Rogers Hi-Speed Internet
As a contractor I landed a some work with Rogers Cable that ended up becomeing a full time, permanant position as the Sr. Programmer/Analyst for Customer Operations and Rogers Hi-Speed Internet. The @Home network owned by eXcite filed Chapter 11, MSOs (Multiple Service Operators) and ISPs (Internet Service Providers) needed to decide if they would take on offering their own Internet services or find another company like eXcite to leverage. Rogers opted to take their (at the time) experimental Internet over coax and roll their own offering.
Charlie was a former Networking student from CDI who reached out on IRC to see if I was interested and asked if I could demo how to modify Windows Registry settings over the Internet. So I whipped up a simple prototype that changed the registered owner and product key for Windows 98 systems and went in to demo it. This landed me a short, four week contract but at a good price.
What they needed, was to transition things like email settings, addresses, network configuration, and a series of other settings on subscribers systems with the lowest amount of friction. ActixeX (formerly OLE) was their best option with a subscriber base of close to .5 million and about 96% Windows systems. The tool I created was code-named ACT (Automatic Conversion Tool) we focused on Outlook Express (the most common email client of the day), and Internet Explorer.
Big Companies are netourious for having internal politics that cause challenges for themselves and this was a perfect example, once the tool was built and tested and I was paid and finished the contract (on time and budget), it was squashed internally by the IT department and I was brough back in for a longer contract to split up the ACT into 12 seperate and single responsibility tools (Automatic Conversion Tools), and again paid well.
During round two, the VP of Customer Ops (Vic) happened to pop into the lab and ask how difficult it would be to include a tool for Netscape Mail, and alternate to Outlook Express that had about 2% of the subscriber base. I told him I would look into it. The next morning I handed the tools for netscape over to QA for testing and let him know I had done it. Vic appreciated that he could have a conversation and get traction and decided that it was in his best interest to build a department around me to handle the customer facing software and behave as a combined developent and operations department. (Pre DevOps folks).
It took a bit of negioation but I became the first employee at Rogers with 'one day a week remote' in my employee contract. We put together a small team, including Charlie, Matt and Kwame (and Later added Jeff when Matt left for EA) and built a bunch of cool and fun tech, BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) were common at this time and naturally, ISPs provided a 'Client CD' with drivers, manuals, and tools. We were responsible for all of the client facing software. SHS (see the SHS post), an automatic updater and a browser toolbar were the main bits, but we experimented a lot and embraced better ways of working that would eventually evolve into agility.
Following the successful releaseof Client CD 1.0 and the immediate reduction of inboound call volume thanks to SHS, I was inagurated into the Rogers Vice Presidents Club. This was a unique award only given to about 35 employees to-date and is reserved for employees that go well above and beyond for the good of Rogers.
I left Rogers for v.1 Labs