Last night (24th June) saw the first Dublin based MySQL users meeting, kindly organised and sponsored by Echolibre. Mark Baker and Ivan Zoratti flew into Dublin to talk about MySQL 5.4 and MySQL Cluster 7.0. Some brief points from the presentation and discussions. MySQL 5.4 (beta) is now available with a GA release planned later [...]

Usability & Usefulness – two key principles In the design and development of websites, usability and usefulness may appear to be similar terms, but they are related to different aspects of the design and development process. Usefulness is concerned with improving the relevance of the website to the user as they are completing a task, [...]

In a previous post, I explained the principles of a balanced business card and how it helps to focus an organisation on the expected benefits from an application rollout. The first step in building a balanced scorecard is to develop an overall business strategy for the application rollout that provides a focus on the end [...]

When your company is considering changing it’s website or rolling out a web application, one of the challenges that the management team will face is to ensure that the appropriate business benefits are achieved with such an investment of time and money (i.e. that the rollout of a new system/website will be the right thing [...]