This is really just an experiment with static pages on the Drupal platform.

More may follow...

I've often said that if you don't have the capacity or capability to do something that is essential to your business, you should assess outsourcing it... (and/or hopefully "nearsourcing" it to support local economies).

In my experience, very few organizations have the capabilities required to execute on common and essential quality management disciplines.  In the software development world that may mean a formalized testing strategy, and in the manufacturing world that means broader quality assurance and management measures.

At Sunaptic Solutions we decided early that Quality was going to be a true differentiator for us, knowing that few of our competitors did more than pay lip service to formalized quality assurance practices and methodology. 

We spent time and budget developing a team of dedicated Quality Engineers (not just "failed software developers") that not only had a deep engineering background, but also had the aptitude, dedication and discipline to ensure quality standards are met (and exceeded).  We also invested in the development of best practices, processes and even formalized training on the subject, all under the watchful eye and management of Carles (my head of quality engineering).

An interesting company, CreationStep based in Toronto, has taken the approach to create, develop or partner with a number of smaller niche and highly specialized groups (Indoor Playground, Service Cloud, etc.).  The latest, based on Mark Dowds' latest blog post, is QA Room, which promises to "improve your code and reduce your support costs".

If you don't have the capability or capacity to make quality a core competency of your software company, consider outsourcing it to someone who does ... maybe QA Room.

I was just proofing my last post and came across an unintentional anagram in a fictitious store name: "Crazy Al's Shoes"

I swear on a stack of Bibles that this was unintentional.  If you don't see it, I'm not going to point it out to you.

If you saw it right away, you should have spent more time in Sunday School as a child...

I was just playing with Technorati last night, and searching for a recent post of mine and found that it has me categorized as having "some authority".

I searched for "iphone" and the result was quite large, so I refined the search to only english blogs with "some authority" and I was there!  Granted I was on page 14 of over 15,000 results, but the results were ordered by age (or posting date) rather than any pageranking system.

So apparently "authority" is simply determined by unique links to my site:

Authority:

You can also limit your results to blogs that have any, a little, some, or a lot of authority. Authority is determined by the number of unique site links that a blog has. The more unique site links a blog has to it, the better the ranking and higher the authority of the blog

http://technorati.com/help/search.html

... and here I thought that Technorati performed some extensive analysis on the amount of forethought and insight that I display in the contents of each well-thought-out post, and determined that for the subject of "iPhone" I certainly have some authority.

I guess not...