The Nansen Wintercamp - Day 2

April 5, 2014

After breakfast on the second day the actual coding and building begun!

Each group drafted tasks and did a quick prioritizion. We had two short breaks for show-n-tells so that we could share what we had done and everyone could discuss, add-to and add further ideas to what each group had started.

The first show-n-tell was just before lunch and the second one was just before we called the day quit at 18.00.

Here is what each group have done during the second Wintercamp day:

Trove, Lotta, and Robert

Project and client improvement related topics such as, sprint planning template for customer feedback, understand customers digital eco-system, wish list for new customer cases and discussions on how to define requirements early in projects.
Action points: Checklist in to Nansen Vault (Nansens internal knowledge share site). New customer cases written.

Erik, Sean, and Rudde

Integrate the wireframe tool into the Encore installer so that it gets installed by default once a EpiServer project is setup. Batch scripts was also built that pushes and syncs code from the TFS to our preview server which is where our clients follows the status of the projects and wireframes we build for them.

Rudde also drafted the very simple proof of concept for building our own drag and drop functionality:

1. Add dragndrop functionality using a framework like jquery or similar.
2. Save the page DOM structure via Javascript webservice calls to backend code. Simple in theory, but a lot of discussion and debate was focused around this at the show-n-tell later; is it worth the hours put into it or are we just building ourself a maintenance-monster?

Giovanni, Andreas N, and Johan Ahlin

There’s a lot of maintenance coming out of the front enders. Focus is on the Boilerplate and we’re working on improving the documentation, removing old Javascripts and making sure we’ve got re-usable modules that works across browsers.  We’ve also focused on fixing stuff for Internet Explorer 8+ and currently evaluating different grid systems and concepts to work in our projects without limiting designers while keeping backend developers happy.

Show-n-tell just before lunch

Maria, Andreas O, Andreas C

The wireframe tool is currently in a "you have to know css and html"-state to be able to create templates and pages. This is an ongoing project, with one of the goals being to incorporate a drag-n-drop interface in the future.

Our main task was to look into the possibility to use a third party software or service to achieve drag-n-drop functionality when creating wireframes.

We evaluated Axure, Macaw (http://macaw.co/) and Webflow but they all lacked to option to create a custom library of widgets/modules where we could have 100% control of html, css and javascript. Axure is the most mature of the three but, unfortunately, we had to put the third-party-option on hold.

Rob and Arnold

Integrate EpiServer Commerce into the Encore installer.  This should make it much easier to create sites based on Encore 7.5 + EPiServer Commerce.

Hopefully create a graphical installer for Encore & Encore + Commerce that can be launched from within the EPiServer deployment center.

That much concluded the second day ...

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