USA 5: Working for Valo Intranet - and what've I been up to last few months

This post was most recently updated on October 4th, 2022.

3 min read.

I haven’t actually written that much about my daily work on this blog. I’m currently most involved with Blue Meteorite’s North America team and specialized in partner acquisition and support. Most of my time is spent either onboarding new partners or supporting the old ones in their Valo Intranet deployments. And boy, is that not a lot of fun to do! Never before have I been able to work with so many talented people from so many different organizations, and that’s been both challenging and rewarding.

I actually wrote a few words about it on Valo Intranet’s website… And thought I’d republish the post on this blog, as it’s related to a lot of posts here, too.

Valo Intranet is currently present on all major continents through our awesome partners. We are humbled to have so many amazing companies joining us on our journey to bring Valo to the people of all nations – and we are extremely excited about our progress together so far!

Expanding the business internationally has been an interesting journey for us, and I’m sure a lot of people are amazed how a relatively small and agile company like Blue Meteorite, based in remote Finland, can support our partners’ Valo deployments on such a wide scale of timezones. At times, we are even amazed ourselves, so I think it’s just fair to shed some light on the Valo Support function operating worldwide, and the amazing people behind it!

Valo Intranet Support Team – First line and much more!

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The core Valo development team is based in Finland, but luckily documentation and software development work are largely not tied to any certain times, so the core team can work independently of deployments happening around the world. Hence, it’s usually up to the support team to help our partners no matter what their timezone might be.

The support team consists both of people with highly technical backgrounds (technical consultants and an architect) and people with more human skill sets (consultants or product specialists). This enables the team to solve most issues ranging from technical problems in the customer’s environment, through incompatibilities or bugs within the product, all the way to training, styling, configuration or simply licensing or other business-related things. If the support team can’t solve the issue themselves, the core development team and Valo Business Owner(s) are just a quick escalation away – and they also participate actively in solving any issue our partner might have if need be.

To handle support of more tricky time zones (which largely means everything outside Europe for us), we have both recruited new people abroad and sent our team members for temporary positions wherever they are needed.

Team composition

The Support Team for Valo Intranet currently operates in English, German, Spanish, Norwegian, French, and Finnish. Our main language, and the one that guarantees the fastest responses, is English – the other ones might experience slight delays, as the persons speaking certain languages may need to sleep sometimes. We don’t all speak 6 languages, yet.

Our team offers support through our Partner Helpdesk, Partner Extranet chat, and in special cases also through on-site help or web conferencing. We are thrilled to be soon launching Partner Extranet Discussion Forums, too!

A ticket submitted to our Partner Support can result, for example, in (1) updated documentation, (2) a bug fix to the product, (3) a workaround and KB article to that particular case, or (4) instructions or tips on how to solve the issue, if it’s not in Valo, but rather outside it.

Future developments

Lately, we’ve been challenged by some of our partners developing custom solutions on top of what we’ve been creating – a case that we are really glad to see. We are committed to further developing Valo Intranet to be even more extensible, and compatible with whatever customized solutions our partners want to build on top of it – and still keep the intranet fresh and evergreen for the end-users by supplying our product upgrades on schedule.

So, on behalf of our whole Support Team, I’d like to say this to our current and future partners: You’re in good hands!

Originally posted on https://www.valointranet.com/blog/partners/how-do-we-support-our-expanding-valo-partner-network/ (slightly adapted).

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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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