Get to know your Nstein Customer Care: Simon Deshaies

Featuring: Simon Deshaies, Product Specialist – DAM

As a Product Specialist, Simon is the go-to guy for any customer’s DAM issue. Simon’s official tasks include to respond to customer support queries (level 2), reproduce & document bugs, produce FAQs, knowledge base articles and documentation, install & configure Nstein Products (internal delivery & troubleshooting), upgrade & update Nstein products, program support patches, develop support tools & utilities, maintain product demo site as well as perform product training. Simon’s versatility and thirst for knowledge also make him a key resource for special projects. Simon has become an important part of the DAM team since his arrival in April 08 due to his customer focus and problem-resolution skills.

Simon is currently working on a project for a confidential client in the life sciences industry that involves TME, GIST and C# technologies. It is a very exciting project that offers many challenges from a technology and mission-critical point of view. Without giving away the punch here, the main purpose of this project is that TME and GIST work together to enrich and translate medical newsfeed. We all know Nstein’s TME rather well (if not, lot’s of info is available on the Wiki!). Let me just describe Nstein’s GIST in a few words: GIST is a translation engine aggregator that offers a common API to the programming languages. So TME+GIST= really cool.

To know Simon better, you may buy him a few beers. He would then get very talkative. OR you may read his last blog in which he was advocating for Salvator Ivon’s SVN Best Practices. SVN is a code revision system that is a crucial part of software development and contributes to its success. One of the main points of the Best Practices presented in the blog is not to use SVN as file system or FTP but use it as a revision system, which is the initial point of SVN.

What Simon is excited about from a technology standpoint at the moment are the ASP.net MVC framework and Microsoft’s entity framework. In Simon’s words: “ASP.net MVC framework is used to separate the concerns of a web applications, and runs on Microsoft.net (the best techno in the world) without being a blue screen engine. The entity framework, of course also by Microsoft, is a development booster that allows considerable time saving. It is a new technology and even in this stage, it is pretty solid and cuts down on development time.” What Simon is excited about at Nstein is the people he gets to work with both inside and outside the Company and how their requests or points of view make him explore new technologies.