Enigin Digital

2009 has been a great year for Enigin

I think everyone agrees that 2009 was a great year for Enigin PLC and Enigin Distributors, especially the development department! Nikolai and myself joined Enigin in June this year and here’s a selection of the projects which we’ve completed and launched:

• Eniscope 4.0 Software
• Eniscope Public Display
• Numerous New Distributor Websites
• Enigin .com redesign
• Enigin .co.uk redesign
• Blog site for Ian Wrigley
• News Authoring System
• Energy Saving Blog
• Enigin .TV video site
• The Energy Saving Association website
• Telesales System
• Emailer System
• My Enigin Blog!

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I can remember at the moment without trawling through my project lists!

I have a feeling that 2010 will be an even more productive year!

New Enigin BI Platform in Development

As a holiday project for myself, I’ve taken on the job of rewriting our Business Intelligence platform. The Enigin management team use this platform to view statistics about the business in terms of lead generation for Enigin and lead generation for our Distributors.

Developing BI ‘dashboards’ can sometimes be a complex and time consuming task as it requires obtaining information from a number of sources (in our example 20 different sources across 3 Enigin servers). Once this information has been extracted, it needs to be processed into the required format and loaded into a database. From here, we can then display the data in a way which is visually-pleasing and easy to understand.

Once the new Enigin platform is live, I’ll upload some screenshots with explanations.

Seasons Greetings from this Enigin Developer

Just a quick post to wish you all the compliments of the season. So far, 2009 has been a great year and all of us at Enigin are looking forward to a prosperous 2010.

Seasons greetings to all our Enigin Distributors, business partners and suppliers for making Enigin a great place to work.

Enigin Eniscope 4.0 Software

The last major Enigin project of 2009 has just drawn to a close and we are very proud to announce the release of our new onboard Eniscope software.

Eniscope 4.0 features a completely redesigned real-time viewing interface and makes your energy usage even easier to visualise in an easy to understand way.

To read more about the version 4.0 software, head over to our Enigin corporate website on the following link:

http://www.enigin.com/features/eniscope-4

Here at Enigin, we thrive on customer feedback so if you’ve got any questions or suggestions then we’d love to here from you!

Enigin Developer Reviews Flip HD Camera

I love gadgets… gadgets can make our lives better… gadgets can also be a big waste of money!!!

My latest gadget purchase from Amazon has just arrived at the Enigin office, a Flip HD Digital Camcorder. It’s a small device, about the size of compact digital camera, that will record HD quality video at the touch of a button.

Flip are owned by networking company Cisco and my first thoughts are that they are heavily influenced by Apple (we love Apple!) in terms in packaging. It’s a very iPod-experience removing the device from the folding series of boxes. The FlipHD powered up without any charging and within 20 seconds I was already recording video! Here’s my first 13 second video, Enigin Designer, Alan talking about the Christmas chart battle between Rage Against the Machine and X-Factor:

The simplicity of this unit is it’s crowning glory. There are three main buttons on the back; Record, Play and Delete. I don’t think they need explaining! There’s also an up/down/left/right keypad to navigate through the recorded videos and operate the zoom. The only other thing on the back is the lovely high-resolution 2″ LCD display, which is visible in daylight conditions.

My version of the FlipHD has a whopping 8GB of internal memory, enough for store 2 hours of HD footage. The footage is easily downloaded via the flip-up USB connection and you can be uploading to YouTube within minutes.

Pros

• Very simple and easy to use
• Great value
• Quality product

Cons

• No option to turn HD compression off
• Built in USB not always convenient to use (although an extension can be purchased)
• CMOS sensor not too good in low-light conditions

Summary

Great product at a great price, I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Update

After using the Flip HD over the festival period, I love it! I’m even thinking about buying one for my parents! Great buy 5/5!!

Enigin Love Web Apps: The Apps we use

Not only do Enigin build web applications to support our Distributors, I/we also use a number of third-party web apps to help us collaborate as a team. Here they are!

• Basecamp - We use this simple project management application from developers 37Signals to collaborate on projects.
• Tada List - Another 37s app to manage a simple task list
• Beanstalk - A source-control (SVN) hosted solution to allow the Enigin developers to work together on our code base
• Google Reader - I use this simple app to read all the latest industry news from the websites I subscribe to.
• Campaign Monitor - This app is great for sending email campaigns. It’s very easy to use and has the ability to provide extensive reporting on the number of recipients opening your campaign
• WordPress - We use WordPress to power our corporate and staff blogs
• Google Apps - I personally use Google Apps for handling Email, Word Processing, Spreadsheets and online Calendar

Using online software has the following benefits:

• Access for everyone - Your team can access your business software from any Internet-enabled computer in the world! Great for home-based teleworkers
• Your Data is Safe - All your data is backed up on remote servers and the responsibility of the software providers
• No Upgrading - All upgrades to your software are handled by the creators. So no more holding your breath when performing software updates!

The web is the perfect platform for business software applications. So, if your business is still relying on OS-based software, then it’s time to try something new! Enigin have!