Some history, and the future

Following on from our main announcement, here is some more personal information about the journey we've been on and where we're going.

ocProducts: Some recent history

We haven't really stopped and talked about the transition because we've been working so very hard. In the 1 to 2 year transition between the old ocProducts business and the new one, Chris (our managing director) took a job within the digital marketing industry. Starting as a programmer, in under a year he was a senior programmer, and undertook work for some billion dollar companies including numerous supermarkets and banks. He also found inspiration in dozens of books, produced 3 fairly large projects using ocPortal, maintained ocPortal 3, organised team meetings, and built ocPortal 4.

In 2008, he returned to ocProducts full time – which involved architecting a new business model and identity, a new website, finalized a new ocPortal version (v4), and drove the ocProducts business forward with a constant stream of ocPortal projects. It's been a real rollercoaster, and we're happy to report things are going very well – our clients are all very happy, ocPortal gets great reviews, and there hasn't been a lack of work.

ocPortal: What's next?

We have huge plans for the future. The immediate goal is to get ocPortal talked about – whilst we get great reviews from everyone who tries it – only a handful of CMSs get the buzz (mainly Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal). We are working hard to get ocPortal noticed and get it the recognition it deserves. Any help here is very welcome (and thank you to those who have been helping through our ocP rocks scheme!). Conference speakers, authors, publishing companies, bloggers, CMS experts, consultants, business leaders, and so on – we intend to introduce ocPortal to all the movers and shakers, and hopefully then word will filter down to the regular webmaster.

There's an important competition for CMSs that runs every year and we intend to get included now we're Open Source – more info later, we might be asking for a little help from you.

Once uptake accelerates – then come the conferences, the books, and so on – but one step at a time .

The new support system will allow us to greatly improve our commercial service offerings, which will allow us to grow our team and ultimately deliver back to the community by releasing a new version of ocPortal (which helps us provide better websites to our clients. It's a nice little circle)

We hope you're as excited as we are about these plans. If you'd like to do your part to build this community, then please tell your friends, and consider participating in our ocP rocks program!

Wow Robbie,

That is one of the most comprehensive, behind the scenes, news items about ocPortal that I have ever seen. It gives us a greater understanding of you guys and the company you run.

I am so glad that I found you and decided to use your software. I came in when ocPortal was a pay for and I did not mind at all as it was so well polished. It has gotten so much better over the last year.

I recently submitted a support ticket for a site that I am working on for a Cat Sanctuary over here in the US. I was always impressed with the level of free support within the forums but let me tell you, the paid support is at a level that I have never seen from any company at any cost. The project was quoted to me in a very short time, when I posted that I wanted to go forward with the project I was sent some screen shots of what they had already done in the last hour "before" I had even agreed. After the agreement I think it was less than an our before I was sent a package of files with instructions on how to implement them. Within this package there were 11 files including pictures, templates, css, and png files.

I was amazed at the speed and quality of work. I highly recommend ocProducts to anyone that has a project that needs a little more than the "Out of the box" ocPortal package.

I am extremely satisfied with the results and would like to Thank Chris for an awesome job.

Let me be the first to say I wish you all, every success with you business endeavors, you so richly deserve it.

Hear hear!!

So Chris is out of his ocpruducts retirement that happened over a year ago?

More like 9 months ago .

I did not realize you were unretired sorry that I missed that.

Chris welcome back man!  OCP keep P I M P ing!

Looks like I came on board at a time of growth and new momentum.

I'm excited to be here and am finding everything about OCP to be fantastic - docs, app, people.

I have yet to try my hand at support, but I'm sure it's coming sooner rather than later.

I may actually request a quote on a UGC video site.

I'm still in the due diligence stage, but once i commit to OCP, I intend to spread the word and shout it from the roof tops.

Checking out the OCProcks campaign now.

Hi Elgg_Noob, nice to see you here .

Hey Chris the pleasure is all mine.