iWink Intranet

I became a member of the iternal automization team at iWink in early summer, 2009. The team concerns itself with the iWink in- and extranet. The former is used by all departments and employees for administration, while the latter allows customers access to some of that information. Both are sizeable applications, and maintaining them is no easy task.

The iWink intranet is used by al departments: sales, billing, HRM, administrations, techsupport, product development teams, account and project managers and project development teams. The intranet application is huge and with a great deal of company specific logic. Intranet has been around for years, and parts of the code are outdated. This all makes for a very care intensive application.

The extranet, which hasn't been widely used so far, is meant to allow iWink customers partial access to company information, such as bills, progress on project planning and the entering and tracking of issues. The interface was recently upgraded, but the code base is still too outdated for wide use. It must be modernized so that it can be widely used by our customers to take load off our account and support managers.

When I started working on internal automization, it was just me and my boss, Simon Wisselink. He managed the projects while I implemented new features and fixes issues. Together we developed a steady release cycle which increased the stability of the project.

Then some time ago my boss had to focus on other tasks and the management of the projects fell to me, with him supervising. I planned releases, features to be developed and consulted with all departments on the development of new intranet features. Some time after this, an HTML coder came on board the project several hours a week to work on the design.

When it became clear that I alone could not implement the feature backlog for years, a new programmer was hired and joined the team. Now I coördinate with him and the coder to create new releases of intranet. I also keep an eye on extranet, which is due to be modernized in a few weeks.