Unixapp

We would like to start this update by paying our respects to a long-time friend and colleague – Unixapp. The oldest work horse in our stables, it passed away in silence on 17 April 2024.

Here are, with great respect, the last words of our beloved friend:

Unixapp started its life in or around 2003, the details are lost to time. It was brought into existence to consolidate and replace many individual department servers, serving as a central application server for our then Unix-based in-house applications.

It started out as a physical server, but was later converted to a VM, and it has the questionable distinction of having been run in production on every single iteration of our VMware ESX environment since around 2008.

RIP Unixapp…

VMware Horizon

Over the last few months, a lot of effort has been put into the Horizon environment, to prepare the latest version of Windows (Server 2022) with Office 365 and a whole slew of other major improvements. We are reaching the finish line, but it was not without bumps in the road.

As we will solve the last major issue soon, testing has begun in the last weeks of April, and will continue into May. Once testing has been completed, we will onboard users into the environment and treat this as a production environment.

Azerbaijan IT Onboarding

As recently announced, Steinweg now has two offices in Azerbaijan. In recent months, our team in Singapore has been working together with our colleagues in Turkey to onboarding both offices by implementing our standard IT infrastructure, including replacing the network hardware, deploying our suite of security software, and setting up centrally managed user and email accounts.

Azure Site Recovery

In recent months we have been testing and implementing DR capabilities on our Azure IaaS regions. The team in Singapore, with assistance from Rotterdam and our vendor SoftwareOne, has nearly finished the job and is currently applying the changes to the Middle East region, which hosts production VMs for our Oman office.

Once completed later this month, we can finally offer state-of-the art DR capabilities on all of our Azure VMs worldwide. That also means we will begin earnestly transitioning on-premises VM workloads to Azure Asia and Europe.

Steinweg Stevedoring Portal: Awarded with “Outsystems Quality App”

Outsystems has a program to improve the quality of the apps that are built and monitor the Outsystems partners’ quality of delivery. Part of the program is that Outsystems partners can send in apps that are built. Outsystems will assess those apps. Our IT partner in Portugal, Noesis has sent in the Stevedoring Portal for the “Quality App” badge.
Before this badge is awarded, the application is audited. Then, the app is assessed on its Architecture and UI interface, among other things. 

After this rigorous audit and assessment, Outsystems has concluded that the Stevedoring Portal has earned the “Quality App” badge. The architecture is almost perfect; there are only some improvement suggestions for the UX. We will look at these recommendations in the near future.

Hereby, we would like to congratulate the entire team that worked on the Stevedoring Portal on the result!