I hope everyone is enjoying the summer and continuing to stay safe. I promised at the TFO meeting recently that I would communicate our intentions for the website as soon as possible, and that day is finally here. Since March we’ve embarked on a mission to bring about the new website to TAW, and have taken several approaches to find suitable options. In brief we have looked internally at how we can manage this ourselves, we’ve looked at fully outsourcing it, a combination of those things, and we’ve looked at whether we could update the look and feel of our existing website, whilst keeping the same complex backend. One thing that I must stress is how much respect I have gained for our website, I had no idea of how complex our member management, events management and onboarding/unit management was. TAW 2.0 is better referred to as a piece of software, rather than a website, and that means that the next iteration needs to be able to do the same, and more.

I’m really excited to tell you that we’ve chosen the right option for the community, and work has already begun. Our new website is being developed in-house by a team led by Samblues over in DEVOP. Over the past few months I’ve witnessed the formation (from scratch) of a backend system, something that previous teams have never been able to develop. This is the fundamental structure that underpins TAW’s management platform, and allows the website to grow on top. Work is happening at pace, and just last night I was treated to the first concept milestone demo, registering myself as a new user, being added to a unit and seeing how the back end now handles my credentials and permissions across the system. We’ve never gotten this far before, not since TAW 2.0 was developed.

The objective of this project is that this should be our last website, never should we find ourselves in this position again. All work is being done on familiar commercial coding specifications, using standards that are used in the industry today. We’ve got some great minds coming together on this, and the future of this unit will be embedded into TAW with a view to continue enhancing it naturally, rather than letting it sit still until it needs replacing. We are at the first major milestone, so we’ve still got a long way to go until the initial launch, but I cannot stress enough how impressed I am with the pace that this project is moving. I can’t wait to share more with you all over the next few months as this thing takes shape, so keep your eyes peeled.

Maverick

CIC Update