Blogs

Last weekend Configura celebrated its 20th anniversary. The celebrations took place at the historical village Medevi Brunn, about 10 km outside Motala, Sweden. Medevi Brunn is famous for their water, which was used as medical treatment for a couple of hundred years. Medevi Brunn was founded 1678 and was in use as a medical treatment place until 1982.

The celebration party included excellent food, a magician and music. We created a photo gallery so you who weren’t here can see it for yourselves.

Here is this year’s grand prize in the User Conference Awards Program. This year we decided to have a laptop plus an extra monitor as our grand prize. If you want to have the chance to win this top of the line computer, just follow these simple instructions that you’ll find here and submit your entry.

• Laptop Nine Series
• Display:   17” 1920x1200 WUXGA LCD Active Matrix Display
• Display 2: 24” 1920x1200 WUXGA with Height Swivel Tilt & Pivot Adjustable LCD Monitor
• Processor: Intel Core i7-960, 8Mb L3 Cache, 3.2Ghz (Desktop CPU)
• Memory: 6GB 6144MB, PC3-10660/1333Mhz DDR3 – 3SO-DIMM
• Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce GTX 285M 1GB GDDR3
• Hard Drive 1: 160GB Intel X25-M SATA2 SSD Drive
• Optical Drive: 8X Multi-DVD+/-R/RW RAM Dual-Layer Drive
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional (Discs includes 32 and 64 bit)
• Wireless: Intel Ultimate-N 802.11 A/B/G/N LAN and Bluetooth Card
• Warranty: 3 Year Ltd. Parts and Labor Warranty with 24/7 USA-Based Support
• Extras included:
• *Software and Driver CD
• *Integrated 3.0 Megapixel Web Camera With software
• *Integrated 7 in 1 Card Reader
• *Standard Black Carrying Case

You have probably seen it in different media, e-newsletters and social media sites, that we have announced the 3rd annual CET Designer^® User Conference. You will find the webpage (and the sign up form) for the user conference here, and if you are interested in what happened last year the material from that conference it is still available here.

Here are the official photos from last year, presented in a slideshow.

Greetings!

Yesterday morning we released CET 2.4.1, for a complete list of all changes please check out our release notes.

So far there are just over 300 people that have updated to 2.4.1!

Last week we were present at NeoCon in Chicago. I missed it this year because of schedules for the release. I would like to thank everyone involved in our booth this year. I heard and saw that it was a really great effort and that it was fun to Celebrate 20 years of Configura! I really wish I had been there, I love being at NeoCon and meeting the people that use or wish to use our program!

I also celebrated my own anniversary with Configura this year. 10 years ago, June 17th I flew over from England to Sweden, met Johan Lyreborn outside of our old office and got the keys ready to start work on Monday June 18th. They say that time flies when you are having fun!

UPDATED.

Some photos from our redesigned booth at NeoCon. If you haven’t seen the new booth design, check it out in this pdf. 

Cate Sword and Alexandra Tseffos

Configura people at our booth 7-7046

You will find more photos in our Facebook gallery.

1. Managers that lead
2. Sales people that learn design and practice design
3. Designers that learn sales and practice sales

Today we released CET Designer 2.4!

With CET Designer 2.4 we focused on stability and memory usage to be able to use larger and more complex drawings, and only a minor number of features.

We were very conservative the whole way through and kept the release very tight, with a much longer testing period.

From all our testing we all feel that the release feels solid and we have adressed the larger issues with memory and rendering, even our external test help have been very positive to 2.4 so we feel that we have a very good base to work on.

I hope now that it gets a good reception!

Next stop Neocon!

As you probably know, there are a lot of nice Extensions to CET Designer. For a while ago we updated the Extensions Web page and made it easier to overview. At this Web page you can read about our partners Extensions as well as our own Utility Extensions, which are free to download by the way.

So check out the new Extensions Web page, if you haven’t done it before.

After what seems like 10 minutes since we released 2.3, we are well on our way to the 2.4 release.

For 2.4 the main and only focus has been on stability. This means we wont really have any new great features in 2.4 but that we have spent a lot of time going back over the work we have already done and making it even better.

I will be preparing to travel to our US office in May ready for the release and will be there as we make the change. Its always great to be there and be part of it!

Jeremiah Owyang, a well known web strategist, writes in his blog about support communities, and how these platforms are about to change. He means that now is a time where there are a lot of opportunities to start using these communities in a way that will strengthen both the value for the users and the strength of the brand of the company that runs the community.

I think that an important thing is to see the users’ needs and create the community from those needs: “Community members first, company second”, as Owyang put it. This means that it should be easy to use and easy create content, from a user’s perspective.

By collaborating you can get ideas from other people and develop a wider knowledge about your work and possibly also increase the speed in your daily work. We are trying to see what our customers want and do things from that. Hopefully we can take advantage of the creativity you as a user of our software’s have and do something unique of it.

When you visit the download webpage for CET Designer you will now have an option where to download from. You will see a drop-down list with two alternatives: North America and Europe. Choose the one that is closest to your location. This will enhance the download speed and you will be able to get the application a lot faster.

Here's where you'll find your alternatives.

In software development one of the most difficult tasks are quality assurance (QA). The number of possible combinations of hardware and software are huge. And then we add version numbers which makes the task to escalate from hard to scary. Even if something works for one combination it does not mean that it works for the other. Wow! Something has to be done here? I am not kidding! We need to find the needle in the haystack! There are many great software developers and innovators in this world and most of them are friendly and love to do good things. I wish that 2010 deliver improved QA possibilities for our software heroes.