Blog Archives

SaaS Implementation. A Case Study and a Call for a Deeper Needs Analysis…

February 23, 2010

Business

accy2, acumatica, brainsell, erp

I spend a lot of time hand waving about the joys of SaaS accounting, I thought it’d be an idea to write some stories of successful implementations – kind of a case-study-lite type series. If you’re a vendor with…

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Central Desktop Rolls Out Big Changes to their UI

February 22, 2010

Design, Product reviews
Central Desktop (more on them here) is today unveiling version 2.0 of its offering that is delivering an entire new user interface for it’s customers. A quick update on the past year for Central Desktop:
- 44% year-over-year growth in revenue (gross bookings)
- Employee growth from 20 to 30 employees
- Hundreds of new Enterprise Edition customers
- Q4 2009 Enterprise Edition sales compared to Q4 2008 increased by more than 600%
- Released Microsoft Outlook plug-in
- Micro-blogging feature (Status updates syndicated to Twitter and Facebook)
- Extended global performance via Akamai’s content delivery network
With this new version, Central Desktop delivers a redesigned, intuitive user interface, and introduces several new features including an online file viewing enhancement. Online file viewing is a high profile area after box.net coined the term “cloud content management” a month or so ago.

The new features of Central Desktop 2.0 include:
- New User Interface – Central Desktop’s user interface has been completely redesigned to provide a more user-friendly experience. The new layout includes a workspace creation wizard, workspace templating, new drop down menus, customizable tabs and configurable settings.
- Online File Viewer – The expanded file preview feature supports 189 different file types including Microsoft Office files, PDFs, JPEGs, TIFs, CAD files and Adobe Photoshop files. All files are also accompanied by a thumbnail image for an at-a-glance immediate preview and the ability to comment on files without having to download them to the desktop.
- Improved Wiki Navigation – One-click wiki page creation and page navigation enhancements – Wiki pages can be rearranged by simply dragging and dropping pages within a wiki tree, giving a hierarchical structure to ordinarily flat wiki pages.
- PDF Creator – Convert, download and share any file type – including images – as a PDF with a single click directly from Central Desktop.
- Internal Blogs and Forums – A corporate blog, project blog or discussion forum can be created quickly and used to share thoughts, make announcements or capture the evolution of ideas and projects.
- Page Favorites – Frequently visited pages or files can be marked as favorites for quicker access.
- Avatars – Central Desktop 2.0 uses avatars throughout the platform to identify users and accompany their recent activity.
I’ve used a bunch of online collaboration platforms and while they all vary on the continuum from lightweight to rich, one consistent factor has been their lack of usability for shop-floor workers. With the brief play I had of Central Desktop, I’m impressed at the user experience factors that they’ve obviously considered when designing this new UI. This new focus should see them able to branch out into different, and more mainstream, markets. As CEO Isaac Garcia said when I spoke with him:

Our top priority is creating a collaboration solution that balances utility with usability to increase user adoption for our customers… Going forward, we will continue to build on our 2.0 platform to create turn-key, customizable solutions that target specific industries and customer segments.”

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T Shirt Friday #31 – Tweet4YourTee

February 19, 2010

Just for fun
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

Just as I was about to run out of t-shirts to review, Wellington startup tweet4yourtee called me up and asked me to check out their new designs.

Tweet4yourtee is an interesting example of combining technology and physical goods – their website shows some nice integrations using the Twitter API and they produce a real world, physical good that has some inherent utility.

They were generous to give me a couple to try out, so over the next week or two I’ll be showing the options they have.

First up is this non-too-subtle shirt which nicely shows off the important information – the Twitter bird and your handle.

Hot
- White T shirts are good
- Saves people being embarrased asking who I am
- 100% Cotton
- My hometown heros!
- Nice use of the Twitter API on their website
Not
- Made in Bangladesh – need I say more?
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Company.com – It’s All About Community

February 18, 2010

marketing, Small business

I’m an advocate for small and medium businesses (SMBs) – coming from a SMB background I’m all to aware of the difficulties that those at the bottom of the foodchain experience. I’ve long been involved in business advisory roles and was part of a team that set up a SMB online community a couple of years ago – looking to leverage the offline conversations that SMBs have in an online way.

So it was interesting to see that company.com recently launched. Company.com is a service that promises to “Discover ways to save money and grow your business.” It does so by aggregating together a bunch of different services that SMBs can purchase (legal, loams, collaboration, business incorporation etc etc) and bundles it up with both online guides and a forum to ask questions of the SMB community.

As I said, having been involved in setting up a similar community, albeit in an independent and not-for-profit way, I’m all too aware that key to all of this is gaining some critical mass. Company.com is apparently looking to attracts users via some “cooperative agreements” that will launch later this year. While I’m not sure what those are, it’s interesting to note that the founder of company.com. Bill Wade, formerly served as Vice Chairman of Sage Payment Solutions which is a part of Sage software – one of the “big three” in SMB accounting software.

While I have no knowledge of the route company.com is looking to take, I really believe that what they’re offering is an excellent way for a large software vendor to start to build a community around their product. Previously Sage tried to do something similar (if on a smaller scale) around their eventually-fated SageLive product. It’s also not a million miles from what Intuit could do with their Partner Platform (see disclosures here)

For now company.com is a kick-ass domain name and a nice flashy site – the months ahead will tell us whether it can truly become a service of value for SMBs.

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PBworks Finds Convergence. Ad Hoc Conference Calling

February 17, 2010

Design

PBworks has released its voice collaboration offering that allows one-click voice conferencing from within their collaboration product. We’ve written about PBworks before, but for those who need a recap, PBworks was founded in 2005 and has grown to the point where they host over one million workspaces for upwards of 85000 businesses.

PBworks have noticed what they’re calling a “grand convergence” where collaboration products, voice conferencing, telcos and others are converging in a space that sees multiple communication modalities available depending on the context of work participants are engaged in. They contend that shifting modalities (ie moving from text to voice) should not require a change of platforms. To this end PBworks is letting customers integrate voice into their collaboration workflow.

What this means in practice is that, rather than setting up a conference line in advance and asking attendees to dial in, a user can initiate an instant conference call by clicking participants names. In Users can also add new participants at any time, and each conference call is recorded and stored for later use and review. Voice Collaboration is device agnostic and can be triggered using a desk phone or mobile.

PBworks wants to distinguish itself from the traditional conference call services which it says are most useful for “appointment” collaboration. A user must set up a meeting, send out dial-in information to all interested parties, usually via email, and then wait for all parties to arrive. This overhead generally limits usage to scheduled calls.

In contrast, PBworks is trying to make voice collaboration a natural extension of its collaboration suite. When a user needs to connect with one or more others to gather valued input, he can add a colleague to an ad-hoc conference call with a single click that initiates an outbound call to the colleague’s regular phone. He can call anyone who already has a PBworks user profile, or manually dial any other telephone number of a person he wants to include.

The Voice Collaboration beta is available to all Business and Legal Edition customers, as well as Business Edition free trial users. During the beta period, Voice Collaboration will be free, with a cap of 200 call minutes for free trials. The calling area is limited to the US and Canada.

After the beta period ends, PBworks Business and Legal Edition customers will receive 200 minutes/month at no extra charge. Those who need more minutes can upgrade to Nationwide 300, which costs $5/user/month and provides 300 minutes/user/month. Heavy users can upgrade to Nationwide 2000 for $20/user/month and receive 2,000 minutes/user/month.

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SlideRocket Brings the Real Time Web to Presentations

February 17, 2010

Design
SlideRocket (more coverage here) is today making a release that sees them move one step closer to making presentations that are integrally bound with the real time web rather than historic reflections. SlideRocket is releasing a new plugin architecture that allows third party developers to create plugins that harness real time data as part of a presentation.

Initially plugins are available to run live polls, harness a live Twitter feed and present dynamic stock quotes/RSS but what is really interesting here is that by opening up the architecture, SlideRocket unharnesses their product and allows any developer to think of weird and wonderful uses for real time data within a presentation.

SlideRocket’s new plug-ins are currently being rolled out to subscribers and will be available
to all SlideRocket users by mid-March 2010. Details of the initial plugins are:
- Interactive polling: PollEverywhere, the text message polling and audience response system, developed a plug-in that adds live polling capabilities to SlideRocket. Users can create interactive presentations by asking the audience questions and including the responses in real-time within a slide.
- Live Twitter streams: SlideRocket has embedded the Twitter API into a slide template to bring backchannel discussions to the stage.
- Live stock ticker and other RSS Feeds
It’s a great idea – I’ve seen some instructions for showing a live Twitter feed within PowerPoint and they run to 10 pages or more – with this move, SlideRocket have made sharing real time data with an audience easy. Check out their demo presentation here.

Related posts:
- Web 2.0 Presentation Tools from SAP – Integrate Twitter into PowerPoint!
- Auto-Tweet Directly from PowerPoint And Other Twitter Tool Updates
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LastPass – So Good I’ll Dismiss Any Concerns

February 16, 2010

security
I spend a significant amount of time online – and do so using a myriad of online services – from accounting to banking, from email to my various blogs, from e-commerce sites to airline services – I live in a world of usernames and passwords. Like others I tend to have a few variations on a theme with passwords, an exceptionally risky, yet pragmatic response to login hell. So when I find a solution that takes care of all my password woes, remembers them for me, suggests tem for me and does a bunch of other stuff, even between different computers, I start getting pretty interested.

So it was that I recently stumbled across LastPass, a SaaS solution that promises to be “the last password you’ll ever remember”. LastPass combines a really well-designed web service with browser add-ons for the majority of browsers and also throws in support for most mobile handsets as well. Across all devices and browsers, LastPass remembers your password, give advanced features such as automatic form filling and password generation, and keeps everything secure and tidy.

If I step back and think for a minute, I could get concerned about one web service (and a free one at that) holding all the passwords to my digital life, but LassPass is just so good I’ll take some faith from their security and technology disclosure page and keep on using it. After all it’s better than using the name of my first born child for every single web site and service I use!

There’s the odd thing I’d like them to deal with, so in that spirit here is my wish list:
- Integration with chrome for automatic password generation and form-filling
- Native integration with the windows mobile web browser
- Support for multiple passwords for sites (I have three internet banking log ins)
- Support for two factor authentication devices (and preferably the ability to use one TFA device for all sites – which would require by in from third parties but still..)
- Charge a little for all versions – people feel more secure when they pay for a service!
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Subscription and Billing Services – Outsource or Roll You Own?

February 16, 2010

Design

The next paper Krish and I are writing over at Diversity Analysis is one looking at subscription and billing services. It’s an area I’ve touched on frequently here and is a relatively busy, and increasingly complex, space. I’ve talked previously about Zuora, Vindicia, Aria systems and have spent much time in the past few days talking to other vendors.

It seems there is a big divide between companies that decide to roll their own subscription/billing system, and those who go with a third party provider. As part of my research I’m reaching out to companies asking what they currently do for S&B services, what they’d do if the were starting again, and why.

So as something of a crowdsourcing experiment, I’m aggregating all the responses I get here in a post. Vendors are welcome to comment below or contact me directly to discuss. Some responses thus far:

Robert Coup – Founder of Koordinates:

we’re not straight SAAS (more marketplace) but we did. Plan is to offload a bunch of it to @TeamXero via API though. [my response was to ask why they went down that route – Ed] There wasn’t anything really suitable. In hindsight I probably would have looked harder, dealing with things like GST is a PITA across suppliers/customers/commissions/etc

Julian Stone, CEO of ProWorkflow:

Yes. Built from scratch to use DPS [a local payment gateway – ed]. Only way to get what we needed.

Ian Sweeney – CEO of billFlo:

we did our own billing data aggregation, billing (sending invoices!) but farm out collection… time to explain our needs = the time for us to build. we have expertise. our needs will change. we want to control user exp.

Jason Lemkin, CEO of Echosign:

Yes because we started 4+ years ago. We also wanted maximum flexibility in credit-card customers and ones to invoice. Not what we would do again. [to which I asked what he’d do if we were starting again today from scratch – Ed] It’s complicated b/c I don’t think any of the services handle BOTH credit card and invoicing well. Zuora is terrific but very focused on complex invoicing for subscriptions. Paypal finally added recurring subscriptions to their API but you have to build it and that doesn’t help with invoicing. They all need to integrate with BOTH Salesforce and your back-end, for us QuickBooks. The start-ups with no funding I am not sure we’d trust. To answer your question, we would use Zuora but it’s still only part of a solution that is more complex that it might at first appear.

Heather Villa, CEO of IAC-EZ:

Yes [we built our own solution] – security, dependability, wanting to minimize 3rd parties as much as possible – one less party that payment information has to pass through 🙂 (and one less party to depend on)

Feel free to join in the conversation…

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T-Shirt Friday #30 – Zendesk #3

February 12, 2010

Just for fun
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

I’ve waxed poetic about Zendesk in the past (see here) – for the simple fact that they’re a very cool company. Their product (a SaaS support, help, ticket tracking app) is very cool. Their marketing strategy is very cool. They totally understand the value of fostering community engagement, they’re from Denmark which is always a win in my books but, maybe most importantly, they’re simply nice guys.

I’ve been lucky enough to have received all three generations of Zendesk T Shirts and a month or so ago I managed to luck on to a family set of the 3rd generation tops.

Made, as with previous incarnations, by GMTee out of Hong Kong, there T Shirts are absolutely a study in building a exquisite quality shirt – beautiful fabrics, awesome graphics, lovely design touches and a focus on quality.

Hot
- Orange is a surprising, but effective choice for a shirt
- Wear a Buddha on your chest, have a stillness in your mind
- The side print (see image) of a tree is a high nice, and unsual, touch
- As with previous GMTees, the printing, cloth, detailing and finishing is excellent
Not
- Made in China – part of me wonders about the Karmic implications of the manufacture of this shirt
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Zoho Invoice 2.0 Unwraps

February 11, 2010

Product reviews, Small business

Zoho has just unveiled the next generation release of its invoice product. The two most notable changes are the inclusion of a nice business-logic dashboard, and the addition of expenses to the offering.

Generally the UI has been greatly improved – there is nice use of tabs as opposed to separate boxes for further information on a particular invoice (payments, history, emails etc)

The expenses module is what you’d expect – I was particularly please to see that it allows for billable expenses to be on-charged to customers – an eminently logical and time-saving feature that is inexplicably missing in other offerings.

I talked with Zoho evangelist, Raju Vegesna to get Zoho’s perspective on what these functional changes mean in the long term. Vegesna was quick to articulate that the product will not evolve into an Accounting app but that they did fully intend to keep adding features to this app though.

Behind the scenes Zoho has included much-needed support for multi user access – currently there are two permission levels: administrator and staff. Hopefully with time more granular permissioning will become available.

Zoho has previously been more about integration with its own internal products that about creating open APIs to let the world integrate with it – it was a strategy directly opposite to that which the The Small Business Web folks are pursuing with their call for open APIs. Interestingly in this release Zoho has opened up the application with an API – it’ll be fascinating to see what third party integrations that delivers.

In the case of their own internal apps, Vegesna advised that Zoho Invoice will integrate with other Zoho apps tightly. CRM will be the first followed by Zoho Mail. Specifically the Email History feature in Invoice 2.0 integrates at a high level, but apparently it will go deeper with Zoho Mail going forward.

Interestingly Zoho recently (and pretty much silently) rolled out CRM & Quickbooks integration it shows something of a desire to play with the outside world, and to accept that integration with external apps (especially such stalwarts as Quickbooks, is an imperative. Zoho intends to also integrate invoice with Quickbooks – and in doing so will be going head to head with the other SaaS invoicing providers.

Finally Zoho intends to offer its invoice product to Google Apps users moving forward in a similar way to how they offer Projects, CRM & Meeting for Google apps.

All in all this iteration of Zoho invoice is a far more intuitive one, the addition of expenses really rounds out the product and makes it a viable option for freelancers and small service and product businesses.

(Disclosure – CloudAve is solely sponsored by Zoho, however I cover all accounting applications, have previously reviewed Zoho Invoice 1.0 and as such need to update my information. Suffice it to say this is my own opinion untainted by any commercial bias.

On another note, we’ve been planning to publish this at 6am PST, the planned release time. But now that the news is out, there’s no point in holding back. Oh, the fun of embargoes)

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