Ok, so it’s Abercynon, Wales not Houston, Texas. Nevertheless, at around 5:30pm yesterday, Thursday 13th September, Freewire Platform 2 launched and went live. Last minute bugs were fixed, change freezes were called and DNS changes were made. That’s it folks, this product is now live. We already have almost 10,000 handsets live on the system in Edinburgh, UWIC, Surrey, Portsmouth and Bath and this weekend we have students arriving in halls for the first time to use the system. My mobile is charged, the critical tickets have been resolved and I’m now waiting with baited breath, watching our traffic graphs to see what happens.

By no means is the work over though. There were a number of features that we’ve had to defer to version 2.1 purely because we didn’t have time to implement them – and this is one company where the development cycle is important. We even had a feature that we fixed yesterday and managed to get it working in time – but it couldn’t go in to the final delivery since we’d already stopped making improvements and were just concentrating on fixing critical issues. We’ve got other projects – we have to integrate the existing phone systems of the Universities that we’re present in; there’s the whole Cable and Wireless project which is going full steam ahead; there’s rolling out in other territories and there’s the dozens of fantastic projects that the sales guys are bringing to us that I can’t even think about right now. Of course, we’ll have the usual spate of support issues, I have no doubt, but our testing is complete and we’re live.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to writing a few articles about some of the cool and funky things we’ve been doing recently that I haven’t had time to blog about because I’ve been doing them. I’ll also be blogging about what we’ve got coming. Suffice to say, this project has me really excited – and the company I’m working for and people I’m working with makes that a safe but excited feeling – there’s things in place to make sure that above all, it works.

Anyway, enough for now, I’m off to see what’s broken this morning.

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