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A Multi-Media Database

January 14th, 2009

Those fortunate enough to have attended CES, MacWorld, and the Affiliate Summit have done a great job sharing their experience with those less fortunate (like myself) who were unable to attend. Luckily for me, many of the attendees were sharing their experience via tagged tweets, videos, podcasts and FlickR photos, so in my own way, I was still able to participate as a virtual attendee.

Technology has made it easy to share photos and videos instantaneously with services like FlickR (over 100,000 search results on CES alone) and YouTube (over 200,000 search results on CES). Now that you are coming down from your technology buzz is a good time to ask yourself, how do you track all of the content you created or received outside of the event? Of course we all have our accounts with iTunes, YouTube, FlickR as well as numerous independent sites which are great for capturing traffic that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. But how are you storing those files today? Probably not on your hard drive, we all know what happens when you stockpile video. What if you could organize all of your photos, podcasts and videos in one centralized place?

To make things easier, I’d recommend uploading all your photos, podcasts and videos in a centralized online database that has flexible field types to handle images and video not to mention a powerful search feature making it easier to find that that one photo or video.  Make sure the online database you select has ample storage for your media library.  And to go even a step further, your databases can be categorized based on event or activity.

How are you keeping track of your growing multi-media library, today and is it working? If not, give me a call at 1.800.673.3302, and I will help get you started.

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Posted in features, online database

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The Email-Enabled Database

January 2nd, 2009

I read with interest the recent announcement that Yahoo! is opening up its email service to third-party software. That’s probably good news for programmers who want to build email-enabled applications, but what about ordinary business users? Since email is a staple of communications in the business world – now totaling 200 billion messages per day, according to Cisco – wouldn’t it be nice if you could integrate email with your business database without hiring a programmer? 

With TrackVia, you can. We’ve always had good outbound email integration – for example, email campaigns, and emailed reports, calendars, and statistics that are delivered on demand or via automated distribution schedules. But now, we’ve launched some neat improvements to our integration with inbound emails. By inbound email integration, I mean having your TrackVia database check an email address and pull copies of received messages into the database.

The best of these upgrades is that TrackVia can now be set either to create a new database record for each email received, or to intelligently find a match with an existing database record and update it.  When a match is found, TrackVia can automatically update a field in the matching record.  For example, if a previous job applicant emails an updated resume to your HR department at careers@acmeinc.com, TrackVia can automatically add the new resume to the applicant’s database record, and change a status field to “new update!” so that the new resume is easily noticed.

With this update-matching-records option, TrackVia is a great way to track and manage business processes that involve email. In addition, we added support for secure email connections, for leaving a copy of email messages on your email server, and other technical bells and whistles.

If you want to join the email integration revolution, please contact us! We’ll help you send your email traffic into your TrackVia database and start better managing your share of those 200 billion messages a day.

 

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Posted in email campaign, features, general

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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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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Posted in features

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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A Filter Brain Teaser (Part II)

December 11th, 2008

I ended yesterday’s post asking whether or not there were any real-life examples that would bring my filter brainteaser to life. After pondering this question for a while, I came up with a clear example from a real customer.

The customer is a transportation agency that is building a mass-transit system. They maintain in TrackVia a mailing list of citizens to whom they communicate about the project timeline, the design of certain train stations, and so on. If the plans for a particular train station change, they’ll send an email update to an appropriate subset of their mailing list. Here, the “appropriate subset” is defined as follows:

1) The recipient must still be “opted in,” that is, they haven’t clicked “unsubscribe” on any previous newsletter or update.
2) If they have previously expressed interest in this particular station, they should get the update regardless of where they live.
3) Otherwise, if they live in one of the three zip codes served by this station, and they live close to the train tracks, they should get the update.

So, expressed as a TrackVia filter, the mailing list for this update would be defined like this:

opted-in AND (interested-in-this-station OR (close-to-tracks AND (zip=X OR zip=Y OR zip=Z)))

This would seem to be impossible to build in TrackVia’s online database, because it requires three layers of nesting: the zip code condition is a group inside a group inside a group.

While pondering this, and trying to decide if we should complicate our filter tool by allowing more layers of groupings, I came across a coworker running a report of recently added TrackVia customers. He appeared to be using a complex filter, so I asked to see it. I was surprised to see that he’d repeated one of his conditions inside more than one group. He explained that he’d done it to circumvent the single-nesting restriction. His technique, applied to our mass transit problem, would produce this:

opt-in AND (interested-in-this-station OR close-to-tracks) AND (interested-in-station OR zip=X OR zip=Y OR zip=Z)

Or, visually:

Filter Image

You can see how this will work: being interested in a station does double duty, making both groups above true. If someone is opted in and interested in the station, that’s sufficient to satisfy the filter and be in the mailing list. If they’re opted in but not interested in the station, then to get the two groups to be true, they need to be close to the tracks and have one of the three zip codes. My coworker had discovered this trick of repeating the interested-in-this-station condition inside two different groups.

Mathematically speaking, the trick relies on the fact that a filter like this:

A and (B or (C and (D or E or F)))

is equivalent to this:

A and (B or C) and (B or D or E or F).

The fact that this is possible is a good argument in favor of keeping our filter tool simple. (And, I suppose, for keeping our free customer support just a phone call away – so we can help customers with tips like this.).

This may only be one real-world example, but I can assure you that any condition can be represented in TrackVia’s filter tool. There is no filter too complex for TrackVia’s single-layer mechanism to represent. Still have doubts? Read a continuation of this post in the TrackVia Community.

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A Filter Brain Teaser

December 10th, 2008

Question: Is there any database filter that would be impossible to build in TrackVia with our current filter tool?

This question stumped me for a few weeks, and I even threw it out to our user community. The answer and its explanation were sufficiently interesting to me that I thought I’d share them in a blog post. TrackVia nerds, read on (the rest of you might want to skip this one).

First, some background. TrackVia’s filters allow users to display a subset of their online database records that meet certain criteria. Those criteria – things like “age is greater than 40” or “due date is next week” – can be combined into groups using AND or OR. Groups, too, can be combined with AND or OR. The results look something like this:

In the example above, the left-most AND is joining four criteria, the first two of which are actually groups of two sub-criteria, themselves joined internally by OR and AND.

Here’s where the brain teaser comes in. For the sake of keeping our filter tool simple, we impose a restriction: a user can’t nest groups of conditions more than one layer deep. The darker grey groups above cannot be grouped again with other individual criteria or groups of criteria. The most complex filter possible in TrackVia, then, has a form like this:

(a group of conditions…) AND (a group of conditions…) AND (a group of conditions…) AND …

The outer joiner of the groups, in this case AND, can easily be changed to OR, to create:

(a group of conditions…) OR (a group of conditions…) OR (a group of conditions…) OR …

…but it can’t go back and forth. The main glue that joins all of the groups must be AND across the board, or OR across the board.

Furthermore, the conditions inside any of the groups can only be joined with ANDs or ORs, but not mixed. Different groups can use different glue, as in the picture above, but each group must have a single type of glue.

This would seem like a silly restriction, but if you’ve played with our filter tool, you know that it keeps the tool simple – or at least, simpler than the alternative. The question is whether this simplicity has made some filters impossible. At first blush, it would certainly seem so. If so, a follow-up question is whether there are any real-life examples that would demonstrate this. Is this merely a theoretical limitation, or one that a customer will eventually complain about? 

Check back tomorrow for a real-life example.

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VC Firm – Shoulda Had TrackVia

December 4th, 2008

I read with horror TechCruch’s recent scoop that confidential business plans submitted to a prominent venture capital firm were accidentally published on the web. Ouch. It seems the database that the firm was using behind its online application was dumping the data into a human-readable backup file. The backup file lived in the same directory (folder) on their server as other web content, so it was accessible through a browser, and was indexed by Google.

Here are five tips for building any sort of web form or service that is going to handle confidential data:

  1. Put your data on a different server (or servers) than your web files. The two don’t mix.
  2. Lock down those database servers so only application code is allowed to connect to it, and the web servers are not.
  3. Configure your backups to produce compressed, encrypted files, not human-readable files.
  4. Move those backup files to tape archives. Did we mention not putting them on your web servers?
  5. Turn off the Indexes option on your web server, which allows anyone (like Google’s automated crawlers) to see a list of all files in a directory on your server, even if they’re not linked to from a web page.
  6. Bonus Tip: If you don’t know what you’re doing, go with someone who does — like, say, TrackVia!

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Posted in features, industry trends

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The ROI of Our Online Database

November 14th, 2008

As a buyer, I’m all about calculating the ROI of each purchase. It’s an inexact science – trying to put an objective number on a decision that’s loaded with uncertainty. But just going through the exercise of listing all of the benefits and expenses associated with the decision is eye-opening. The biggest benefit is that it helps me “normalize” the different options, and often makes it clear that the lowest priced option isn’t the one with the best ROI.

In that spirit, here’s my top 5 list of alternatives to TrackVia’s online database that may be helpful in thinking about the ROI for your business or organization.

1) Call a web developer and get a quote for a custom database application that would include a web form (gathering more sales leads from your website – great for the front end of the funnel!) that sends info straight into a web-based CRM that allows you to send personalized, targeted email campaigns.

2) Call a custom database developer and ask how much it would cost to take your existing database and web-enable it, including hardware, systems administration services (gotta apply those patches!), backups and redundancy.

3) Take a look at your Salesforce.com monthly bill, and then look at TrackVia’s pricing. I know – your employees will whine and complain about having to switch to a new application. But in the current economy, isn’t it worth putting up with a bit of whining to switch and save the money? And don’t worry, the whining won’t last long, soon it will be raving that you hear.

4) Take a look at your QuickBase monthly bill, and then look at TrackVia’s pricing and included online database features. Sure, the entry-level prices are the same, but continue reading. You’re paying extra for all of those database records and file storage. And if you don’t have at least 100 seats, you don’t even have access to important security features like IP filtering that come standard in TrackVia.

5) Take a look at some low-priced web applications, and use them for a while. See if you find yourself tapping your foot each time you click to do something (“loading – please wait….”). See if you find consistent complaints about the service’s uptime and response time. And, try to get hands-on help from a real human who’ll do things like customize your HTML web forms and HTML templates for you – for free!

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No Longer Dread the Holiday Card Process

October 28th, 2008

It’s the holiday season and the dreaded holiday card mailing is fast approaching. After a game of “not it” – you feel pity for the poor soul who is assigned the task of pulling together a list of contacts from the company database for the annual company holiday card.

It always seems to be the case that in the process of pulling a list, you realize how outdated your contacts are, how many duplicates exist and how many of the contacts are no longer with the companies that they are listed next to.

Using these simple steps, we hope to make this process easier. Think of it as an early present:

1. Collect:

  • Import contacts into TrackVia via an Excel Spreadsheet. Click to view a pdf with a step-by-step guide to downloading your Outlook contacts into Excel
  • With our new Excel import feature you can easily update (addresses, emails, company names) your existing records

2. Organize:

  • If every manager in your office keeps their own list of contacts, easily de-dupe so contacts only receive one card from your corporation
  • Add a field in your database of primary contact’s name for your mailing list and then send “tailored messages” signed by the appropriate contact using mail merge
  • Track who you sent cards to and who you received cards from by denoting the appropriate fields (card sent/received)
  • Upload an html template to create your own look and feel for your holiday greetings
  • Create custom views to send tailored messages to your contacts. For example, thank current customers for their business and let prospects and former clients know you look forward to working with them again in the new year

3. Share:

  • Mailing – use the mail merge feature to create mailing labels and/or personalized holiday letters for snail mail correspondence without having to perform a difficult mail merge with two different systems
  • Electronic – use the mail merge feature to personalize the email with fields from your database and then send the message via the built-in email campaign tool

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Posted in custom views, email campaign, features, mail merge

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