… At home
The past year has been a significant one for Project Portfolio Office (PPO), with the common theme across the board being expansion. In the last 12 months we have almost doubled our team, adding new staff members to our marketing, sales, delivery, support and development areas. These new faces have brought much required capacity, fresh thinking and energy to our team. In July, we also moved into our new custom designed offices (a project that had already begun in early 2012) allowing us much more room for our growing team. We’ve received positive feedback from all of our guests, with so many saying that they are the best offices they have ever seen! If you haven’t yet been able to visit us, please join us for a cup of coffee. Otherwise, you can visit our Life at PPO blog to meet us, see our new offices and watch how we play.

… In our community
During this year, we supported a number of worthy causes. Highlights included:

• Playing Easter Bunny for the Phehella Day and Night Care Centre, a safe house that takes care of AIDS orphans and abandoned, neglected and abused children;
• Donating 77 fruit trees for the children of Lungisisa Indlela Village (LIV), a home for vulnerable and parentless children;
• Supporting the 67 minutes for Mandela and ReadabookSA campaigns by donating and reading books to children at the Phehella Day and Night Care Centre;
• Supporting national slipper day and casual day; and lastly
• Hosting and funding a party on World Aids Day for the children of the Amadea Safe House, a place of safety for abandoned, neglected, abused, disabled and HIV affected / infected children.

Read the full details and see photos from our Giving Back campaigns on our blog.

… Around the globe
2013 will be proudly remembered for our expansion into numerous new markets. Global implementations for SABMiller, PCCW, UTi and other organisations have brought us new users in countries such as China, Hong Kong, Poland, Spain, Hungary, Belgium, United States, Columbia, Peru and Ecuador, to name a few. We’ve also been working hard at growing our partner network and, in 2014, can look forward to expanding our partner network into Australia, the Middle East, Ireland and numerous African countries. Expect more news and exciting stories from our London based office in 2014 on our blog’s company news section.

… And in the cloud
It has been an exciting year for PPO in terms of our underlying infrastructure and architecture. Although we were an early adopter when it comes to utilising cloud technologies, 2013 saw us migrate our primary production servers to Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud infrastructure provider in the world. This has had a number of benefits, including improved reliability, better performance, faster fail-over in the event of disasters, as well as improved security. For 2014, there are many additional improvements planned which will further boost availability and performance, as well as a number of enhancements, including the official release of our single sign-on solution based on the SAML standard. This will allow clients to integrate PPO with their Active Directory or other federated identification systems. We’ll announce these as they are deployed under the product news category of our blog.

The Project Portfolio Office directors would like to thank the staff, partners, suppliers and, most importantly you, our clients and users, for the great year we’ve had and look forward to 2014 for more exciting changes.