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.
Archive for July, 2008
Taking security to the next level
July 25th, 2008Learning from the Dabbawala
July 24th, 2008
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.
TrackVia Has a New Office!
July 23rd, 2008
TrackVia’s headquarters were relocated last week to the lower downtown Denver (LoDo) area. After bursting at the seams in Golden, we were looking for a new office that would accommodate our present and future growth.
The search was painless. We found a fantastic loft space in one of Denver’s historic brick buildings, built in 1909. It’s situated one block from Union Station and just a few blocks from Coors Field. The hustle and bustle of being in the city, the new places to eat lunch and grab a beer after work, and of course the proximity to our NL Champion Rockies (well…last year) has been awesome.
How to lay out the office environment was more of a challenge. Some departments, like those who write code and get off task at the drop of a pin (we won’t mention any names), lobbied for closed offices. Others, like those in sales and support, were hoping to increase teamwork and knowledge sharing with more open space and visual lines of sight between colleagues. We comprised, setting up closed offices for some and defined-yet-proximate work spaces for others. It’s only been a week, but so far, so good!
If you’re a customer or a partner and you’re in the neighborhood, please come visit! We’re at 1732 Wazee Street in Denver, Suite 202.
Where is Your Data? In Your Hand.
July 18th, 2008When using software as a service, do you ever wonder where your data actually is? Where do the clouds in “cloud computing” reside? Not having something tangible to hold in one’s hand, something that contains one’s data, might make potential SaaS customers restless.
Therefore, we’re happy to announce a new feature in TrackVia: the ability to request a CD-ROM or DVD with all of your TrackVia data. These “account archives” include all databases, records, images, files, attachments, change history and even notes from your entire TrackVia account. It’s all organized clearly in folders and zipped up into one master backup file. For a small processing charge, we’ll assemble your account archive, burn it to a CD-ROM or DVD, and ship it to you via FedEx, UPS, or regular mail. You can receive an account archive every week, every month, or simply any time you feel a need to hold your data in your hand.
This new account archive feature complements the existing ways to get your data out of Trackvia, such as Excel exports and automatic report (or view) distribution schedules. Those features can be used any time without charge, of course.
At TrackVia, we know that sometimes it’s nice to have something tangible to hold on to – including your data.
Mastering the Art of Customer Service
July 11th, 2008This week a key member of our customer support team took a well-deserved vacation. During his absence, I and other team members at TrackVia filled in answering support inquiries. Reflecting back on the week, I realized the importance of delivering great customer service.
I started to think of the companies I feel deliver great customer service and two came to mind: REI and Home Depot. Although the environments of the two stores differ, they do have one common thread which is their employees working the floor. From the competitive biker who sells mountain bikes in his spare time to the do-it-yourselfer who recently renovated his basement, these employees know and live the products they sell. If you have a question, they either have an answer or will find an answer. This dedication to customer service has created a loyal customer in me, and I not only shop at but refer friends to these stores. These are just two examples, in part because it is hard to find a store or product whose team truly believes in the products that pay the bills.
At TrackVia, one of our core pillars is a dedication to customer service. All members of the TrackVia team, from admin to sales, are expected to know our online database solution and be ready to answer the phone. Since day one, TrackVia has been committed to mastering the art of customer service, and as we grow this is still one of the key traits we look for in prospective employees. ALL of us look forward to your inquiries.
On work…
July 9th, 2008
Around here it takes thick skin to be an MBA. I won’t name any names, but certain departments at TrackVia tend to make comments about how MBAs spend the day sitting at a desk, moving papers from one stack to another – and consider that work. Sometimes these people even go so far as to simulate this kind of “work” at meetings, just to get a laugh. So, to the product development team, I’ll just have to say that I resemble that comment.
The other day we had a team lunch, and we all got to talking about the worst teenage job we ever had. It turns out that our team has a much more diverse background than I had ever imagined, and I’ll leave it at that. But the discussion did produce some pithy comments about what constitutes real work. I know a timeless one from my military days – whenever an enlisted guy is asked whether he’s an officer, the standard reply is “no, I’m not an officer, I work for a living.” And one of the better ones I heard was from one of our employees’ former boss, who said that “the only real work is getting someone else to open his wallet and hand you money.”
So, fortunately for our customers, our software developers consider real work to be writing more code each day to make our product better. They like to show tangible results that they can hang their hat on, and feel like they got some work done. As for me, I need to finish up, print this, and move it into a stack of papers.
Google Said It Best – In 1999
July 8th, 2008The first time I used Google was in 1999 or 2000. I had heard about the quirky new search engine whose home page contained not much more than a text box and a submit button. I was immediately struck by the contrast with Yahoo!, whose home page had (and still has) hundreds of links to choose from.
When my first search came back almost instantly, I thought, “Cool, they must be showing pre-generated results for the most common queries.” I began searching on increasingly obscure terms, trying to find out how deep those pre-generated results were. When I got to “purple kangaroo suitcase” I realized the results weren’t pre-generated at all – Google was just that fast. I was agog.
I dug around on their website and found a short description of their principles. Two in particular explained what I’d witnessed: Google’s reverence for simplicity and speed. The principles are still there today, and are still a great articulation of two crucial principles of web-based software design. I’m posting them here, where I hope they’ll serve as a frequent reality check against what we do at TrackVia.
Every millisecond counts.
Nothing is more valuable than people’s time. Google pages load quickly, thanks to slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions are eliminated. Google products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Tasks are streamlined.
Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn’t sacrifice without good reason.
Simplicity is powerful.
Simplicity fuels many elements of good design, including ease of use, speed, visual appeal, and accessibility. But simplicity starts with the design of a product’s fundamental functions. Google doesn’t set out to create feature-rich products; our best designs include only the features that people need to accomplish their goals. Ideally, even products that require large feature sets and complex visual designs appear to be simple as well as powerful.
Google teams think twice before sacrificing simplicity in pursuit of a less important feature. Our hope is to evolve products in new directions instead of just adding more features.
World’s Worst User Interface: My Thermostat
July 2nd, 2008Part of my job is to try to make powerful software simple. So I tend to notice good and bad user interface designs when I come across them in everyday life. I recently realized that I live with a product whose usability was ruined by an advanced feature: the thermostat in my home.
My family’s one digital thermostat controls the heating and air conditioning for the whole house. It sits in a room with lots of windows, which therefore gets cold faster on cold days, and hot faster on hot days, than the rest of the house. The thermostat keeps that room at a constant temperature, say 72 degrees. That means the rest of the house is hotter than 72 degrees on cold days, and colder than 72 degrees on hot days.
So when the weather changes dramatically from day to day, as it is wont to do in Colorado, I just adjust the thermostat, right? No, not unless I have a lot of free time on my hands. The reason is the thermostat’s supposedly advanced feature of time-based programming. Instead of maintaining a single fixed temperature, it remembers different target temperatures for different days and times. The goal, I assume, is to lower my energy bills by turning down the A/C or heat when I’m at work or asleep, but have the temperature back where I like it when I return or wake up. Great idea. The problem is there are 12 different independently adjustable target temperatures: weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, each with four time periods during the day. And it takes 3 button pushes to change the temperature in one of those periods by one degree. So to change all of them from 72 degrees to 71 degrees takes thirty-six button pushes. Thirty-six! Imagine having to click your mouse thirty-six times to change a preference in Internet Explorer.
There is a manual override, of course, but it only lasts until the end of the current time period. So if I lower the temperature by 1 degree manually, it will revert back in a few hours, which is more than annoying. Rather than pushing 36 buttons every time the weather changes, I end up just pushing one button every 6 hours. Every day. I am a slave to my thermostat because I’m picky about my home’s temperature and I’m too stubborn to push thirty-six buttons to change the temp by one degree. I wake up hot or cold in the middle of the night and have to go back downstairs to push another button. I then say hurtful things to the thermostat using graphic language.
Because this advanced feature doesn’t come with a switch that lets me turn it off, my thermostat is a million times more frustrating to use than the simple analog turn-the-dial ones we all grew up with. I can’t imagine anyone actually tried living with this product before deciding to mass produce it. It’s a classic example of engineers trying to be clever and completely ruining a product.
