trouble…you’re one of those people I keep the email and numbers for….lol.

Thank you Maggie.  Much appreciated.  I can deal with this short term, and I feel I won’t be the only one asking for support to get this issue resolved for long term use.  It really is an issue needing attention, and i know you will keep it top of list as you stated. 

Staffing software sales is a hard thing, but after-sale onsite software training can be even harder, and it’s something Mike has excelled in. 

Invariably you are meeting up with the client at their most sensitive time.  They’ve spent hard dollars on software, converted data, engaged already super-busy back office and ops people with change management, and still they haven’t yet begun to profit from the new system.  Now walks in the guy or gal who is the face of the software company.  

But he or she may already have been burning the midnight candle with late night tests of newly converted data, long flights, long delays at airports, and yes a hurricane or crippling blizzard just to make things fun.

The result though is a baptism by fire that few can sustain yet turns you into the kind of road warrior that makes you perfect for the position of selling software if you are cut out for it.

That’s why I would buy from Mike Binder.

From: Casey Kraus
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 11:45 AM
To: TWEmployee
Subject: Mike Binder

I just wanted to let everyone know how impressed I am with Mike Binder.

As you know, Mike recently changed from training to sales back in the middle of February.

However, we had an issue with a client that needed to have training this week for a live date on Monday. With our training department booked, Mike stepped up with no hesitation to jump back into his old role this week to provide the level of customer service that we expect at TempWorks.

Mike, way to be a team player and helping out when it was needed.

If you don’t get a call back from a voice mail, it could be that your message has been unretrievable.  Please don’t hesitate to recontact us.

Looks like the VM issue is still alive and kicking on the Shoretel end.

Please take messages and deliver via Email for the time being.

Noticed Effects:

· Transfer to voicemail = dead air

· Unable to retrieve voicemails

· Unable to change voicemail message

· Unable to change ringtone

Affects System(s):SKY, TAU, VOX, WIL

Incident Start:3/26/2013 1:07:00 PM

Summary:

A problem has been discovered with the Voicemail system on this cluster. When attempting to check or receive voicemail, the caller will hear ‘The Voicemail System is currently unavailable’. In addition, any attempted programming changes for Visual Call Flow will not be saved as well as retrieving recorded calls from the portal will result in an error message.
Update 1: ShoreTel Engineers are investigating the issue.
Update 2: ShoreTel Engineers are in a process of restarting resource servers which should resolve this issue.
Update 3: Issue has been resolved.
Update 4: Issue resurfaced, ShoreTel Engineers are looking into the issue.
Update 5: ShoreTel Engineers are still working on the issue.
Update 6: This issue has been resolved.

Incident #2025  |  Date Resolved: 3/26/2013 5:40:00 PM

Affects System(s):SKY, TAU, VOX, WIL

Incident Start:3/27/2013 8:49:00 AM

Summary:

A problem has been discovered with the Voicemail system on this cluster.

The American Kennel Club held its national agility championship in Tulsa, OK,  and Dalyce placed very well among the 409 contestants.  I watched this video of Dalyce and realized that even if I had the talent to train a dog I’m not fast enough to have kept pace.

It was sub-zero here in Minneapolis, but it was Hugo, the Californian, who warmed up the conversation with the comeback story of the Executive Forum, his firm’s yearly conference of industry captains.

It was only a couple years back that I was mistakenly convinced that in-person shows were going the way of the fax machine.   Virtual reality was going to take their place and put the gropers at the TSA and the airlines with their soaring airfares in their place.

Instead, a desire for intimacy has resurged.   Physical presence dominates in the staffing business, and it has won out in the conference business as well.  

Tempworks is proud to be a sponsor there and wishes the attendees and our many staffing software, funding, benefits, and worker comp provider friends there success as well.

But given what’s going on with Oscar, I’ll settle for the Hayward Cross Country Marathon.  Best of luck Maria and Bracy.

I’m struck by three powerfully disruptive influences on staffing software and the recruitment space.  The first is mobile.  The second is the web.  And the third is distributed database technology.

These forces are affecting other industries as well, however, competition makes recruitment among the first to embrace disruption.  Only the oldest of industries  (like, um, gambling and pornography – notice how quickly Twitter’s new video service, Vine, got blitzed by the pornographers) move faster than we do in recruitment.

If we’re not faster, better, and cheaper, clients will just take things into their own hands.

Mobile

Mobile gets a lot of media attention, and so it should.  For decades we’ve had computers – beginning with the mainframes – that required substantial investment and ongoing maintenance.  Big companies could afford computers. They had the edge. The minicomputer and then the PC democratized things somewhat, but still business and government largely decided what technology you would use.

Now consumers have taken control.  They have tasted freedom, and they will never let go.  The enterprise control freaks no longer have a say in the matter. Mobile devices will soon number in the billions.

Everyone from the CEO to the Kenyan farm boy picks whatever device he wants. And they’re all demanding that we service them via that mobile device.

And if you’ve watched Apple’s stock price lately, you know just how fickle these buyers are. Androids like the Nexus4 make the iPhone feel like a cathode ray tube. And tomorrow’s hottest device may well be a Windows8 phone or even harder to believe, the Blackberry BB10. How does the song go, Don’t Blink?

Low prices. Great devices. Huge competition. All that leaves an insatiable demand for services — cloud-based services for those mobile devices. We’re talking Web.

Web

By ‘web’ I’m including both installed apps (custom browsers, is what they are) like those that install on your iPad to browser-based apps that dish out html. The disruption at every turn is impacting recruitment in a big way. Your next crop of job candidates is more likely to find you on their phone than from their desktop browser (if they have one).

HTML5, hyped beyond belief, was actually not hyped enough. Few of us older developers had any idea that a supporting cast of web tools – css, js, model binders, json editors, jquery, fiddler, web apis, debuggers, Typescript, device emulators — would improve as fast as they have. Some argue that these tools have won out over html, that their capabilities are what will make the web of tomorrow. Just stick a single html tag in a page and let js do the rest. That may be a strech, but some SPAs – single page apps with tiny amounts of html (albeit tons of CSS and JS) — do their magic so well you’re easily fooled to into thinking they’re installed apps.

One of the arguments against these new web apps is that they can’t use hardware like a native app. But that is changing fast. One of our lead web devs at Tempworks, Andy Cohen, is using something called SignalR to wire our web apps asynchronously to our phone system. If a call comes in to a support representative, up pops a web page with the customer’s profile.

Distributed Databases

Although the first two items on my list (mobile and web) are pretty familiar themes for anyone in technology or for that matter anyone alive in 2013, my last item is probably less familiar. In fact, in a recently informal poll I did of some software heavies I know, few were familiar with the subject and very few had actually done work on them. Nevertheless, a lot of the cloud services that we’ll be using in the coming decades will be coming from data first served up to a distributed database. The economics of scalability and reliability demand it.

Unlike SQL databases that rely on CRUD (create, read, update, delete) which requires a central store, a distributed database involves multiple, loosely coupled sites. The ones I’ve experimented with store events. You updated a pay rate? That event gets sent to each instance of the distributed database. Creating a new job order? That’s an event that goes to each database. Posting a message to a customer record? Another event to each database.

And if your Paris database goes down, no problem – London will pick up the slack. London down? New York. And so on.

The really cool thing is that you don’t need much money to be a player any more. If you know your way around Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or any of the many other cloud offerings (Cloudera is one I want to try next), you can get your online service running globally at scale in no time and for less money than my Dad paid for his first NCR minicomputer.

Summary

Some 15-year-old in a basement in Iowa or Gabarone is using these three technologies to change the world and maybe recruitment right now. I just need to find her.

[Kobe Burger Stuffed with Blue Cheese at Microsoft’s employee cafeteria]

This last week I was out at a Microsoft conference in Redmond, WA, with two other devs from Tempworks.

Presumably there to get a futurist view of software, I came away with a futurist view of employee culture and hospitality.  Their devs were not just great technologists and speakers, they were genuine.   They showed they really cared about us as guests and that their company cared about them. 

Over the years I’ve been in and out of many hot tech shops that burnt people out left and right (and yes, Tempworks can be like that too sometimes…like January ), but the really good shops get back on the path fast of allowing employees to live fully balanced lives.

Winning in the innovation business is a marathon, not a sprint, and the Kobe Burger treatment goes a long way.

This sign was posted by the elevators inside our building where some of our fellow tenants are training centers both government and private run.  It’s not unusual to see courses on technology I haven’t used for twenty years.