After the coldest and most miserable start to summer in recent memory; the gods smiled on the Friday of the Gruden Christmas Party with a nice warm sunny day to put everyone in a festive mood for a great day ahead.
It was “keyboards down” at midday as the party began with the first order of the day being the decorations.
In keeping with our successful Adobe event theme the office was divided into 6 Pods with each section responsible for decorating its own part of the floor. Prizes were up for grabs and the teams put in a great effort with themes ranging from a full on Snowy Christmas Scene complete with snow ballooons and snowmen, to a Bad Santa stall, ”The Vault” where all the money was locked away, Aussie Christmas with remote control floating shark, Traditional Christmas and from the sales team – “The Stolen Christmas” or should we say “Borrowed Christmas” in which they “borrowed” the Christmas tree from the lobby downstairs and asked each of the floors on the way up to help out with the decorations.
The competition was fierce and Brent’s team took out the gong for their impressive sleigh scene and won a lovely Christmas hamper for their efforts.
It was then into the main boardroom for Kris Kringles with the usual funny gifts and Brent hosting which is always a laugh. Stephen was asked to play Santa to hand out the gifts however he politely declined. (wise move with Brent hosting)
Then it was time to move on to the serious stuff at our ready made cocktail arena.
Mondo Bartenders put on a fine exhibition of cocktail mixing and then it was up to each team to discuss and create their own cocktail with prizes up for grabs again.
After some notable successes and some miserable failures Brent’s team came up with the “OH YES” and took top honours yet AGAIN !!
After enjoying quite a few of their own and other teams cocktail creations it was time for everyone to move onto Strike Bowling Alley in Darling Harbour where a great night was had knocking down some pins and singing Karaoke — when anyone could get the mic off Todd 
The rest as they say is history; partly because no one can remember past Strike and partly because certain things should remain censored in this family friendly blog space.
Hope you all had a fabulous Christmas party and all the best in the New Year.
Team Gruden.
A little goes a long way – An Amway solution that impressed
Here at Gruden it’s not all about making the biggest and best sites and applications from the ground up. It’s the little things we can do to existing systems that can make all the difference…
Amway approached us to create an offline order capturing system in anticipation of a 4 day Oracle outage.
As Amway does all of its business online, it was vital to them that they keep their shops open during this period and that the end users experienced a seamless UX when ordering their products. After initial meetings it was decided to have our expert analysts to work on the project for a two and a half week engagement, in which they created a “disconnected” HTML/ASP.Net MVC/JSONP order capturing and reviewing screen based on the original form in Oracle.
The focus of our efforts was to provide some great BA / UX functionality to augment their systems enabling customers to order as normal with the minimum of fuss.
This rapidly paced innovation helped Amway to expedite the creation of a middle tier service layer to connect the offline capture system to the Oracle DB. This middle tier layer is now called eOrders as opposed to the Offline Order System and along with its original intention serves to be an important backstop in the case of any future unexpected outages or emergencies.
As fate would have it, an executive from Amway’s head office in the US was visiting Australia. Upon being shown the Australian eOrders/Oracle system he said, “You’ve already created our next generation ordering system!”. The executive was both shocked and visibly impressed to see that so much could be done in so little time with so little money.
The underlying point is that you don’t need a big budget to make a big impression.
With forward thinking, clear communication, understanding and innovation a little truly does go a long way.