REJIS enabled instant messaging within our organization.  This has been one of the more exciting developments as of late because I personally find IM to be a great way to have short conversations without needing to break away from what you are doing or take your headphones off to use the phone.  E-mail is not a medium for conversations.  Too often will people include multiple items in an E-mail and only a few actually get responses.  With IM it’s hard to ignore someone asking you Can you do A, B, and C?  IM is like the person is actually standing there asking you, except that it is on your screen and they can see if you start typing.  You have to be pretty good at ignoring people in person to ignore IM.  If you turn off and the person is smart enough, they will come to your desk anyway. 

IM is not for everyone.  Some people can’t handle another channel for communication.  Personally, I could do most of my day-to-day tasks with IM, a few phone calls and in person meetings only when really necessary.  Many of the projects I work on already have few, if any, in person meetings for the technical staff at the various partners.  These are by no means small projects either.  To coordinate testing we’ll often use IM rather than E-mail or keeping conference lines open.  For me this means I have to use Google Talk on my Blackberry (because we do not allow other IM connections internally).  Most of the conversations go something like: "Hey we sent you a document but our process timed out, what happened?" 

"Let me look at it and I’ll let you know." (time lapse) "Looks like an error during an internal process, we’ll fix it and let you know."

"Ok, we’ll send another when you’re ready"

Any further details are handled in a phone call or E-mail.  In terms of simple coordination you can’t beat IM as a medium for brokering this communication.  IM is not for everyone or everything, but it’s darn handy to have.

Twitter has been another interesting medium for conversations and meeting people.  Most recently, my post about CodeRush netted DevExpress as a follower on Twitter and connected me to some of their evangelists and other CodeRush enthusiasts.  Similarly LinkedIn is proving valuable as I am making connections with some people in the justice industry that will be able to help us solve some problems on our technology transformation effort. 

Although I haven’t been on much lately, I also game on Xbox Live with one of the managers at REJIS as well as peers from other partner organizations.  I would be remiss to say that we never had a few post-mortem meetings while shooting zombies or blowing up terrorist camps.

While on the topic of conversations, not long ago I recorded an audio interview with Clint Edmonson on the challenges of applying SOA concepts.  The interview is up on the Thirsty Developer site.  Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

Lastly, REJIS needs developers.  We have openings for .NET developers and as one of the lead developers I can tell you we need good people.  REJIS is currently using .NET 3.5 SP1 including LINQ to XML, WCF, WPF and we’re using Microsoft’s Enterprise Library and Unity.  The projects we work on are mission critical apps that service a variety of purposes for criminal justice agencies.  There is no shortage of work and believe me when I say you’ll get very valuable experience with things you won’t work with at other places (yes, there are things we do that are not discussed here).  Take a look and apply on-line.  Please don’t send me your resume unless you are looking for some peer review…I don’t make the decisions :)