The new Master Gardener Volunteer Management System is complete and has been launched into beta testing. We budgeted a month to give the system a total facelift and add dozens of features, and give or take a few days, we met that goal.
The most difficult part of programming at ANR CS is also the most vital part of WAT (*rimshot*) we do. Bryon, Karl and I actually support the systems we build.
For instance, I might be waist-deep in complex code, trying to figure out how to create recurring events in the new VMS calendar, and the phone will ring. The caller might be a new employee at a county office who needs help adding images to a their Web site.
The caller could just as easily be a regional administrator having trouble with the Grant Tracking System, a professor from Arizona trying to log into Collaborative Tools, or a 4-H volunteer having issues with a survey. Very few of the calls we receive are actually problems with the systems we've built.
The mental break these phone calls create distracts from any programmatic endeavor, but it is also WAT (*groan*) sets our little group apart. Very few organizations send client questions directly to the programmers of the systems.
At some point, I imagine that the continued growth of our family of web systems will make this type of support less feasible, or we will need to add additional programmers.