Hello all, its me Hazlan the odd duck and ugly duckling at Azrul.com. The odd business developer living in a software developer's world, having joined the company in November of last year.

Well, its now January 2008 and everyone at Azrul.com is buzzing away as busy as a hive of worker bees working to usher in Azrul.com into another brand new year, with new resolutions, high hopes and great expectations.

For the development team, the priority task at hand is probably getting our components fully Joomla 1.5 compatible. We have got Jom Comment to run on Joomla 1.5 RC4 but there are still some wrinkles to iron out. My Blog and Nice Talk is next on the list. Though this process will take time as we think it best to wait until Joomla 1.5 itself is stable.

As usual Mark is standing by to squash all bugs and soothe the savage Joomla beast with the clickity-clack of his keyboard and the melodic lines of his codes, coaxing our components ever closer to 1.5 compatibility.

We will also be looking at rolling out several new products to the Joomla community this new year. While actual details of the new component roll outs are still hush hush and confidential, I am allowed to say that we may be seeing a better way to put up forms and job listings on Joomla soon. Building a better mouse trap so to speak.

Newcomer Eddy Yanto is currently in the thick of the action, as the newest developer at Azrul.com. The first one of many more that we will be recruiting all through the year. Part and parcel of our planned expansion. As Wil Schroter is fond of saying ,"Go Big or Go Home". We have big plans for 2008! Though we do plan to still keep things cozy. Where are we heading? Well let's just say into another blue ocean.

This is what I will be spending most of my time on this first quarter, weeding out the wheat from the chaffs, screening applicants and looking for those few, those happy few, those band of developers that eat, sleep, drink and excrete verified codes. If you have what it takes to be the best or ARE the best do drop me your resume and a note on why we should hire you at hazlan@azrul.com.

Azrul has got himself a new toy this year. After the iphone from last year, Azrul is now all crazy about VPS and virtualization. He has cobbled together a web server and is experimenting with XEN VPS like some Dr. Frankenstein and his stitched up corpse. When he is not spearheading the development team's coding forays he can be found by the side of his newest toy.{mospagebreak}

Much to the chagrin of Meriza, who nevertheless is keeping busy with our many planned community and public relations activities. We are also looking at expanding our market outreach this year. So if there are any interested potential affiliates and partners, do give us a buzz. We would love to hear from you. We are looking for affiliates to market our products as well as partnerships with template producers, 3rd party components developers as well as hosting providers. Interested parties can contact me.

Speaking of community activities, we will be supporting the upcoming Joomla Day Melbourne 2008 where limited FREE COPIES of our standard edition components will be up for grabs. If you are organizing a Joomla Day do let me know and we will see what we can do to support and celebrate your Joomla day with you.

Well that is all thats up with 2008 for now. I hope this will be a good year for us here at Azrul.com as well as for all our friends, affiliates, partners and customers out there. Till later, I bid all a good day and a spectacular year ahead!