[No, this isn't an accident. I'm intentionally posting about my blender on the work blog.] My wife, Jenn, was making strawberry ice cream today. You see, strawberries are finally in season here in Tennessee, and that means that I seemingly can’t get out from under strawberries these days. This particular ice cream recipe requires using a blender to obliterate a bunch of strawberries with sour cream and heavy cream. As I was shooting the pictures of the blender full of goo for Jenn’s blog, it occurred to me that I love my blender. Jenn was trying to blend two recipes worth at once, and my only thought was, "If that blender breaks, I’m going to buy another one just like it, price be damned." My blender, the oh so fine Kitchen Aid, happens to be an expensive one, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it works well every time. I never have to reach my rubber spatula into that blender to scrape the sides in a manner that terrifies those around me. It works so well that it simply makes it a waste of time to consider another blender, should I ever have to. Last week finished with two validating moments, so I thought I’d share them. First, I demoed the SCORM Engine for a prospective customer, a fairly significant LMS. The sole reason this prospect called us was that two of our customers had strongly encouraged them to do so. Kind words from DominKnow and Articulate had pointed them in our direction. That kind of a recommendation is so valuable to us and so appreciated by us. (And I think more genuine given the fact we don’t do lead referral agreements.) So, thanks to those of you espousing our virtues publicly. Second, and this was my favorite, we extended our agreement with Learning.com. Learning.com has been using the SCORM Engine for more than two years and is a high volume client with more than 1 million learners. They are among the group that occasionally push the limits of the SCORM Engine to see how far it will go, and we love that about them. Learning.com’s agreement with us for the SCORM Engine was coming to a close in about six months, so I shot them an email early last week to let them know that date was coming. By Friday afternoon, we had signatures on an agreement extending our work together three years further. From my point of view, this is the ultimate kind of validation for the work we do and the products we sell. When a customer is willing to extend an agreement without nasty negotiations, wrangling over altered terms, or shopping around one bit, it tells me that we’re a lot like the blender. And I like that a lot.

We spent nearly a year updating our website. It was an arduous process, worked around our daily chores, but let me tell you, it was worth it. We’ve been linking to our own website constantly as people ask us questions we’ve answered before. That in its own right would be enough to make me feel like it was worth it. But check this out… We released the new version of our site on March 20. In the 52 weeks leading up to March 2009, we had never had a week with more than 6200 pageviews (excluding TestTrack entirely). Since the release, we’ve had weeks of 7300, 8700, 9400, 9200, 12,000, 12,300, and 11,400. Unique visits are up as you can see. And not only that, our effectiveness is way up. The average time on site is up from about 1:55 to about 3:20. The bounce rate is down from the mid 50’s to the mid 40’s. These are statistically significant changes. First off, thanks for the interest. We’re thrilled that the site is seemingly more useful for you now. And second, if you’re wondering whether updating your site and sharing information with the public is wise, it is. Go for it. Later: Also of note, people seem remarkably uninterested in SCORM around the holidays. What gives, folks?

A few SCORM Engine customers have asked recently what our plans are for SCORM 2004 4th Edition and how it relates to our release schedule. Must of the SCORM 2004 4th Edition stuff is already complete here in house. We’ve been working with the early versions as they come out and working with ADL in testing the test suites. All of that is going well. Our intent is to hold our release until ADL agrees to start testing/certifying SCORM 2004 4th Edition LMSs. When they do that, we will quickly release and have some version of the SCORM Engine certified. Once we prove that we are certifiable (in the good way), we will release what we’ll call 2009.1. The announcement of that release will be made via the forums here. Our sense from ADL right now is that they will open up that certification sometime in June, but we don’t control their schedule at all. In the mean time, we’re incorporating other functionality into our 2009.1 release. Things like historical attempt logging are likely inclusions. Let us know if you have any questions on the release.

Just following up on yesterday’s post regarding SCORM 2004 4th Edition testing. According to this tweet, it looks as if ADL may be holding off until August for this testing. We will likely follow suit so as to be sure to release a certifiable product right away.

We’re still toiling away on the public release of the SCORM Cloud. A few folks have asked for application_id’s (the token that allows you to interact with the SCORM Cloud,) and we’ve actually shared them. We’re still very much in the alpha stage… although TestTrack has held up quite well under the Cloud so far. Reading Lifehacker this morning, I saw an interesting quote from Avner Rosen, founder of Boxee, that got me thinking about our Cloud work. I think at this stage of Boxee, realistically, when it comes to the big media companies, the big studios, we have to do a lot of the foot work. We’re not at the stage where we can expect (content providers) to be investing in and developing Boxee apps on their own. They need more guidance, and incentives to make apps on their own. We are having discussions with bigger media companies about developing Boxee experiences around their brands. … We’re spending time with them, and trying to make it a hands-on process. As we mature, more and more of those efforts are going to be done by those big companies by themselves … While we’re obviously working in comparative anonymity to Boxee, there are some parallels. The first of you who integrate with the SCORM Cloud will need some assistance. I want to be clear right now that we are willing to provide that assistance. In that vein, we’re working away on a couple of first demonstration/documentation applications for you. Our first application will include the minimal functionality required to deliver training to learners. It will show you how to create the necessary connections to the Cloud via our client libraries and use the functionality embedded in the Cloud (creating courses and registrations). Emails will be generated, and the code will serve as a roadmap for you to extend it into your systems. Our second application will extend upon the prior Moodle proof of concept integration we’ve done. Rather than working against a hosted version of the SCORM Engine, however, the next version will integrate directly against the Cloud (eliminating the .NET dependency we happened to have the first time around). I’m really excited about what this might mean for Moodle folks who wish for better SCORM conformance. So, I implore you to ask for our help as we introduce the Cloud. We want to hear what you’re attempting to do, and we want to help you succeed in that. We understand that we, too, will have to do some of the legwork to get you rolling. If you demonstrate your commitment to the project, we’ll pay it back in kind.

No, unfortunately this post doesn’t mean we’re hiring right now. But the next time we are, it would serve an interested applicant well to read this post from 37 Signals. Plenty of people know how to code and have years of experience to show for it. But, if I get to pick the person I’m going to work with, it has to be somebody I want to spend time with, somebody I look forward to seeing on Monday morning…in addition to somebody with rock star skills. We’ve interviewed a lot of people over the years and we’ve only had one candidate ever "fail" an interview question. The question was "What do you do for fun?", and he had no answer. The guy was an absolute stud when it came to coding skill and even communicating, but I just couldn’t imagine sharing an office with him. Personality matters. Skills are of course hugely important too, but often the least skilled are the best at making themselves sound good on a resume. I’m a big believer the fact that the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. The most talented people I know are also the most modest. In software development (and probably in most endeavors), it is the little things that separate the cream of the crop. The small day to day habits that over time make a big difference are what produce excellent software….but those don’t make for great resume fodder. We’ve found our JavaScript test to be HUGELY indicative of an employee’s eventual performance. Great resumes, not so much. If you want to work here, make an impression. Show us that you have a personality. Show us that you have skills. When we hire, Tim and I hardly even look at resumes. Of course, we want to know something about your background, but a couple paragraph narrative is often much more informing (and easier to digest) than a long detailed resume. When an applicant comes in the door, it is a cover letter and JavaScript test that we are most interested in. Those are the true indicators of skill and personality that lead us to think an applicant might make a good fit. Of all the people we’ve interviewed and hired, I remember virtually nothing about their resumes. I didn’t even remember that Troy has a master’s degree until I was crafting this blog post…but I vividly remember the elegance of his solution to the JavaScript test. I think I have a faint recollection that Jean did some teaching and magazine editing back in the day…but I certainly remember knowing that she was the gal for the job after reading that she was "getting tired of the stay at home Mom gig". I remember that Ells did a cool thesis about something for his master’s degree…but I mostly remember that he once DJ’d at raves and that had the guts to mock Tim and I’s alma mater in his first email.

Countless sites have discussed an important topic in time management… the important/urgent matrix. In my simplistic terms, these folks are encouraging us all to work on important/non-urgent things more than we do. Apparently we are collectively distracted by the less important/more urgent tasks. Email, I suppose, contributes to this with its timely nature. Lately, I’ve been working on a collection of items in both quadrants. Today, though, all of those things were thrown aside to resolve something crucial. Mike was right in that we aren’t hiring any software developers right now, but he didn’t know what I had in the works today. Today, I hired a cookie intern. Miss Hannah Wyatt, formerly employed as the artist of our SCORM comic, has been languishing in her educational career over the last few years. We regularly challenge our prospective employees to impress us with their story. And if your dream, your lifelong dream, is to be come a cookie intern, well, then, your story better be told in cookies. Hannah has wowed us over the last several months with her baked goods, and we decided it was time to make her an offer. She’s accepted, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. If Hannah performs up to the levels we expect she will, we’ll be trying to come up with another offer for her in August… one that will convince her to opt out of her senior year at Franklin High School. The title of "cookie professional" awaits. If any of you faithful readers aspire to a similar position, say, "ice cream intern", please, by all means, tell us your story whenever you’re able. We may well be hiring.

Dear Drupal User. I’m so happy for you… your relationship with Drew Pal has brought so many great things to your life and your work… I couldn’t be more thrilled for you. In every relationship, though, I know tough times come along, and I can sympathize. I recently heard from a mutual friend that you’ve hit a real snag in your relationship. It seems that your dear friend is failing to meet your needs in a very important, very personal way. Drew just doesn’t seem to understand why SCORM is important to you. I know a lot of guys like Drew. They say they care about your needs. Sometimes, they make sincere efforts to be there for you… but do they last? Do they really understand? I know Drew’s been giving you lip service about this for years… wasn’t it back in 2007 when he said he would really work on this SCORM thing? That didn’t work out, did it? So what did Drew do then? Drew thought he could bring in one of his buddies… he thought the two of them together could embrace your needs. The problem, though, is that Mo Dull isn’t all that great with SCORM either. Mo is more of an early 2000’s guy, since he’s yet to embrace SCORM 2004. So then you were stuck with Mo and Drew together, and neither of them really did what you needed them to do. Twice the headache. You’re not ready to throw Drew to the wolves, though, are you? He does great things for you, and you can trust him. You know what you’ve got, and you really kind of like it, you just wish it did this one thing better? I think it’s time for me to introduce you to the Cloud… The SCORM Cloud is the best kind of therapist… he sits between you and Drew and explains what you really mean to each other. With SCORM Cloud serving the content, there are no mixed messages, no disastrous incidents… Your needs are met… you can deliver SCORM content without a headache. And Drew? Drew would be thrilled. Drew wouldn’t have to spend any of his time and energy trying to understand this crazy SCORM stuff. He would get the simple, grunt sized pieces of information that he needed. SCORM Cloud therapy, like most valuable things, does come with a cost. The good doctor spends countless hours in continuing education to keep up with the evolving "illness" that is SCORM, and hosting these pieces of content isn’t a trivial expense. That cost is simply passed on to you, since Drew himself won’t pay. Drupal User, I would love to introduce you to SCORM Cloud. Scheduling that appointment would take a bit of time on both our parts, but your sincere interest in ongoing therapy would make it worth my while. Please, send me a note, and we’ll introduce the two of you. Tim Note: We haven’t put together the connection for Drupal and SCORM Cloud yet. We would love for you to do that yourself. Or, if you’d rather we do it, let us know that it would be useful for you, and we can help out. And if you have another piece of open source software that you’d like us to integrate, let us know that as well… Moodle, Sakai, Wordpress, all of these systems would fit together with the SCORM Cloud beautifully… just give us a good reason.

Last night we released an implementation of SCORM 2004 4th Edition to the public TestTrack server. For all of you chomping at the bit to take advantage of the new features in 4th Edition, now’s your chance to give it a whirl. Ok, so maybe it’s not all that exciting, but we’re happy to have it out there. As far as we know, we are the first to release a 4th Edition conformant LMS product. Our plan is to make 4th Edition available to all of our active SCORM Engine customers as soon as ADL opens up certification for 4th Edition (last indication was that would be in August). Note: Details of the 4th Edition changes are available here.

I wanted to take a moment to thank Dave Evans at AccessPlanIT publicly. They’ve been using the SCORM Engine for content delivery in their Accessplan LMS since November 2008. This, alone, is worthy of thanks. Today, though, I wanted to thank Dave for something else… Last week, Dave got in touch with me with a series of questions. He described, in detail, a number of potential sales scenarios for their product. Yes, we have an existing contract. Yes, the contract states that all users are included. But you know what? With Dave’s proposed sales approach, there was a lack of clarity. Our contracts generally include a per user component that relates directly to the number of licensed users, but Dave was going to be including all of the users from his client in the database, and wanted to know how we would want them counted… Further, Dave wanted to consider how our fees would affect his sales process. I have a little secret to share… we desperately want our customers to be wildly successful. Seriously. When they succeed, our product is out there more, our clients are solvent, and our revenues grow as well. There’s nothing better for our health than our customers’ massive success. So when Dave came to me seeking to simplify his sales process ahead of time, I was agreeable. We do not want to get in the way of your sales! So thank you, Dave. Thanks for being our customer. Thanks for being proactive. Thanks for coming to me seeking permission and interpretation rather than coming to me later asking for forgiveness and claiming ignorance. Your tone, your desire to do right ahead of time, these things make me want to work with you for a long time… they make me want to do right by you. Thanks.