BasicGov / BLOG

My first two weeks here at BasicGov has been full of activity.

The first week was marked by an event that proves the cloud computing model is gaining significant traction in government. The decision by the City of Los Angeles to move from enterprise software (Novell) to Google’s Software as a Service (SaaS) for email and calendaring was a major departure from the, I’ll say it, older way of thinking and deploying software. The discussions about whether this is a good or bad move has been lighting up the internet and is very interesting, but at the end of the day, should the software customer be responsible for maintaining upgrades and best practices implementation anymore.

All in all, this is very exciting for companies like us as it shows other cities that a) change is good, and b) change can happen (as a sidebar, there are documents circulating that do a detailed cost analysis of this decision, if you would like that, please let me know). This is a major event in the evolution of cloud computing and many of my peers are very excited about how this event will influence government software decision making in 2010.

In addition to that, BasicGov is releasing a new product this week and there is an impressive set of products announcements ahead of us. Please sign up for any or all of ways to communicate with you (twitter, blog, newsletter, etc)

We are also preparing for DreamForce, which is an education and partnering event for companies delivering products based on Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. If anyone is out there on the Force.com platform and sells to local government, I would like to meet you there.

Mike

michael.togyi@basicgov.com

Here’s my story about developing our new Parcel Updater for municipalities and going from Intern to Product Development Specialist.

I joined CloudBench Applications (BasicGov) in July 2009 as an Intern while wrapping up my Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from the University of British Columbia. Before being promoted to Product Development Specialist in October, I was responsible for a variety of tasks the most critical of which was building a tool that would help our clients load their data into our systems within a few button clicks. This tool, which was later dubbed the “Parcel Updater“ took 3 weeks of intense development and captured the interests of several existing and new clients after its release.  I really enjoyed being able to put my 5 years of programming experience to work on this project.

The Parcel Updater has some interesting features; for example it can load thousands of data within a few minutes, it takes few steps to run, it can send email notifications, it does not require Microsoft Access or Excel to be installed, and it is compatible with Microsoft Windows’ XP and Vista. So far many of our local government customers are finding this Parcel Updater tool really helpful.

CloudBench Applications has a small but excellent and easy to work with team, deals with very interesting technologies and frameworks, and has great growth potentials. 
Besides that, they believe in the “work hard play hard philosophy” ;)

As such it was not difficult for me to make a decision when I was offered to stay with the company late September.