BasicGov / BLOG

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.

Hi and welcome to our blog. We’re new at this so we really welcome your input as we learn and improve.

We started this blog for our local government customers and cloud computing supporters. So if you’re interested in finding out about cloud computing / SaaS / web-based software trends, e-government, and how local government is using software then this is the place for you. And of course, we open to all participants, so if you wish to join the discussion, you are free to do so, as far as you respect our blog policy.

I’ll like to introduce you our first bloggers: Susan (me) – blog editor and marcom, David – President & CEO, Mike -VP, Marketing and Sales, James – technical expert, and Roula, our sales expert.

I hope that you find the conversations engaging enough so that you will want to read, share, comment, even bookmark us.