Myki website developers (partially) fess-up

David Heath
Wednesday, 20 January 2010 11:59

Your IT - Home IT

Although creating the main informational pages, the developers of the Myki website assert they had no part in the development of the card processing sub-site.

Recently, iTWire exposed the development environment of the Myki website to be CommunityManager.NET 2008 from Sydney-based software development house Elcom Technology Pty Ltd.  This information may also be gleaned by perusing the source of many of the site's pages.

iTWire approached Elcom in an attempt to determine their involvement in the difficulties being experienced by many users on the site.

This is Elcom's response, from General Manager, Ryan Bloch:

"Elcom implemented the front-end information portal website for Myki (www.myki.com.au) on our Web Content Management System, CommunityManager.NET, which includes information about Myki, FAQs and other general information.  Elcom was not responsible for the development or management of the Mymyki.com.au system which handles registrations, purchases and top ups.  The performance problems mentioned in the article have occurred within mymyki.com.au, not on CommunityManager.NET. CommunityManager.NET is used by many organisations and none of the problems that have been mentioned in relation to the Myki site are related to Elcom's software."

In other words, Elcom happily claims the credit for all the "informational" components of the site, but had no part in developing those pages which are required to actively communicate with the underlying smartcard management systems.  Users will know when they have moved to the card management site - there is a warning that the next page will open in a pop-up window, there is a different blue banner at the top of the page and the web address changes (as Bloch states) from www.myki.com.au to www.mymyki.com.au.

It would be a reasonable assumption that, with the very necessary tight integration between the user management pages and the underlying smartcard management software, the same group who build the smartcard management software would also have been responsible for the user management pages, but this has not been confirmed.  iTWire was not able to investigate the site further as it was down for maintenance at the time of writing and appeared to have been for some hours today.