Archive for December, 2008

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Search on Steroids

December 31st, 2008

Our online database has many powerful features to help businesses better collect, organize and share data. Search is definitely one of our most popular features amongst customers today and even Jack Germain, a journalist with E-Commerce Times, said TrackVia’s search was “like an Internet search engine on steroids” in a recent article.

In the short video below, Matt McAdams, CTO, reveals why search is his favorite TrackVia feature.

Let us know about your favorite feature, and we will feature it in future blog posts/podcasts!

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TrackVia’s 2009 Resolutions

December 30th, 2008

Watch Chris Basham, CEO, and Matt McAdams, CTO, share their top three resolutions for TrackVia in 2009.

 

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Starbucks Shoulda Had TrackVia

December 29th, 2008

In late November Starbucks announced that an employee’s laptop was stolen containing the personal information of 97,000 employees. This was the second time in two years that Starbucks was forced to make an announcement that private information may have landed in the wrong hands. In November 2006, four Starbucks’ laptops went missing with data on 50,000 former and 10,000 current employees.

Laptops turn up missing all the time due to their tendency to “walk off” with strangers. Laptops like your skinny caramel mocha latte are becoming feature rich by the day, and unfortunately all the latest and greatest features just make them more irresistible.

My first question upon hearing this news was, “Why would Starbucks allow employees to store personal information on laptops in the first place?” You could try to justify the first breach in 2006 as a learning experience but to have it happen again within two years is alarming. I pose the following question to Starbucks, “Wouldn’t it be better to have this information stored on a secure online database?” For example, if this information was stored in a TrackVia database, Starbucks’ administrators could have set restrictions on who was able to view the secure data in the database and who was able to export the data. With automatic change notes and history, there would be no question as to who made changes to the personal data. Best of all, there would be no way for the data to hitch a ride with a laptop because it would only reside on secure servers.

We all have our favorite barista and neighborhood Starbucks and look forward to working at Starbucks with our own laptops. The difference? Using an online database solution, we can have our coffee and drink it too. You can still access the personal data you need for your work via anytime/anywhere access, however you can feel at ease knowing the information does not reside on your laptop should someone decide your laptop would look better with their coffee.

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A Few Clicks from Your Data

December 26th, 2008

It is the holiday season and everyone is relaxed and perhaps away from home and enjoying some time “off the grid.” But what happens when you get an important phone call requesting a recent presentation or you need to contact a customer to inform them that their order will be delayed.

As a so-called mobile warrior, I have put together a few tips and services that I use for surviving those times when you are away from the office but may need to check in from time to time:

1. Wi-Fi Hotspot List – If you are traveling, find out the local Wi-Fi spots before heading out.
2. Twitter/ FriendFeed – Stay connected with clients and friends using frequent updates.
3. MobileMe – Sync your calendar between multiple devices and save copies of those important documents that you may need later.
4. FlickR – Upload all photos that you may need to access later for presentations and the like.
5. GoToMyPC – connect from anywhere to your computer in the office.
6. Skype – make cheap international calls when you have Wi-Fi access.
7. And of course, TrackVia – Save all contacts, excel files and sales leads in the web-based database.

Enjoy the holiday knowing that you can work anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection.

Cheers

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The Software Designer’s Dilemma

December 24th, 2008

Most software designers try to balance power with ease of use. An new feature that enables an advanced task could unfortunately make simple tasks harder. When weighing that trade-off, we at TrackVia often ask ourselves whether leaving the feature out – going with the “less is more” philosophy – will render the advanced task impossible, or merely harder. If it’s just harder, we can probably live without the feature and its complications.

Sometimes, though, the question “Impossible, or just hard?” is not easy to answer. An example that I analyzed in gory detail recently is whether there are any conceivable database filters that are impossible to build using TrackVia’s filter builder. The answer was “not impossible, just hard.” Unfortunately, the answer was also, “for certain things a customer might want to do, it’s too hard for an ordinary user to figure out.”

So, should we add new features to TrackVia to make it easier to build very complex filters, but potentially harder to build simple filters? I don’t think so. Here’s why:

  • TrackVia was designed for non-technical users. People who dream up extremely complex filters are likely to already be using a more complicated product than TrackVia.
  • Those complex filters are possible in TrackVia, they just take more effort.
  • We offer free phone-based technical support to our customers, precisely to help them with advanced tasks like this.

And, most importantly:

  • No customer has asked for it yet.

That last statement is a recognition that designing business software in a vacuum is a very bad idea. We prefer to build basic versions of new features first, launch them, and see what feedback we get from users. Often their feedback takes us in directions we didn’t anticipate, directions that would have rendered moot the advanced work we conceived of on our own. And sometimes we find that the number of people who want an advanced feature is a tiny fraction of what we thought it would be.

A final answer, and the one I prefer, is this:

  • If we keep trying, we’ll find a better way to do it.

This is the “breaking the compromise” approach, or having our cake and eating it too. If we try hard enough, we might find a better design that’s both easy and powerful. In view filters, the better way was to build more powerful individual conditions that lessen the need for grouping conditions together. For example, instead of grouping the condition “greater than 10” and “less than 15” with an AND operation, we allow users to build the single condition “between 10 and 15.” Similar combination conditions include things like “due date is next week” and “any of the following are selected.” These beefed up individual filter criteria allow users to build their filters with less grouping of multiple criteria. The powerful stays simple.

Easy is hard, as they say, but the above thoughts illustrate how we approach these design questions. If you have comments or advice, let us know!

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A CPA’s 12 Step Program to Inventory Database Management

December 23rd, 2008

“I am a CPA”. Make that a recovering CPA. As a recovering CPA, I know how easy it can be to suffer from denial. Why change my inventory methods? However, my time at TrackVia has shed light on new ways to improve inventory management with an online database. Although I’m no longer a practicing CPA, I feel I owe it to all those tasked with year-end inventories to provide them with my “12 step program” to a successful year-end inventory.

1. Don’t let your client wait until 12/31 to create inventory lists. I know, easier said than done. No worries, it is easy to upload an excel document to create an online inventory management database in minutes!

2. Include fields in your database for book total, count total, calculated discrepancy, and warehouse location.

3. Restrict access to select fields (i.e. book total) so counters will only have access to edit and view the count total field. You don’t want to influence the count!

4. Create different views by location for all the inventory takers.

5. Print out and distribute views with item, location, and count total to the team. For teams counting in remote locations, email corresponding views to auditors straight from the database.

6. At this point, don’t let temptation take you back to where you were before. It only takes one misstep to get off the wagon!

7. Let the counting begin. Then have data entry clerks enter count totals into the online database. Better yet, have counters input count totals real-time while conducting the inventory via their laptops.

8. As count totals are input into the database, change history notes will record who made updates/when. No more claiming, “I did not count that many.”

9. Create a view that shows all items with a discrepancy amount not equal to zero. All discrepancies will automatically be calculated via the discrepancy calculated field.

10. Determine total discrepancy impact and key locations with inventory discrepancies by viewing database statistics.

11. Re-count as necessary and update records accordingly.

12. Finish your year-end audit in record time, so you too can enjoy New Years!

Admitting there is a better way is the first step. Feel free to give another CPA a call, and see how I can help get your inventory management database up and running.

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Posted in general, online database, use case

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Will SaaS Kill Microsoft?

December 22nd, 2008

Video killed the radio star, and SaaS killed Microsoft?…

SaaS is a better way to deliver software, in many ways. But installed software is better than SaaS, in some ways. So, just why is SaaS on the upswing, while Microsoft Office is on the way out?

Better features, easier implementations, great collaboration, etc. That’s the easy answer, and a lot of it is true. But I’ve also been thinking about how the simple difference in pricing models may be the biggest factor.

With installed software, you buy a “perpetual license,” meaning that you pay for it once, and then you can use it forever. Or at least, you can use the specific version you bought. (And that means that the publisher has to create new features in the next version to “bring you along,” which tends to pollute the product and UI with crazy things that you spend half your time trying to figure out how to undo. See: auto-formatting in Word).

It’s this perpetual license scheme that may prove to have been the fatal flaw of Microsoft’s dynasty, albeit one that has taken a long time to prove fatal, and that sure generated a lot of wealth along the way. But here’s what I’m thinking. Where else do you buy a (relatively expensive) product that has zero resale value the moment you pay for it?

In the car industry, you buy a car, and if you want the newest make & model you’ll have to go buy it. But, there’s a market for your old car, and you can get your equity out of it. Not so with a perpetual software license.

Contrast that to a service, which you pay for as you use it. That’s what software really is, and has been, way before the advent of the term SaaS. Using software that’s of value to your company is an expense, it’s not an asset that you buy, depreciate, and that has a salvage value. So, it just makes sense for software publishers to price and deliver their products as a service, rather than as a product/asset. As much as I like to think that it’s our great SaaS features and performance that are going to lead to our continued growth and success, perhaps it’s also that our pricing model just makes a lot more sense?…

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Top Ten Cool Things You Can Do With TrackVia Formulas

December 19th, 2008

We recently added several new types of calculated fields to TrackVia, and beefed up the built-in functions you can use in those fields’ formulas. To give an illustration of the power of these new tools, I though it would be fun to give a top ten list of Cool Things You Can Do With Formulas. Drum roll, please….

10. Calculate prices and percentages. Let’s warm up with something that’s easy to do in a spreadsheet. If I want to calculate the markup on a product in my Products database, I can create a calculated percentage field whose formula is

     (retail price – wholesale cost) / wholesale cost

Conversely, if I want to calculate the retail price based on a markup percentage, I can create a calculated currency field whose formula is

     wholesale cost * (1 + markup)

9. Calculate dates. Suppose I use TrackVia to manage a fleet of vehicles. I record the Last Maintenance Date of each vehicle, and want to set a Next Maintenance Date that’s 90 days later. I just create a calculated date field with the formula

     dateadd(last maintenance date, 90)

8. Join first name and last name. Suppose I have a First Name field and a Last Name field in my database. I’d like an automatic field called Full Name that I can use in views, merged documents, email campaigns, etc. Piece of cake – I just create a calculated short answer field whose formula uses an ampersand to join text together like this:

     first name & ” ” & last name

7. Transform data. Now we’re getting fancy. Suppose I already have a Customer Name field, but it came in from my legacy system in all caps. I want to convert the capitalization to be correct, meaning all lowercase except the first letter of each word. Piece of cake. I create a calculated short answer field called Customer Name 2 whose formula is

     proper(customer name)

Then I convert that calculated short answer field to a regular(non-calculated) short answer field. Then I get rid of the original field, and rename Customer Name 2 to plain old Customer Name. As my three-year-old would say, Fwalala! (He means, Voila!) My names just changed from JOHN DOE to John Doe. I can use a similar process to transform numbers, for example distances from miles to kilometers.

6. Auto-generate web and email links. Suppose I want a link to a Google map for each record in my database. (Yes, I know I can view all of my data on a map using TrackVia’s built-in map view – but I want a separate link for each record that opens in its own window.) I create a calculated URL field with the formula

     “maps.google.com?q=” & Street Address & “,” & Zip

Yes, it’s that easy. I can similarly auto-generate email links for people in my company using a calculated email field with a formula (for example) of

     first name & “.” & last name & “@trackvia.com”

5. Auto-select Mr. or Mrs. Cheap parlor tricks, you say? Let’s get into some actual conditional logic. Suppose my Contacts database has a drop-down called Sex with values of M and F. I can auto-generate a Title field with a formula

     if(sex = “M”, “Mr.”, “Ms.”)

That just made my TrackVia-generated invoices a bit more personalized.

4. Convert state names to abbreviations. I know what you’re thinking: “I can nest those if statements to create multi-tier logic!” Yes you can. You can also use our “map” function, which does it for you in many cases. If I have a State field in my database that contains spelled-out state names, and I want to create a calculated short answer field containing the state abbreviations, I use the formula

     map(State, “New York”, “NY”, “California”, “CA”, …)

3. Conditional permissions. Suppose I’ve mastered TrackVia’s permission features and I want to set up my Sales Leads database so that sales reps can only access leads assigned to them. But I want the rep, and thus the permissions, to be set automatically based on territory. I can create a calculated TrackVia user field with the formula

     map(Territory, “West”, “John Doe”, “South”, “Jane Deere”, …)

2. Link to many fields. Suppose I want to link my Orders database to my Products database, but I can’t decide which one field in the Products database I should link to. Product code? Product name? Both are useful, and when I’m adding an order, I’d actually like to see the price in the select-a-product pull-down too. That’s not hard. I create a calculated short answer field that combines all three:

     product code & ” – ” product name & ” ($” & price & “)”

Then I link to this calculated field from my Orders database. The choices show up like

     10029 – XL Widget ($19.95)

1. Extract parent fields. Wow, now I’m a TrackVia formula Ninja. It would be nice to have that $19.95 price in my Orders record so I can use it in a Total Amount Due calculated field. It’s easy to extract from the Product field into a calculated currency field using the snip function to grab the value between the dollar sign and the closing parentheses:

     snip(Product, “$”, “)” )

Whew. What a list, huh?

Full documentation of those tricks and many more is included in our Knowledge Baseand under the Help link inside TrackVia. If you’d like help setting up any of this in your own database, please give us a call!

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SMBs are Getting the Best Features First

December 18th, 2008

In the past, the coolest and most powerful business software would start at the enterprise level and then trickle down to the SMB market. But today, it appears that there’s a trend where the opposite is true – the SMBs are getting the benefit of the most innovative products, while enterprises are falling behind. James Powell says as much in his recent article about TrackVia’s online database in Enterprise Systems.

From the software company’s perspective, I think that it’s simply easier to build and sell a product direct to SMBs using the great new online marketing channels that are available. That’s as opposed to selling to enterprises, meaning you have to hire an expensive team of field sales guys, fund their travel and golf expenses for 9-12 months, and hope they can get meetings with the handful of executives that can actually make a decision to purchase really expensive software. And the product development process is just a lot more fun when you’re building a product that you can innovate on a dime, and can release updates quickly, without big field implementations at each client.

From the enterprise’s perspective, they have a whole set of concerns that SMBs don’t necessarily share, and that tend to stifle their ability to adopt new technologies quickly. For example, security and infrastructure. I’m not saying that SMBs don’t care about those, but they may not have to worry about SOX compliance like enterprises do. And I also think that it’s a bum rap that younger technology companies are significantly riskier to sign up with, or that they don’t know how to build a secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure. At TrackVia, at least, our uptime and application performance is way ahead of any of our competitors, including the biggest SaaS companies. (They’ll say that it’s because we don’t have as many users, and I’ll say it’s because we have a PhD in Physics who designed our architecture and app, and because we spend lots and lots of money on an outsourced data center and 24/7 professional services from sys admins, etc.).

So, if you’re an SMB, be sure to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction knowing that you’re getting access to some killer, innovative technology that enterprises aren’t using. And if you’re an enterprise, maybe it’s time to take a serious look at younger, more innovative technology companies, before those SMBs you’re scoffing at start taking your market share.

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Roll your own CRM from a database

December 17th, 2008

Click here to listen to a podcast featuring TrackVia’s CEO, Chris Basham, and CTO, Matt McAdams, discussing rolling your own CRM.

CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. I’ve seen a PR agency whose CRM was a cork board with index cards stuck on it with thumbtacks, and the cards were moved from place-to-place as they progressed through the agency’s workflow. And I’ve seen a non-profit food bank whose CRM was a set of file cabinets with hanging folders. In other words, although the modern usage of CRM has come to mean a software application that tracks sales leads, it can actually be just about any system that an organization uses to track its interactions with people.

As for the software-based CRMs that people are most familiar with, these are simply databases that have some pre-built structure on top of the database. The nice thing about an “off the shelf” CRM is that it’s relatively easy to just jump in and start using it. The downside is that, as a pre-built product, it’s not flexible to accommodate the specific ways that your company operates, and rather your company has to adapt its operations to fit into the CRM.

So, what if you could use a database to design your own CRM that’s a perfectly tailored fit to your operations, and that you’ll never outgrow? That’s what I’ve helped many of our customers do, and as a result, it’s how I’ve learned some lessons about how to “roll your own” CRM from a database. Here are 4 tips:

1. Just jump in. Don’t try to perfectly design the CRM before you start building it. The beauty of building your own is that you’ll know how to tweak it, whether in 5 minutes or 5 months.

2. Build it to accommodate both structured data (dates, statuses, contact info) and unstructured data (your “scribbled” notes about each conversation). A good CRM has to handle both, so that you can 1) know the next time you need to follow-up with a person, and 2) read the person’s history so that you know the whole story, not just the facts.

3. For structured data, err on the side of specificity. If there are any fields that have multiple parts, split each of the parts into its own database field. For example, don’t create a mailing address as a text field. Split it out so that the zip code is a field, the state is a field, etc. This will build-in a lot of power for you to search and slice & dice your database into usable pieces.

4. If you’re already using a software application as a CRM, you can bring your information into a database. It’s not always easy to find, but almost every application today has a feature to export information in .csv (comma separated values) format. So, don’t feel like you have to start completely from scratch.

Click here to listen to a podcast featuring TrackVia’s CEO, Chris Basham, and CTO, Matt McAdams, discussing rolling your own CRM. Don’t forget to subscribe to future podcasts in iTunes.

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