TrackVia Blog

Managing 50,000 Oil Exploration Permits With An Online Database — a TrackVia Case Study

Our own Matt McAdams is speaking at the Office 2.0 Conference (www.office20.com) in San Francisco this week, accompanied by Ritch Hensley, CEO of DataPush Technologies, one of our earliest customers.  Matt and Ritch are telling the story of how DataPush has been able to use TrackVia to revolutionize the way DataPush provides its services to its clients, and how TrackVia has become a key competitive advantage in DataPush’s industry.

DataPush Technologies provides information management services in the oil and gas industry. They use TrackVia to help their clients track and manage the details, workflow, and document generation and storage associated with tens of thousands of parcels of land.  (In our early days, DataPush was often our best, albeit inadvertent, “stress tester,” including mail-merges of 100,000+ records into multi-page documents.)  Matt and Ritch’s talk will demonstrate TrackVia’s key online database features and how they’ve transformed a mission-critical business process in an industry experiencing explosive growth.

Last week, as I was working through my online “to do” list that I have automatically sent to me via TrackVia, an e-mail popped up that was forwarded to me from my 13-year-old son Kaleb. He wrote:

Dear Dad,

Since you’ve been sending me so many daily thoughts, I thought I’d send you one! We all know that we’re not perfect, and we feel bad about it, but usually we don’t do a lot about it. The key to this is finding a specific problem and fixing it. So, every night, as you reflect upon your day, think of something you did wrong that day (or recently), and try never to make the mistake again. The next night, determine whether you solved the problem. If you did, move on to a new one you can fix. If not, try again the next day. If you follow this pattern every day, you will have a lot more peace in your life.

Love,
Kaleb

My first thought was, Wow, pretty heavy for a 13-year-old! But Kaleb’s a bright kid and certainly mature for his age. My second thought was, Hmmm, maybe he’s right.

So, if you’re one of the customers I’ve reached out to recently as your TrackVia account representative, please feel free to contact me with your TrackVia problems. I promise to work on them — one per day!

Last week I declared that we’d launch a new feature or improve an existing feature every week — I called it New Feature Friday. Well, this week’s feature did get launched on Friday…somewhere in the world. But the description of it had to wait until today, Saturday.

This week’s product improvement consists of some useful enhancements to database views:

• You can now publish statistics views to your website, or to a public URL. So to publish a pie chart of donations by source, for example, simply create a TrackVia view with just the “Source” column, set the view’s default format to “statistics,” and paste the “publish this view” code snippet into your webpage, as usual. Like with table-formatted reports that you publish, the pie chart will always reflect the latest, real-time data from your TrackVia database.
• You can now email statistics views, either on an ad-hoc basis using the ”email” link, or using a Distribution Schedule. Thus that pie chart, or perhaps a total of all donations received to date, can be delivered to your email inbox every morning.
• Emailed views, whether formatted as tables or statistics, now show up in the body of the email, not just as an attachment. This lets you see the key info in Outlook’s preview pane (for example) without having to open the message and then open the attachment.  
• Views and individual records that you email now include a link that takes you directly to the live version of that view or record in TrackVia. You’ll first be prompted to log in, and then redirected to the page that was sent by email. If you have a TrackVia login box on your own website, the emailed links will bring you in through your own website. The link can be removed in Distribution Schedules that go to large audiences.

None of these are earth-shattering, but they’ve been requested by enough customers that I know they’re a definite step forward. One week’s worth, at least. 

You cannot turn on the radio, TV or even walk down the street in Denver without hearing the buzz about the Democratic National Convention coming to town.

It has been a hundred years since the last convention was held in Denver. A 1908 New York Times article referred to the convention as a “show” and referenced the mounted police on horseback and lemonade/fruit vendors on the corners. If the convention was billed as a show in 1908, I can only imagine what that same reporter would call the extravaganza that is to be the 2008 DNC. From reported Secret Service agents on rooftops to the closing of I-25 for the Obama speech at Invesco Field at Mile High, Denver is not holding back.

There was an elaborate ticket distribution scheme for the 2008 Convention, and I can only hope that the organizers learned from the 1908 convention, which “had blundered in distributing tickets” resulting in a thousand empty seats on the first day of the convention. The Broncos fill the stadium for all games, and I know the interest in seats to this event was great so it would be a shame if seats were empty.

A lot has changed in Denver since the first convention, and I look forward to having our city showcased to Democrats and Republicans alike during the DNC.

Up next: telesoftware!

Dell’s recent attempt to trademark the term “cloud computing” illustrates the importance of buzzwords in the high-tech industry. Cloud computing is on a roll, with almost 400 mentions in the mainstream media this year, according to Google News – more than all of 2007, and twenty times the number in 2006. But if history is any guide, none of us will be talking about cloud computing in two years. Not because it will have failed – to the contrary, cloud computing has been going strong for more than a decade – but because we’ll have found a new word for it. 

Let’s rewind. In the mid-1990’s, the idea of delivering hosted software through the Internet was called, well, hosted software. As the dot-com crescendo built, a new term was invented: “application service provider,” or ASP. As the chart below shows, talk of ASPs reached fever pitch in the year 2000, with more than 20,000 press mentions – more than thirty times what cloud computing is on pace for in 2008!

In the Internet Dark Ages of 2003 to 2005, ASP talk quieted down. But then a brand, new, shiny term came along: “software as a service,” or SaaS. The big year for SaaS was 2006, with more than 10,000 media mentions. No dot-com bubble, but excitement nonetheless. Alas, it too became passé, with press mentions dropping by half in 2007.

The key point, though, is that many of the companies discussed in those ASP and SaaS stories, and today’s cloud computing stories, are the same. Chief among them is Salesforce.com, the ASP/SaaS/cloud-computing poster child. Same companies, same business models, same pros and cons; different buzzword.

So I expect the cloud computing discussion to reach its peak in 2009 and then plummet as sharply as ASP and SaaS did. (I plan on shouting, “The cloud is dead! Long live the cloud!”) What will take its place? Well, let me think…how about telesoftware? “Tele” as in from afar, like television and telephone. I like the ring of that: TrackVia, the world’s first teledatabase. Maybe we’ll trademark it and sell it to Dell in two years.

We’ve been on a roll lately when it comes to adding useful new features to TrackVia. So I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that we’ll announce a new feature or product improvement every week. Call it New Feature Friday. Except…it might not always be on Friday, or every week…but we’ll try!

Today’s new feature announcement is that we’ve added three new field types to TrackVia:

• Currency. These fields are numbers, but they display with a $ symbol in front of them – or € or £ or ¥ if you prefer. They use commas as a thousand separator, and two digits are displayed after the decimal (this can be changed in any given context). They’re great for representing prices, commissions, revenue, or other monetary amounts.
• Percentage. Another numeric field, but displayed with a % sign. The number of digits displayed after the decimal is determined intelligently, but can also be set manually. In formulas, 30% acts like 0.3, for example when multiplying a percentage by a price.
• Auto-counter. These fields automatically increment each time you add a record. For example, you could have a field called Customer Number that starts at 1 (or 101, or any other starting number you like) and goes up automatically as you add records. Once a record is given an auto-counter value, that value cannot be changed or reused.

Like all TrackVia fields, these three new field types will be automatically detected when you import a spreadsheet to build a new database.  They also export to Excel with appropriate formatting. And of course you can convert them into any other field type, and vice versa. So an existing Customer Number field that you’ve been incrementing by hand (sorry about that) can be converted to an auto-counter, with existing values preserved and new values automatically assigned. If TrackVia detects any potential problems with converting a field to a new type, it will warn you, as always.

 If you’re a customer and would like help using these new field types, please call our Product Support group. Everyone else, tune in next week!

Veteran TrackVia users have probably noticed that our “views” feature has evolved over the past few months, making it easier and more efficient (we hope) to organize and view your information.

Never ones to rest on our laurels, today we’re launching a few more enhancements that affect views. To introduce these new enhancements, and more importantly help you find tools that have moved to new places, we offer the following tips:

• Views have a new Format drop-down menu that allows you to change the format of a view between Table (rows and columns), Edit-all mode, Statistics, Map, Print, and Excel. Note that this menu has replaced the links that used to appear at the top of each view. So if you’re trying to figure out where the “Excel” link went, look in the new Format pull-down!
• In the Tools area of every database is a new link called Arrange Default Views. Default views are those views that appear on your database overview page. By clicking this tool, you can now quickly add, remove, and reorder (by drag-and-drop) the views you want on your database overview page. Accordingly, we’ve removed the “Show on Database Overview page?” option that used to appear when editing a view.
• You can now choose a default format for your views, so that a view always displays as a map, statistics, or in edit-all mode. This means you can have maps and pie charts appear on your database overview page.
• The option to mail merge a report has moved to the Mail Merge tool, under the Tools area of each database. To merge a document template with a view, instead of running the view first and using the “mail merge” link, you should go to the Mail Merge tool and select the view from there. Merging a single record with a template is still done using the link on the view-record page.

We think these changes make TrackVia views easier to use and more flexible. Please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

As you know, TrackVia is delivered through a browser. That means you can take advantage of browser keyboard shortcuts to get your work done more quickly. Here are some of my favorites, which I use all of the time – in TrackVia and anywhere else on the web:

Ctrl + F
Pressing the Ctrl and F keys simultaneously allows you to search for information that’s displayed on the current browser page. It’ll even search information that’s not visible on your screen, such as information that you’d have to scroll up/down or right/left to see.

F5
Pressing the F5 key will reload the current browser page. If you want to reload the page and also pull in fresh copies of stylesheets, javascript, and other page components to make sure they’re not cached, press Ctrl + F5.

Ctrl + Home, Ctrl + End
Pressing the Ctrl and Home keys simultaneously will instantly scroll your browser back to the top of the page. Pressing the Ctrl + End keys simultaneously will instantly scroll your browser to the bottom of the page.

Ctrl + W
Pressing the Ctrl and W keys simultaneously will close the current browser tab.

Right-click a link to open in a new tab, or in a new window
Whenever you see a link in your browser, you can place your cursor over the link, right-click your mouse, and select to open the link in a new browser tab, or a new browser window. This comes in handy all the time in TrackVia, for example when you want to open a record detail page for a particular record without navigating away from the view you’re looking at.

These shortcuts save me time because by using them, I avoid moving the cursor around, and therefore avoid taking my hands off the keyboard. Feel free to add your own favorite time-saving browser tips in the comments below.

Here at TrackVia, we know how important your data is to your business. So we do our utmost to maintain its integrity and ensure its safekeeping. As part of that ongoing effort, we have recently released a new premium feature that allows you to restrict access to your account from specific IP addresses. So, if you only want computers in your building to be able to login and access your data, well that’s no problem. You can limit access to any number of IP addresses or range of addresses, to accommodate temporary vendor or partner logins, or those employees that might need to work from home. Of course, we also give you the ability to remove them at any time.

We hope you find this new feature a useful addition to our existing security features. Combined with our robust permissions model and user management tools, we think it’s a great way to enhance the protection of your business data.

We recently outgrew our old offices and moved into a larger space in lower downtown Denver, in the shadow of Coors Field.  The move went smooth with only minor glitches – phones turned off prematurely and a few misplaced boxes.  We all pitched in and are now settled at our new address.

When I say we all pitched in, I mean those of us who were “volunteered” to be on the Moving Committee.  We unlucky few helped assemble desks, filing cabinets, book shelves, etc.  I must admit this is not one of my core strengths, and I hope my desk does not collapse!  While putting together the desk, I had flashbacks of assembling toys during the holidays for my younger brother.  The directions always made it seem easy, but it never was.

The recent issue of The Economist had an article, The Cult of the Dabbawala, about a group in India known for its efficiency and flawless logistics systems that use color-coded boxes to deliver meals 99.9999% on time, to the right address.  It is an amazing system that has been around since the Seventeenth Century, and it made me question the instructions I struggled with while assembling my desk.  If the pieces had been color coded would I have struggled and would I still have those unused mystery screws?  Would boxes have been temporarily lost if we had color coded them?  I doubt it.

Why do we overcomplicate things and make them harder than they should be?  At TrackVia, we do our best not to overcomplicate our online database solution.  Our database is powerful yet intuitive.  We even have color coding on our search results and Find Duplicate features – guess we learned a thing or two from the dabbawala.  The next time we move, I plan on pulling out colored Sharpies to color-code my boxes.

If you find yourself in the Denver area, please stop by and say hello. And don’t worry – everything is assembled so we won’t put you to work.