In one project we have been doing for one of our client, the world class scripting aid was needed. Who did we choose for the job? Me :).
Well let’s be honest. I wasn’t that keen on starting scripting because it feels like ages ago when I last wrote a few lines of code. But what can you do when especially MY skills were needed (according to my colleague – a great salesman)?
The job was to clone users from one Active Directory forest to another while updating group memberships. Migration was not an answer for the matters I’m not going to discuss in this space. Somehow I chose PowerShell and CSVDE and LDIFDE for the job. CSVDE was user to create new users and LDIFDE to update group memberships. And PowerShell was used to orchestrate the whole thing. Sounded like a plan. But not exactly.
The thing I like about scripting is that it’s actually problem solving. Not writing a code. And that is one thing I think I’m good at. Solving problems.
Another great thing about scripting is that you always learn something new. When you discover that you knew that you knew everything but it turned out that you know nothing, it keeps your boots safely on the ground.
One lesson I learned this time was that if you have Scandinavian characters in your group names, LDIFDE wants to convert the strings to base64. That complicates things a bit when you want to do string manipulation with members. One free advice: you can find convert-data cmdlet from /n software‘s NetCmdLets package :).
Today is the day! We have been working our asses off for the last three months and now our first cloud service is seeing the day light. Today we have launched Onrego’s Online System Center. System Center as a Service, Systems Management as a Service and Management as a Service. Let’s take a closer look!
We are very proud to present our first cloud service Online System Center. Online System Center is cloud based systems management service for managing workstations, servers and mobile devices, monitoring server, services and network devices as well as for running service desk. Online System Center is based on Microsoft System Center 2012 and run from Onrego’s cloud. The benefits for clients and partners are enormous! Microsoft System Center 2012 solutions are instantly ready to use without any upfront investments and invoicing is based on actual usage. Plus the solutions are configured already based on the best practices. Online System Center is the killer cloud service at the moment.
We have two websites for Online System Center: one in Finnish and another one in English. The address for the Finnish version is www.onlinesystemcenter.fi and English version can be found from www.onlinesystemcenter.com.
Since you can find more details about Online System Center from the websites, I’m not going to go any further with the details in this space. Rather than that, I want to share to you a few things our team at Onrego has done.
Three months ago we started only with a killer idea of building our own cloud service of Microsoft System Center. Since August 2012 we have had 150 meetings with clients and partners, we have built the first version of Online System Center, the first customers are already using the service and we have run a marketing campaign including teaser videos, websites, social media activities, press releases and upcoming advertisements. It’s been quite hectic time but we have loved every minute of it.
Our website www.onrego.com (www.onrego.fi in Finnish) had a timer of Online System Center launch. The launch took place on November 1st 2012 11 AM.
We produced three teasers which we uploaded to Youtube to give an idea of what we are doing and what benefits could Online System Center have.
Here are the teasers:
Teaser #1 “Amazing Things Happen On November 1st 2012”
Teaser #2 “Things Are About To Change On November 1st 2012”
Teaser #3 “The World We Are Living In On November 1st 2012”
We also produced two more videos of Online System Center and its features prior to the launch and upcoming sales and marketing activities.
Online System Center presentation in English:
Online System Center presentation in Finnish:
While our journey has just begun, I want to thank our team at Onrego: Antti, Kenneth, Kimmo and Pekka, you have made fantastic job; our friends at Microsoft, our friends in Online System Center Ecosystem and, of course, our wonderful clients!
Now, Online System Center is not going to be the only cloud service Onrego is going to produce. We have many more killer cloud services coming up that we have developed with our clients. Stay tuned!
It was only a three months ago when I went to National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland to established our company Onrego Ltd. So far we have had over 100 meetings with clients and partners and have had great discussions with them.
Couple of days ago Finnish IT journal Tietoviikko (tivi.fi) referred to an article from Computerworld concerning how rewarding it is to work with startup companies for IT executives in corporates. In the article Computerworld’s Johanna Ambrosio writes as:
IT leaders said the biggest benefit of working with startups is access to leading-edge technology that solves their business problems more quickly than they could by building something internally.
Even I wouldn’t have said that any better! I have had over 60 meetings with clients and partners expressing myself and together Onrego have had way over 100 meetings since August 2012. We have been presenting our ideas of modern IT infrastructure to our clients and have had great discussions and feedback. In fact, our first cloud service is going to go public within the next few weeks and on next Monday; we are having the first Proof of Concept with our client. We have also been gathering great partners to our ecosystem, which we are going launch a little bit later.
It has been fun to acknowledge that many other friends and partners are also expressing themselves and turned into entrepreneurs. The last one is upcoming consulting company focusing on cloud technologies called Cloud 1 Oy by MVP Harri Puupponen. Besides meetings I have been expressing myself with other duties that the CEO of young startup can have, such as developing a portal for our cloud services and buying espresso from Stockmann for the employees.
While buying espresso does not require any special skills, I have had a change to do some serious multitasking with my partners at Onrego and to seek my limits especially with my developing skills. I need to remind that I have been World Champion of Scripting two times a row, but still doing stuff with Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET MVC4 and Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 is something I didn’t know I was capable of. But with enormous self-confidence I was managed to develop a great portal for our clients. I can say I have been expressing myself big time lately :).
A good friend of mine is a lecturer in a senior high school. He asked me if I want to do a presentation for his class about entrepreneurship. At first I was like, “yeah, why not”, but more I have been thinking about it, more thrilled about it I have got. I just can’t wait to be able to get up and speak about entrepreneurship and the ability to express yourself. As we are expressing ourselves at Onrego, as our partners are expressing themselves, and as our clients will be expressing themselves with a little help from us.
In the following article I’m exposing how our startup is trying to stay focused on the essential matters and what does our customers mean to us.
A couple of days ago I read about another hot Finnish startup called Jolla and the way they are leading their crew. Jolla is continuing Nokia’s work on MeeGo based smartphones and is recruiting new employees at an accelerated pace. Jolla’s CEO Jussi Hurmola told in the article that the employees of Jolla form new teams very month with coordination from the management team based on tasks need to be done. They are calling them as iteration rounds like in agile development.
What a wonderful idea I thought and started thinking of how those methods would work for our startup Onrego Ltd. Suddenly I realized that we are already working almost like that even though our iteration round is one week rather than Jolla’s one month. We have a management team meeting weekly which lasts for two hours. In the meeting we summarize what we have done within the week and what should we do next. We are mostly concentrating on developing our cloud services and discussing about the meetings with clients, with which we have had great discussions about their expectations of IT services now and in the near future. We are very thankful to our clients for all the meetings so far!
Many of our friends have been asking how it feels to be a startup entrepreneur. I may have replied as “excellent” but what I meant was, was “quite dizzy” :). That’s because there one million and more tasks to fulfill because basically you have no processes, no infrastructure, nor any assistants. You have to build everything from the ground up. That’s why Onrego has milestones and targets which should lead our way and help us stay focused on the essential matters. The milestones also help us achieve something, and let us feel success, which is essential for every company and its employees.
Because our hands are full of tasks, we are trying to get rid of garbage. For example we are using internal discussion forum to minimize email traffic, which normally creates lots of interruptions. We are also teleworking whenever it’s useful and have quick chats with some of our clients and our partners using Microsoft Lync, as I wrote couple of weeks ago. I have also been fan of Lean techniques for quite some time now and I try to implement them to Onrego’s daily work. If you don’t know what Lean is I suggest you take a look. While Lean was first developed for manufacturing goods, Lean has also been used for service production and for knowledge work as well.
Currently we are in the start-up phase developing our cloud services but as soon as we enter the production phase, we need to adjust our way to work a little bit. We are going to implement Balanced Scorecard as a framework which lets us to monitor our performance. One very important measure to Onrego is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is so important that Kenneth, our Chief Customer Officer, will have his eyes and ears on the heartbeat of our clients and informs the management team of how we have succeeded.
I might open up our working methods a little bit more in the future when we hit the production phase with our cloud services.
On this week’s Friday Finland is having a national day of teleworking. Employees are encouraged to work from home to save the nature but also to increase their productivity. Onrego is going to attend the act but an agenda of it’s own.
Our friends at Sulava have been talking about knowledge work and one essential part of it is productivity and ability to telework. There are couple of technical problems about how to allow employees to do modern knowledge work, but luckily we at Onrego have solutions for that :).
Beside cultural challenges some organizations are facing with teleworking, managing devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones can be quite tricky or sometimes even impossible when employees are working from remote locations. We think that those devices MUST be managed wherever they may are located and teleworking shouldn’t be disallowed because of management issues.
Another modern issue with knowledge work and teleworking is consumerization and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Modern knowledge workers wants to use their own laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile phones. This is also a tricky thing for IT departments but the question should be: is productivity going to be increased and if so, how much? We believe productivity will be increased and so we think that employees SHOULD have a possibility to use their own devices at work, but with security in mind.
We are working on these issues and we believe that our upcoming solutions can be a great deal for IT departments but also for modern knowledge workers. Our solutions are going to include ability to manage devices where ever they are located but we will also include possibility to allow BYOD devices to be managed securely as well. Also, we are going to have a solution which will allow companies to allow the use of LOB apps to the BYOD devices. With security in mind of course. All of these will be delivered as cloud services, without the need of installation projects and with no deployment costs. We are bringing the future to the present day.
Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the national day of teleworking on Friday!
In the last post I wrote we have a new branch office in Jyväskylä. But branch office, even in Jyväskylä, is pretty useless without any employees. So now we do have an employee in Jyväskylä branch.
I’m so proud to present our next employee and partner today! He (yes, he is a male) will be located in our brand new branch office in Jyväskylä and he will focus 100 per cent in sales and marketing. (Drumroll). Our next partner and our Vice President of Sales and Marketing is Mr. Kimmo Vesajoki. (Applause). Kimmo has been working in the industry for ages and has enough experience of sales management to become the leader of sales and marketing for Onrego.
We are very thrilled about this opportunity and together we are going to reinvent IT! We have big plans and we hope we can reveal them to our clients in a near future.
In the meantime, I do welcome Kimmo to Onrego team with open arms. Next a nice portrait with a glimpse of Andy meets Metro.
Congratulations Jyväskylä! Congratulations Keski-Suomen lääni! Congratulations Harjun torni! Onrego is expanding to Jyväskylä with a brand new branch office. With a lake-view this time.
While our headquarter is located by the sea in Keilaniemi, Espoo, our Jyväskylä branch is located by lake Jyväsjärvi with a walking distance to city center.
But one question remains. Are there any employees working in the branch? Hmm… let’s dig into that in the next post.
Thank you Microsoft; thank you our clients and thank you Onrego team! Next stop is Gold Management and Virtualization!
Steve Ballmer, the President of Microsoft Corporation, remembered us with a nice placard and Microsoft Finland gave us a bottle of champagne. The placard is hanging on our HQ‘s wall and the bottle has already been emptied :). Over and out.
Our startup, Onrego Ltd, has a website, business cards, t-shirts and now we have badges too :). At least from now on we can do some buziness :).
I just came from a lunch at Restaurant Keilaranta to our office building when our assistant run towards me with a small package. My first feeling was “not another advertisement again”. But my mood changed rapidly when I noticed this package was not an advertisement. No, we finally received our badges!
Onrego is using Microsoft Office 365 as its messaging and collaboration solution. This means that we have the best solutions in the market such as Microsoft Exchange for emailing, Microsoft Sharepoint for collaboration and Microsoft Lync for communication. This also means that you can call us using Lync!
Microsoft Lync is the solution for online communication. Lync is the follower of Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007, and gives possibilities such as chat, online meetings and calls with or without video. Here is a screenshot of my Lync including my Onrego Staff contacts:
JarnoMaki.com 