Managing a software roadmap

24 May 2007

Alastair’s prioritisation model is excellent and shows how a SaaS software company can balance being flexible enough to innovate, while being structured enough to deliver. 

productmanagement.png

Often stakeholders will want to have a detailed roadmap for the next 6-12 months, but as this model shows, anything beyond the next release is up for debate and anything beyond the next 3 months is strategic. 

What a roadmap should show are the business and strategic goals, ensuring that the development focus is in the right place, but also allowing it to be fluid enough to meet these goals in the most appropriate way.

Leave a Comment » | Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Anti-spam law

21 May 2007

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act comes into force on 5 September 2007 and effects every business in New Zealand that sends email.

Here’s my summary, but if in doubt read the Act yourself!
 
The new law says:

  1. Before sending “commercial electronic messages”, you must get consent from all recipients
  2. All “commercial electronic messages” must provide a working unsubscribe facility
  3. The sender of all “commercial electronic messages” must be clearly identified and contact information must be available
  4. Harvesting emails is illegal

The definition of “commercial electronic messages” is a catch-all for email, SMS and instant messages (but not POTS, VOIP or FAX) where the primary purpose is to market or promote goods, services or business/investment opportunities. 

There are exceptions of course – which pretty much apply to most day-to-day business email: 

  • If you are already doing business with someone, you are allowed to email them. 
  • If someone gives you their business card, or if you find a contact email address on a website you can email them (unless there is a ‘no spam’ notice with the email address). 
  • If someone asks for a quote, you can email it to them. 
  • You can let people know about their subscription or account, or renewal of a product. 
  • You can email people about upgrades to products/services that they have bought.

If you want to send email newsletters, offers, promotions etc – you should keep a double-opt-in database using a system such as Calcium Software’s Hot Prospect.  Hot Prospect v3 was recently released and there are some good reasons for using it:

Save time - Hot Prospect will automatically manage double-opt-ins, unsubscribes and bounces, allowing you to collect email addresses from your website, or from offline and comply with the law.  Sending email campaigns is fast and safe.  Using Hot Prospect you can build a great looking email in minutes and know that it will only be sent to the people on your list who are currently opted-in.

Repudation - the Act states that the onus of proof lies with the sender.  Hot Prospect provides full repudation by keeping an audit record of recipients being added and removed from mailing lists, including opt-in confirmations, changes of information and details of emails sent. 

Results - its one thing to be allowed to send a marketing email, its another thing to be able to deliver the email through spam filters.  The SMTP engine behind Hot Prospect is mailPrimer, which was designed to deliver daily 1-1 emails and therefore uses a number of unique techniques for optimising delivery.  When used to deliver bulk email, mailPrimer gets the highest delivery rates that I’ve seen.

greenrunningman.jpg

For more information on Hot Prospect, have a look at: Calcium, Red Running Man, Green Running Man

3 Comments | Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Wellington

19 May 2007

View of Wellington today from the top of Mt Kaukau.

Wellington

Leave a Comment » | Wellington | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Thought of the day

9 May 2007

Javascript is like a Porshe 911 that only has a first gear.

Leave a Comment » | Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Calcium -> Xero

9 May 2007

After spending the last couple of years as the CTO for Calcium Software, some people are still suprised to hear that I’m now full time with Xero, so here’s a quick update for those people:

In Jan 2007, I left Calcium Software to join Xero, based in Wellington, NZ. Xero is building a collaborative online accounting system – which is something that I’ve wanting to do for a few years, so when I discovered that Rod Drury had started Xero in Wellington to do this – it was too good to be true.

I had previously started Nexsys Development in Jan 03 and merged with Calcium Software in Aug 04. Nexsys Development was supposed to be about building project/information management systems, but to fund that, I developed Imprint, which is now being sold as Silhouette. I continued down the path of marketing software as CTO for Calcium and built Calcium’s mailPrimer and Hot Prospect products. After 4 years, I decided it was time to return to what I set out to do – developing business software and joined Xero and am loving it.

Leave a Comment » | Business | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

Reporting made easy

6 May 2007

The Xero Report Centre went live to accountants on Friday (see the Xero blog for the official announcement). We’ve had a team working on the report centre since Jan this year and a lot of the initial concepts came (unknowingly) from users of Imprint, the website reporting package I built (now being sold as Silhouette).

The concepts were quite simple: what most systems call a ‘report’ is just a pre-formatted dump of data. Typically, a user has to take this data and massage it into a presentable report before it can actually be read and actioned. This means grabbing the relevant data from different reports and combining, adding charts, adding executive summaries and analysis and notes and then making it all presentable.

The Xero Report Centre allows accountants to do all of this within the app itself and then present a completed management report, board report or annual report to their clients – users of Xero. The report will then always be stored within the app, so future users can always access historic reports.

Its as easy as:

  1. Start from a default report – ie a mgmt report including executive summary, cashflow, P&L, balance sheet, aged reports
  2. Use the drilldowns to examine the information more closely
  3. Export to Excel if you want to try some ‘what-if’ scenarios (all calculated values have formulas in Excel – allowing quick and easy analysis)
  4. Write your summary, highlights, lowlights, explanations, action points, etc directly into the report
  5. Annotate individual pieces of data directly with footnotes
  6. Add additional pages with information that is relevant for the month
  7. Add charts to highlight the most relevant info (coming soon)
  8. Publish to Excel, PDF or live within Xero

While other systems are focusing on providing customisable “report builders” – I think a lot of them are missing the point. All they’re doing is allowing people to customise the “data dump”, not actually build a presentable report. Data doesn’t become a report until it has been analysed and this is something accountants are trained to do, which is why using an online collaborative accounting system like Xero makes so much sense.

1 Comment | Business, Finance, Technology, Xero | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

What SaaS isn’t

3 May 2007

Following on from my thoughts about webware & software, I’ve been hearing more and more chatter about the pros and cons of web apps. Having worked on a webapp for four months at Xero with some top people (including Craig, Kirk, Fletch, Jeff, Adam, Grant, Phil, Ivan & Vicki) in their fields – I’m convinced that webapps can provide more powerful UIs than software can.

Have a look at some of the Xero screens – which are possible in software – but you’d never see stuff like this for the same reasons as I mentioned in my last post … software typically follows well defined UI patterns and constraints and therefore limits the creativity of the UI/design gurus who can make webapp UIs look and work this good:

Xero dashboard

What still annoys me though, is SaaS marketing like this:

“Avoid the costly IT expenditures, prolonged time-to-market and outdated technology associated with traditional software”

“Nowadays, companies need flexible technology solutions with low upfront costs, reduced risks, and higher probabilities of project success. In response to this need, we developed our solution to be “Software as a Service” that is hosted in a centralized data center and delivered on a subscription basis to clients using a web-based interface”

This is all true of “traditional software”, but its not the reason for building a webapp. SaaS can be delivered as a smart client or webapp or both (or xaml or …). There are some clear advantages of doing each, but all that really matters is that the data is stored in a data center and accessed via standard web protocols. Whether you run a javascript/html client or a thicker client such as a .NET windows forms – both can provide “low upfront costs, reduced risks, higher probabilities of success” etc, but both can also provide none of these. I’ve seen plenty of webapp services delivered with the wrong business model, poor UI and poor delivery/support and they can have longer “time-to-market” and higher “hidden costs” than delivering software.

Although this disagrees with wikipedia, I think SaaS isn’t the software or technology – its the business model, which has to be backed up with a strong capability to deliver & serve users through great UI, great functionality and great business & software support.

2 Comments | SaaS, Software, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew

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