The Barone, Budge & Dominick (BB&D) ATC research and guidance unit has been actively supporting the SA Architect (www.saarchitect.net) and the Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVP) communities, sharing knowledge, experience and value-added artefacts, including quick reference posters, white papers and technology books such as “Best Practices for the Connoisseur”, “Interoperability for the Connoisseur” and “Software Engineers on their way to Pluto”.
To serve the local and international users, the unit has established a community server (www.drp.co.za) in the United States and a community server (www.saarchitect.net) in South Africa, both of which contain in excess of 1GB of value-added information, shared freely with the communities. Statistics on both community servers were analysed in September 2008 and have shown tremendous growth and adoption of both servers with an average of 419 posters being downloaded from www.saarchitect.net per month and 2 787 posters downloaded from www.drp.co.za per month - this excludes e-books, white papers and other artefacts.
With all artefacts included, the www.drp.co.za site is currently showing an average of 3.97GB of download traffic per month. The total number of downloads on the two servers has accumulated to 83.934GB, with the top download artefact being the “Team Foundation Server (TFS) Guidance White Paper Technology white paper”, with 1 297 downloads. All statistics quoted are as at 30 September 2008.
The following map shows that consumers are utilising the community servers from all over the world, predominantly from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Spain. Traffic from South Africa and the rest of the Middle East and Africa has declined steadily since the availability of the local www.saarchitect.net community server.
The statistics are a clear confirmation that the technology community servers and associated communities - sponsored by BB&D, Internet Solutions, Investec and Teamprise - and maintained by a number of community leads and MVPs, are delivering phenomenal value and are therefore showing constant growth of viewing and download traffic.
In addition, the statistics are a clear signal that the interoperability and academia drives, with the vision to “provide information and guidance regarding the real world information technology environments, through collaboration and interaction”, are bringing different vendor-specific environments under one roof and creating a valuable and realistic software development environment, realising the community vision of creating “one happy family”.
Share
