Hamid Shojaee

This Just in: In the Future, Windows will be Better than iPhone

Hamid — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:57:00 GMT

Yes, ladies and gentleman, it's hard to believe, but Microsoft has just announced that Windows 7, the $20 billion a year operating system that runs on hundreds of millions of PCs around the world will be way better than your...wait for it...wait a little more... i...wait...Phone! It will be an amazing feat. In about 5 years when Microsoft releases Windows 7, it will be better than the iPhone is today. I can't wait!

OK, maybe I'm being a little too sarcastic. The real quote from Microsoft is that Windows 7's multi-touch feature will "blow you away" if you are impressed with the iPhone's multi-touch. Is that the best Microsoft can do? Compare a future PC operating system to an existing phone? If I remember correctly Microsoft was telling people the iPhone was irrelevant just a short while ago and they touted the vastly more capable Windows Mobile platform. They couldn't imagine why anybody would want an iPhone and now they're talking about a future Desktop OS whose release date is yet to be determined will be better than the iPhone is today? What happened to making Windows Mobile better than iPhone? Was that project canceled?

The irony here is that in order for Multi-Touch to even work, you have to have hardware that supports it. So don't hold your breath for any PC today to be able to use the multi-touch features coming in Windows 7. Microsoft still has to convince a bunch of dinosaur hardware makers (HP, Dell, etc.) to make hardware that allows for multi-touch. Oh and they have to keep praying that when Windows 7 is released 2, 3 or 5 years in the future, that Apple is frozen in time to today's technology. Yeh, that will happen!

Microsoft products have been unbelievably disappointing lately and the rhetoric that comes from Washington is starting to show the same desperation and logic of the rhetoric that comes from the other Washington. Come on Microsoft! As a former Microsoft employee and a business owner who's entire company is focused on the Microsoft platform I expect more from you. It's time to stop talking, stop bashing competitors, stop copying and start creating damn good products. Now get to it!

A Tornado of News at Axosoft

Hamid — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:51:00 GMT

The launch of Axosoft's OnTime 2008 is the most significant event in Axosoft's history and with it, we have a lot of other announcements, too. This article is a summary of what's new with the launch of OnTime 2008:

	OnTime 2008: The Most Exciting OnTime Ever With the new Enterprise Project Wiki features of OnTime 2008, we believe OnTime 2008 is the most exciting product we've ever built. Now, teams can store all related project information, documents, meeting minutes, team directories and more in a single location. OnTime functions as a central repository of everything related to a project. With OnTime's built-in security allowing every feature of OnTime to be controlled by role, OnTime 2008 provides one of the most secure wiki systems in the world and it's the only one of its kind on the Windows platform. Final Release is coming on Wednesday, December 5th.
	New "Express" Edition of OnTime with Incredible Pricing I view OnTime Express as a game changing event for our industry. There is simply no other system on the planet that provides the features of OnTime 2008 Express at such an amazingly low price. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find another system that offered a comparable feature-set at any price. OnTime 2008 Express is priced at just $395 for teams of 5, $795 for teams of 10, $1,495 for teams of up to 25 and just $2,995 for an unlimited number of users! If you have a team of say 100 users, OnTime Express would have a cost of less than $30 per user! Check out the OnTime Express vs. Professional page to compare and see if it's right for you.
	Fear The Bug Video Podcast with OnTime Tips & Tricks With OnTime users growing worldwide faster than ever, we thought it was time we provide a weekly video podcast that offers OnTime tips and tricks in small bite-sized 2-5 minute chunks. If you are an OnTime user, you don't want to miss this podcast. Subscribe to it in your favorite RSS reader (and soon in iTunes). It's guaranteed to make you a more productive user of the OnTime system. Fear the bug!
	Ship Software OnTime Blog Having a product that targets software development teams, at Axosoft, we're in a unique position to see a lot of different techniques for successful software development. I have decided to start a blog that organizes some of the things we have learned about shipping software on time and share them with the world. Take a look at the new Ship Software OnTime Blog.
	FREE Instructor-lead, Web-based Training For the first 30 days within your initial OnTime purchase date, we are now offering free training for your administrator and all users! OnTime's intuitive user interface and features don't need much explaining if all you need to get out of it is the basics. But, if you'd like to get the most out of workflows, wiki collaboration, security, reporting, and more -- Axosoft University is for you. Our web-based training focuses on 6 different 60-90 minute classes with plenty of opportunity for Q&A. In case you'd like to send users through training after your 30-day free window, we've dropped the price of our courses to just $49 per user (open-enrollment plan, when purchased for all users). This allows users to attend any class any number of times for up to 30 days. Your $49 investment will pay for itself many times over by making you a much more productive OnTime user.

Plus we've created an all-new web site with better content, more screenshots, more videos and easier navigation. The Axosoft Store has also been revamped to allow customers to purchase OnTime Express and even upgrade from Express to Pro without the need to contact anybody at Axosoft (the store automatically calculates the credit to be applied to the purchase of Pro). We hope you like what you see and we look forward to another record-breaking year in 2008.

OnTime 2008 Release Date Announced

Hamid — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:41:00 GMT

When we started the development of OnTime 2008 immediately after the release of V7 in February of this year, we were targetting a Dec '07 to Feb '08 release window. In the past couple of months it became apparent that we could easily come in on the earlier side of that 3-month window and still meet all of the major goals we set out to achieve with OnTime 2008. So after two OnTime 2008 Beta releases having gone more smoothly than we had originally anticipated, I'm excited to announce that OnTime 2008 Express and Professional will ship on Wednesday December 5th, 2007.

We have a lot of cool stuff planned for the release, including a brand new web site, completely redesigned to better serve visitors, we also have new OnTime 2008 videos and tutorials to help you get the most out of OnTime 2008. Wheather you are a new customer or an existing customer, come back and visit Axosoft.com on December 5th to get the latest about OnTime 2008.

So stay tuned and check back on Wednesday December 5th, 2007.

Introducing OnTime Express with Much Lower Pricing!

Hamid — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:08:00 GMT

With the introduction of OnTime 2008's new Wiki functionality, we are extremely excited about the collection of tools that OnTime provides for managing projects in a single application suite:

A Team Wiki allowing teams to collaborate on document creation and sharing
A central Project Repository for any documents that are related to a project
A central Bug Tracking tool for all projects
A central Requirements Management (Features) tool for all projects
A central Incident Tracking system for support
A central Task Tracking system for all team members

These are tools we consider to be instrumental (or the "Core Functionality") that any team needs in order to successfully build and manage software projects (or any project for that matter). Having these tools in a single application can significantly boost productivity. No more Shared Network folders and Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, random emails with tidbits of information, etc. to track what's going on in a project. Now everything can be tracked in one place.

How does that information relate to OnTime Express?

As the creators of OnTime, we get a large part of our personal satisfaction from the adoption of the tools we have built. We feel a great sense of pride knowing that companies like Verifone, Lego, Medtronics or Pitney Bowes rely on Axosoft's OnTime for their development efforts. In fact, there are over 6,000 other teams worldwide that do just that. Many of these companies create products that most of us use on a regular basis in one way or another. That intertwining contribution to the wheels that makes the world go around is immensely gratifying.

So internally, we often debate on how we can bring the adoption of OnTime to an even greater number of teams who are developing exceptional products. One of our ideas has been to reduce the cost of entry. To facilitate and accelerate a large adoption of OnTime 2008's suite of tools, we are introducing OnTime 2008 Express at a significant discount to the normal price.

In fact, our pricing for OnTime 2008 Express might come as a bit of a shock when you consider what you get. First, lets take a look at the new pricing:

What's the catch?

There will be some feature limitations in OnTime 2008 Express, but fortunately, we believe the limitations we have placed are relatively minor for teams that operate with basic (or no) structured processes. OnTime Express will still include the core functionality of Wiki, Bug Tracking, Requirements Management, Task Tracking and HelpDesk Incident Tracking! You will find that most competing products don't offer the features that we consider "basic" and include in OnTime 2008 Express edition. So when comparing OnTime with a competing system, you'll find that often times OnTime Express provides even more functionality than other systems you may have been considering.

Lets take a look at specifically what's different between OnTime 2008 Express and Professional Editions:

One of the real benefits of OnTime 2008 Express is that your investment is safe. If you decide to upgrade to OnTime 2008 Professional edition within 1 year of your purchase, you can get a full credit towards the purchase of OnTime 2008 Professional (even your maintenance will be prorated and applied towards your new purchase). When you upgrade to OnTime 2008 Professional from Express, it'll be seamless. No physical upgrade (uninstall/re-install) is necessary since they share the same code. We simply change your key information and you are good to go. Your data is in place and your upgrade can be done in a matter of seconds.

Existing Customers who have maintenance will all receive upgrades to OnTime 2008 Professional edition.

With the introduction of OnTime Express, we have covered the barrier to entry problem better than ever before with substantially reduced prices for small teams. Therefore, the price for OnTime 2008 Professional Edition's 5-User Starter pack will increase from $495 to $795, although additional users will remain the same at $199 per user.

OnTime 2008 Beta and Project Wikis - How did We Live Without It?

Hamid — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:30:00 GMT

Today we are announcing the immediate availability of OnTime 2008 Beta! That's V8.0 for those of you keeping track making this the 8th generation of the OnTime software suite. We have added more than 60 new improvements and some of them, such as the new Project Wiki, are so exciting that I wonder how we ever lived without them.

It's important to note that Axosoft is not just making a separate Wiki software, but instead, we've integrated a full project Wiki (or team wiki depending on how you see it) inside of the OnTime application so that OnTime can be the central repository of everything related to a project.

What's New in OnTime 2008 Video

Download OnTime 2008 Beta

So lets take a look at the new features:

New Project Wiki

Wiki pages provide a great way to collaborate and communicate important pieces of information between team members. Everything from team member directories to policies to project goals and guidelines can be tracked in wiki pages. Depending on how your organization utilizes the new wiki functionality, it can replace certain aspects of intranets, eliminate reliance on folder sharing, and preserve knowledge that would otherwise be lost in email archives. The possibilities are endless, and more and more progressive teams are adopting wikis for internal and external collaboration.

OnTime's new Project Wiki tab creates a unique way to manage Wiki documents. Like all other item types, wiki pages in OnTime revolve around the project hierarchy. When a user creates a new wiki page, it's always related to a project or to All Projects. To create a new wiki page, users can select the project and click the "New Wiki Page" button (Green Plus Sign). Here, we see a Wiki Page for Coding Guidelines:

This Wiki Page Shows the Naming Conventions to be Used by the Team

One of the problems with Wikis is that teams can generate hundreds or thousands of wiki pages over time, so it can become extremely difficult to find any particular wiki page. But in OnTime, wiki pages are stored in the project tree hierarchy, providing an easily maintainable structure where each wiki page is organized. So finding or browsing to a wiki page couldn't be easier.

In fact, there are several ways to browse to a wiki page:

Just click on a Project - Each Project can have a "Home" wiki page associated with it. You might create a wiki page called "Project Overview and Goals" for every project. You can then set this main document as the "Home" Wiki page of that project. When you're on the new Project Wiki tab and you click on a project, the Home wiki page is automatically loaded.
Use the Auto-Generated Table of Contents - The auto-generated table of contents in OnTime's Project Wiki is a unique and extremely powerful way to look at all or a portion of the wiki pages in your system. By clicking on the table of contents option in the wiki toolbar, you can see all the pages for the currently selected project and all of its children. Since each user's project visibility is based on their security roles, the table of contents automatically takes into consideration any security roles the user may have and therefore, the table of contents is customized for each user and for each project:

This Screenshot shows the Auto-Generated Table of Contents in OnTime's Wiki

Use the Recent Changes Page - The recent changes page on the Project Wiki tab can be accessed from the toolbar and shows a quick list of the 25 most recent documents that have been changed in the currently selected project. Select All Projects and you'll see recent changes in all projects that you have access to allowing users to quickly find the most up to date information.

The Auto-Generated Recent Changes Page is a Great Way to Stay on Top of What's New

Use the Wiki Page Listing for a Given Project - If none of the above methods are sufficient, you can always use the Wiki Page listings for the currently selected project. All the pages for the currently selected project are in a drop-down list on the Project Wiki toolbar:

Use the Project-Specific Page Listing drop-down to Navigate to a Page

Project Improvements

Significant improvements have been made to Projects in OnTime 2008. We've added Project-level attachments, custom fields, a custom form designer for adding or editing projects and we've re-arranged some existing features to make them easier to navigate.

Lets take a look at what's new in Project Improvements:

Easier Project Notifications & Alerts Navigation

We added project-level Alerts in OnTime 2007, but they were a little hard to find. You had to first have Edit privilege at the project level and you'd have to go in and edit a project in order to add or modify an alert. The same was true with general email notifications at the project level. These two features have been brought down to the "Project Wiki" tab, with independent privileges so users no longer need to have the "Edit Project" security privilege just to add themselves to the email notification list or to setup a new Alert.

The new Project Wiki tab Provides Easy Access to Project Notifications and Alerts

Having the Project Notifications and Project Alerts tabs accessible on the main form makes both of these existing features more useful.

Project-Level Attachments

OnTime's attachments had previously been limited to attachments at the item level. This meant that if you wanted to attach project related files, there wasn't a great place to do it. But with the addition of the Project Wiki tab in the main window, we've also added the ability to add project-level attachments for the selected project. What's more is that your project-level image attachments are also accessible when creating a wiki page. So you can include team pictures, diagrams of your processes, workflows, project overview and build process inside of wiki pages where you can provide additional detailed explanations about the images.

Project Level Attachments Allows OnTime to be the Central Repository of all Project-Related Documents

Project Custom Fields

The project custom fields allow users to create their own project fields that are accessible from the add/edit project window. Additionally, you can use the new drag-and-drop form designer to edit the way these fields appear in the add/edit project window.

The new Form Designer Allow Users to Customize their Project Fields and Layout

Customer Management Improvements

Customer and contact management in OnTime became super important once we added the Incident Tracking for HelpDesk capabilities in OnTime 2007. One of the most requested features was the ability to track additional information about customers and the contacts associated with those customers. With OnTime 2008, we've added this capability and much more.

Lets take a look at each of the new improvements for Customer and Contact Management:

Redesigned Customer and Contact Management Window

First we redesigned the customer and contact management features into a single view where customers are listed in the top pane, while the contacts for the selected customer are in the bottom pane of the window. This makes customer and contact management significantly easier as you can see in the screenshot below:

The New Customer Management Window Makes it Easier than Ever to Manage Customers and Contacts

We've also added OnTime's trademark Quick Search to both Customers and Contacts on this window so you can easily find the customer or contact you are looking for. The columns on each of the list views can be customized to show any columns you wish, including any new custom fields that you create.

Import Customers and Contacts

From the toolbar of the Manage Customers window users now have the option to import Customers and Contacts. When importing new customers or contacts, OnTime allows users to automatically update existing customers or contacts by matching pre-existing records based on company name, URL and contact Email address. Like all other import capabilities in OnTime, fields can easily be mapped from any existing CSV file to the OnTime built-in or custom fields and the field mappings can be saved for reuse.

Importing Customers and Contacts couldn't be Easier. Save the Import Template to Reuse it Again

By saving an import template, OnTime allows users to re-import a list of customers on a regular basis. This could be extremely useful when a separate CRM tool might contain a master list of customers. You could easily re-import all customers on a regular basis allowing OnTime to stay up to date with the latest customer information.

Customer and Contact Custom Fields

Now any number of custom fields can be created for customers and contacts. With the new Customer and Contact form designer, users can add grouping tabs to group similar custom fields together. Take a look at this example:

Customer Form Designer with 3 Custom Tabs and Multiple Custom Fields

Fields can be dragged-and-dropped from the available fields list (which includes custom fields) onto the new form designer. You can even drag-and-drop fields to re-order them and click on any text box, checkbox or drop-down to set default values. The new form designer is limited to just setting up forms for Projects, Customers and Contacts. I know a lot of you (myself included) will be asking for the form designer as a means of creating field templates for defects, features, incidents and tasks. Unfortunately, that will not be in V8.0 as those item types require a more complicated form designer. We hope to address that in a future version.

Email Templates

OnTime's rapid email notification and alerts system can send out any of more than 40 different emails and with the release of OnTime 2008, users can now customize these emails to include whatever information they want the email to include.

The New Email Template Designer Gives User the Option to Customize Email Notifications

Email notifications or alerts can include static text as well as special placeholder fields that can be filled by OnTime as the email is being prepared. The email placeholders can be replaced by a URL to access the item via the OnTime Web client, the changes that triggered the notification and any other fields that the template creator wants to include. This feature also allows our International customers to localize the emails to whatever language they prefer.

Drag-and-Drop Attachments

Having attachments or even pasting attachments is nothing new to OnTime, but with the release of OnTime 2008 we wanted to make attachments even easier than before, so we have added the ability to drag-and-drop attachments so that you can add a large number of files easily. This is especially helpful with the new Project attachments tab where you might have a large library of files that should be associated with a given project. Now you can just drag-and-drop all of the files and OnTime will import each file and even give you a chance to set the options and description for each attachment.

Now OnTime Users can Drag-and-Drop any Number of Files to Quickly Attach them to Items or Projects

New Hyperlink Custom Field

Sometimes it would be nice to be able to pass the information from a given project, customer, contact, defect, feature, task or incident onto another application or web page. With OnTime 2008, you can easily do this using the new "Hyperlink" custom field. You can setup a hyperlink field that includes placeholders, which are replaced with a property of the currently selected project, customer, contact, defect, feature, incident or task.

For example, you might want to lookup the details of a customer's previous purchases in your accounting application. You could potentially setup a web page in your accounting application that retrieves such information and OnTime can provide an easy link directly to that page from any given incident, customer or contact. Here's how something like that might work:

First, you create a custom Hyperlink field for Incidents:

The New Hyperlink Custom Field Allows Information About Current Item to be Passed to any URL

As you can see from the screenshot, you can pass any incident property to any URL. In this case, we've chosen to pass the customerid to "MyAccountingApplication".

Use the Toolbar List of Hyperlink Fields to Activate a Hyperlink and Pass Relevant Information to the URL

By selecting an incident and clicking on the hyperlink custom field from the toolbar drop-down list, OnTime will automatically open your default browser and pass the appropriate URL and associated information from that item into the URL. The "MyAccountingApplication" in this case could use the customer ID information to lookup a history of purchases for that customer.

Addressing Concurrent Edits

What happens when 2 users edit the same record at the same time? Ever since OnTime V1.0 (and all the way to OnTime V7.x), the answer was simple: if you attempted to save a record which had been modified by another user after you opened the record, it would give you a warning indicating that the record was modified. Then it would give you the choice to either overwrite the other user's edits or to cancel your own edits.

Although this method works great for smaller teams where this type of even is extremely infrequent, it definitely leaves something to be desired for teams with lots and lots of active users. So now, thanks to the insistence of many of our larger customers (thank you Graham!), we've addressed this issue in the following way:

When a user edits an item a "lock" is established
The default lock timeout is for 30 minutes (but can be changed from the system options)
If another user tries to edit a locked item, it'll say it's locked by another user
If the lock expires and the user is still editing, it'll re-lock the item if the system "Refesh Locks Automatically" setting is checked, otherwise, the lock is automatically released
If the user still tries to save after the lock is released, OnTime will check to see if the item has been edited by anyone else and if not, it will still allow the edit to go through

Adding the edit Lock feature also means that in OnTime Windows, we needed to provide a way for users to just view items that are being edited. So there's a new View Item feature that works similar to the view item in OnTime Web. Also, in case an administrator wants to remove a lock prior to the lock expiration, they can do that from System Options.

Lots of Little Stuff Too!

We have been very busy for the past year with improvements in OnTime 2008. There are so many things changed and improved that it's too much to go over in detail, but here are some additional noteworthy items:

Change Due Dates on Multiple Items by using New "Push Back [X] Days" Feature
Ability to Auto-Login (by remembering password) in OnTime Windows
Quick Sort Pick-List Values Alphabetically
Option to Show History in Ascending or Descending order
Lots of changes and improvements under the hood
And More Improvements Coming Before Release

Let us know what you think. We want to hear your feedback. Feel free to leave comments on this blog post or email me directly ("hamids" at you-know-where).

A Quick Update to PhotoDrop.com Album Sharing

Hamid — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:27:00 GMT

Since the release of PhotoDrop a little more than a month ago, we've been quietly adding more and more features. Collectively, the new features are very exciting, so I wanted to take a moment to point them out:

Public Album Browser - Now when you upload a public album through the DropZone system tray tool, your album could show up on the home page of PhotoDrop getting hundreds of views. It's a really cool way to browse some really interesting pictures. Check it out.
My Public Albums Page - The new User-Based public album page allows you to easily share a link with your friends and family that lists all of the albums you want to share with the world. It's really cool. As an example, here is a page listing All My Public Albums. I could see us adding an RSS feed to this page in the near future. To get your public album page URL, login to your account page and click on the "My Public Albums" button.
Improved Photo Framing - We've also improved the look and feel of photo frames which includes a drop-shadow. I think the new look makes pictures jump out of the page. The new look is a lot like the new Vista Picture Gallery.
Improved Vertical Image Thumbnails - Vertical image thumbnails used to be relatively small. I think the new size allows vertical images to look better on the album pages.
Improved Reliability in the DropZone Client - We had some issues with the DropZone client crashing when a transfer would get initiated after a long period of idle time. We believe all of the issues with that are resolved in the new client. It should be an automatic update the next time you run the DropZone client.

We aim to make PhotoDrop.com the easiest way to share photo albums. Let us know if you think we've achieved that and how we can improve it. We'd love to hear from you.

Axosoft at Microsoft Partner Conference

Hamid — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 22:15:00 GMT

This week, we attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference. As a Bronze sponsor of the event, we had a 10x20 booth in the Expo hall. Our booth was buzzing with people the entire time, but what was really cool is the shear number of Axosoft customers who stopped by to say hello. I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of other exhibitors whose development teams manage their projects using OnTime. The ones I saw were: BlueSpring Software, LionBridge Technologies, Red Maple Press, Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software, Scribe, Sitecore and WM-Data. I'm always delighted when I see that OnTime has such deep penetration into so many companies. It was great to talk to our customers and learn how they use our products to manage theirs.

The event was a big success for us as Mike Robinson did non-stop demos and answered hundreds of questions. His answers always started with "let me show you!" At the Microsoft ISV party, we also got a chance to show our dance moves (I'm really sorry to everyone who had to witness that). The party was great and we got to meet Paul Mooney who has a popular tech blog on DotNetJunkies.

Here are a couple of pictures from the event that I threw up on PhotoDrop.com, our new photo sharing site:

(from left: Darcy Graham, Michael Parrish, Sima Saeidi, Mike Robinson, me and Angelo Coppola)

Axosoft Donates $5,700 to Charity from OnTime 3-User Sales

Hamid — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:20:00 GMT

Three months ago, I was pleased to announce that in the first calendar quarter of 2007, Axosoft sales of the specially priced 3-User version of OnTime generated $4,200 for various Axosoft charities. The pace of sales in the 2nd calendar quarter of 2007 has quickened and we're donating another $5,700 to various Axosoft charities. That brings our total donations this year up to $9,900.

Here is how it broke down for the various charities:

8 Purchasers Chose Autism Society of America
4 Purchasers Chose Komen for the Cure
5 Purchasers Chose National Multiple Sclerosis Society
40 Purchasers Chose to have us Pick one at random

I split the 40 "pick at random" selections between the 3 charities giving Komen the extra tie breaker. So here is how much each charity received:

$2,100 for Autism Society of America
$1,800 for Komen for the Cure
$1,800 for National Multiple Sclerosis Society

Hey, I think that's pretty cool.

If you're wondering what the deal is with the specially priced 3-User version of OnTime, here's how it works: Prior to introducing the OnTime 3-User version, customers had to purchase OnTime 5-User Starter Pack at $495. Even if they only had 2 or 3 users. So we decided to come out with a specially priced version of OnTime for these super small teams with tight budgets and reduced the price to $197. To make the offer that much more special, we also take $100 of the purchase price and donate it to one of the above 3 charities. The purchaser gets to decide which charity gets the money. To take advantage of the 3-User offer, use this link: https://store.axosoft.com/purchase.aspx

Winning in Technology Presentation: Wii, Google Search, iPod and iPhone

Hamid — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:07:00 GMT

As software developers and technologists, we often get wrapped up in the day-to-day heads down "feature" development of our products. Sometimes, this is great as the features we add are often the result of customer feedback and truly improve our offerings. But sometimes, staying focused and heads down on feature development causes us to miss the bigger picture of the problems we are trying to solve. It's essential to take a "heads up" break from time to time.

I thought it would be great to look at a few examples of companies who focused on features vs. those who came late to the market and focused on solving root problems and then took a leadership position as a result. My examples include the Nintendo Wii, Google Search, Apple's iPod and iPhone.

Here's the presentation as it was given in an AZ Groups .NET meeting on June 27th, 2007. The Google Video is just under 10 minutes long:

In the presentation, I refer to a previous presentation on "Shipping Software OnTime". Here is the Google Video of that presentation:

CodingHorror, Jeff Atwood and the Microsoft Open Source Ecosystem

Hamid — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:53:00 GMT

I recently discovered Jeff Atwood's blog, CodingHorror.com and I have to say, I have been extremely impressed with the quality of articles and subject matter that Jeff writes about. His articles are consistently about interesting topics, thorough, well researched and extremely well written. I'm proud of the fact that Axosoft has become the first sponsor of CodingHorror.com, because CodingHorror is such a great service to the developer community.

What's even more impressive about Jeff is that he's taking a significant chunk of his advertising revenue and donating it to Microsoft .NET-based Open Source projects. Wow! What an amazing thing to do. Shouldn't Microsoft be the ones doing something like this? It blows me away when individuals like this step up, innovate and do something totally out of the box to solve a real-world problem. With Jeff's influence with software developers and his generosity with real hard-earned cash, I'm sure his support of MS-based open-source projects is going to go a long way to create great products for all of us to benefit. Way to go Jeff!

But Jeff's great step forward for open-source made me think there's a lot more that companies like Axosoft can do to help push open source projects too. In fact, I have decided that Axosoft will provide a free copy of Axosoft's OnTime 2007 Suite, Installed or Hosted for Microsoft .NET-based open-source projects that needs a team-collaboration tool. We'll have to figure out a good way for teams to apply for a free license -- until we do, feel free to just email me (hamids ** at ** axosoft ** dot ** com) your request. Be sure to include information and links about your product, team size and as many pertinent details as you can offer, so we can get you taken care of asap.

Oh, and if you are a developer, subscribe to Jeff's blog before you do anything else! It's definitely worth your time.

Axosoft Geek Marketing Contest Winner Announced!

Hamid — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:29:00 GMT

As many of you know, we setup a geek marketing contest a while ago where anyone could submit an idea, a video, image or anything that might have some kind of viral effect to help Axosoft get some unusual marketing exposure. We had more than 60 submissions to the Geek Marketing Contest.

However, one of the submissions by Dan Lamoureux and MC Router, stands above the rest. It's a fun video called "Buggin' Out!" that the two worked on as an entry for the Axosoft Geek Marketing contest. Immediately, the viral effect of the video could be seen. Within days, the video had several thousand views. But it got even more interesting when YouTube featured the Buggin' Out video on their home page. Buggin' Out! now has over 200,000 views rivaling main-stream TV commercials in terms of exposure! That is exactly the type of thing we were hoping to accomplish with the Geek Marketing Contest. A relatively low-cost way to reach an unusual audience through a viral message. Take a look at the video or click here to see it on YouTube.

So I'm excited to announce that Dan Lamoureux and MC Router have been selected as the winner of the $5,000 prize from our Geek Marketing contest. Here's a picture of the two of them together:

(By the way, that photo is hosted on PhotoDrop.com which is a new service we just launched and it's a great way to include pictures easily inside your own blogs)

Congratulations!!! You guys did an excellent job!

One other thing worth mentioning, Dan Lamoureux is behind NerdCore For Life, and they are making a documentary about "Nerds, Geeks, Dorks and the Hip-Hop They Make". The trailer for the documentary looks excellent:

Looking forward to the finished movie!

The Easiest Way to Create and Share a Photo Album

Hamid — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 04:42:00 GMT

A couple of years ago Dan and I spent a weekend developing a simple way to send large files over the web. We documented the 20 hours of development we spent on creating the file transfer service and the result, TransferBigFiles.com, turned out to be a very popular site. In fact, we never did much to promote it and the servers that run the site probably hit their limit more than a year ago. Since its creation more than 1 Million files have been downloaded from TransferBigFiles totaling more than 97 Terabytes of data (that's 97,000,000 MB!!!). We think that's nuts, especially considering we only spent a weekend on it.

So a couple of months back, we got this itch to improve the service. So this time around, David and I started to make some really cool improvements to the site with some graphics work from Angelo. But as we were creating all these cool new features and a super-easy system-tray client to send files, we realized that the service would be ideal as a specialized photo transfer tool. So on the road to improve TransferBigFiles.com (the improvements will still come, but they got delayed a bit), we have created the world's easiest way to create and share a photo album. We call the new service PhotoDrop.com.

You don't believe me? Watch this (YouTube Video, if reading with RSS reader, click article to see the video or go directly to the video):

If you don't think that PhotoDrop is the easiest way to send full-resolution photos to someone (and for free!), I challenge you to name another site that can do it as easily. Now, before you write your comment naming off Flickr or PhotoBucket or whatever your favorite photo service is, take the time to actually send some pictures through one of these sites, then do it through PhotoDrop.com. Count the steps required and the user-time it takes to actually send the files, create the album and share the URL.

We are so excited about this service that we got brand new state-of-the-art servers dedicated to hosting PhotoDrop.com. One of the coolest parts of the PhotoDrop service is that we use a combination of our own and Amazon's S3 for photo storage. We think we've created some really cool technologies around the site that make it very unique. Hopefully I'll blog more about that stuff later.

So check it out, the world's easiest way to Create and Share Photo Albums.

One more thing...the service is 100% free, but we've decided to donate $0.05 (a nickel) for EVERY photo album that's created through the PhotoAlbum DropZone tool and shared with at least one person (we're limiting it to $1,000 donation per month). We haven't picked a charity yet, but it will likely be a local chapter of a reputable organization such as St. Vincent de Paul.

P.S. Those of you who are reading this and thinking "Hamid, shouldn't you be working on OnTime?" don't worry! I'm giving myself far too much credit for PhotoDrop.com. David Higgins has done most of the hard work and we've been busy building some great new features and fixing a lot of minor bugs with OnTime 2007 V7.1. I'll be making an exciting announcement about that soon.

Safari for Windows - The War is for Developers, not Browsers!

Hamid — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 04:36:00 GMT

Wow, I can't believe how many people have totally missed the significance of Apple's announcement about Safari for Windows. I've seen a dozen blogs and major web publications describe Apple's Safari for Windows as either "igniting another browser war" or "yawning" at the announcement. Both camps have pretty much dismissed the significance of the announcement. And the Apple loyalists are saying to themselves "huh? I don't get it!"

I have to admit, I was surprised by Apple's announcement today, but shortly after I installed Safari on my Vista machine, I got busy testing our own OnTime 2007 Web version to see how well it runs in Safari. To my surprise, it runs noticeably FASTER on Safari than it does in IE or FF. That blew me away. But more impotantly, I was pleasantly surprised that Safari's rendering engine seems to have fixed the vast majority of the problems that the previous versions had. Now that our developers can run Safari on Windows, it'll be significantly easier for Axosoft (and hundreds of companies like us) to support Safari in the future. This is huge!

The Fight to Get Developers

It's not about browser market share on Windows. In my opinion, Apple couldn't care less for the Windows platform. It'd be happy to get 0.5% of the Windows browser market, but by making it super easy for Windows-based developers to test their apps on Safari, they ensure that all new web apps will run smoothly on iPhone and the soon-to-be-announced Safari for Apple TV. That ensures their new platforms, which are far more important than Windows PCs, will all have smooth access to Web-2.0 based applications.

There are probably thousands of software companies out there, like Axosoft, who today decide to accelerate their support for Safari. Fast forward 5 years and the same people who think the Safari announcement today is a yawner are going to look back and say this was a huge strategic move for Apple ensuring the success of iPhone and Apple TV. Brilliant!

As much as I believe this to be a fight for developers, I don't discount Apple's ability to get market share on Windows. Remember, Apple already has tens of millions of iTunes users. If Apple truly manages to make a better browser and ties the download to iTunes, it could have a big chunk of the browser space on Windows overnight. Whether or not this happens is really not that important. Windows developers are going to support Safari because a) it's easy now that it's on Windows and b) they want to run their apps on their iPhones.

OnTime V7.1 Beta - Performance, Performance, Performance! And more!

Hamid — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:38:00 GMT

Up to 10 TIMES Faster! If there's one word that could summarize OnTime V7.1 enhancements, it's Performance. As OnTime users continue to put more and more data into the OnTime system, the ability to retrieve that data in a timely fashion has become an increasing priority. For larger database systems and slower connectivity, OnTime V7.1 makes huge gains. Oh and there's a ton of other improvements, new features and bug fixes, too!

If you want to download it right away, use this link: OnTime V7.1 Beta Details and Download

Here's a summary of the cool stuff in V7.1...

Performance Improvements

OnTime V7.1 has a bunch of performance improvements. The following is a summary of the internal details of how we improved performance:

Minimized Data Retrieval - In previous versions of OnTime, when retrieving a set of defects, features, tasks or incidents to display, the call to SQL Server would grab all the data for the items that meet the filter criteria, regardless of whether or not that information was being displayed in the grid. In V7.1, the data that is retrieved is limited to just the columns being displayed. This has the effect of reducing data between the client and SQL by as much as 80%! This is huge. Not only can SQL Server process the data much faster, but the bandwidth usage on the network is reduced substantially.

Windows UI Enhancements - Filling up the main list view and grouping the list of items in the OnTime Windows client could take a substantial amount of time for large sets of data (> 500 items). We've optimized this process to improve performance by an order of magnitude. What could have taken as long as 20 seconds in OnTime V7.03 (for example to load and group the grid with 17,000 items) now takes less than 2 seconds!

Enhanced Caching Techniques - In V7.1, we've also spent a great deal of time eliminating data access to the SQL Server when the data was recently retrieved. Smarter caching techniques have reduced round-trips to the database server, in some cases by as much as 60%.

Web Compression Improvements - The OnTime Web Server now uses Dynamic Page Compression (a feature of .NET 2.0) to conditionally compress the data that goes between a browser and web server. The slower your connection is to your web server, the more this enhancement will help! The web compression can shaves off an average of 80% from the payload of the data being transferred. If bandwidth is a bottleneck for your connectivity to OnTime, this feature alone could improve performance by as much as 5 times! A 5-second transfer of data could be trimmed to as little as just 1 second. The compression/decompression overhead is minimal and negligible.

Remote Server Improvements - The OnTime Remote Server is a set of web services that allows OnTime Windows and VS.NET clients to access the OnTime database through HTTPS. Since Remote Server is basically a set of web services that sends XML text back and forth, applying compression to Remote Server data packets has allowed us to reduce the traffic by as much as 90%. But it gets even better! Combine the fact that Remote Server users also benefit from the Minimized Data Retrieval method described above and the enhanced caching techniques and the performance gains are absolutely incredible! In fact, it's insane! The OnTime Windows client hitting the OnTime Remote Server is now my favorite way to access our own OnTime Hosted solution and I can personally tell you that performance is at least 10 times to as much as 20 times faster than ever before. If you've checked out the OnTime Remote Server in the past and thought it was slow, check it out again. You'll be pleasantly surprised!

User Dashboard: A Combined View of Everything!

With all the performance improvements in V7.1, it's hard to remember all the other goodies we've added. We wanted to address some of the most commonly requested features:

A combined view of everything that's assigned to me
Quick, on the fly filtering based on status, priority, assignee, etc.
A quick way to see how many hours of work I have to do this week
Auto-refresh the list of items so I know about new items

These are 4 of the most requested features by OnTime Users. Until now, we hadn't figured out a good way of integrating these things into the OnTime client, but I believe V7.1 nails it. We created a new "User Dashboard" that provides the familiar grid list, but it combines all the different item types into a single, group-capable list.

By default, it shows your assigned items, grouped by item type and summarized below by the number of items in each type and number of hours they represent. But re-group the list by another item type and watch the dashboard re-calculate everything based on the new groupings. You can also set this view to auto-refresh every 5, 10, 30 or 60 minutes and you can easily do quick-filters to eliminate a certain item type, status, priority or project. You can even apply your default filters from the main OnTime view with just a single toolbar button click. This is a very slick view that should address the needs of not only individual users who want to see all their items, but also project managers who want to see collective data by project, assignee, etc.

One of my favorite things about the new User Dashboard is that it's a non-modal window, which means you can have it running side-by-side with the main OnTime Window. In fact, I could see users keeping the User Dashboard maximized on one monitor with an auto-refresh interval while the main OnTime window is minimized. Here are some screenshots to give you an idea of how great the new User Dashboard is:

Click on the new "User Dashboard" toolbar Menu to open the new, Powerful Dashboard View

The new User Dashboard shows all item types and can be Grouped by many fields. Here, it's grouped by user.

Quickly filter by User, Project, Status, Priority & Start/Due/Completion Dates

Keep the User Dashboard open as you work, setup appropriate filters and set auto-refresh to show you what's new

Another great feature of the user dashboard is that you can view items that are just assigned to you, another team member or everyone on the team, making the User Dashboard a great tool for individual users as well as the project managers and directors. I think you're going to love this new view!

But Wait, There's Even More!

And if you order in the next 15 minutes, we'll also throw in this Ginsu Knife set! Ahhh, wait a second, we don't do infomercials, we do rapomercials ;-) If you haven't already listened to the new Axosoft rap song, go take a second to do that now. You'll see another side of Axosoft :-)

Back to features...OnTime V7.1 also adds:

Email attachments for outbound emails
Multi-Edit can now edit date, short text and number fields
Improved security privileges
Improvements to OnTime Customer Portal
Non-modal add/edit windows in OnTime Windows Edition (open multiple add/edit windows)
Improved AJAX in OnTime Web

Dependent custom picklists no longer cause a page refresh
Hold down Shift-key to multi-select items

Oh and there are also over 50 bug fixes! Yeh, more than 50. Although we don't want to brag about 50 bug fixes. We shouldn't have had these bugs to begin with. But at least we're on the ball and getting them nailed. I'm almost as excited about V7.1 as I was about V7! This is a great release. For full details of what's new, check out this announcement:

Full Release Notes for OnTime V7.1 Beta

How to Get V7.1 Beta

If your company already has maintenance for OnTime, your upgrade to V7.1 is free. Go download it here:

OnTime V7.1 Beta Details and Download

If you're not sure if you have maintenance or if you want to add maintenance, login to your Axosoft account here:

Axosoft My Account Page
(Use this to check or add maintenance)

You can add maintenance by clicking on your product key and then clicking the Upgrade link.

Listen to "Fear The Bug" and watch "Buggin' Out!" Axosoft Rap Songs!

Hamid — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:40:00 GMT

Fear The Bug

As you may have heard, we've running a Geek Marketing Contest and putting up $5,000 for the best viral marketing idea we can find. While we were waiting for submissions to the Geek Marketing Contest, we decided to move forward with the creation of a rap song ourselves. We hired a group called the Big Beat Battalion (checkout their MySpace page) to write and create the song. The results are here:

Grab the "Fear The Bug" MP3 File Here

THIS SONG IS AWESOME!!! I absolutely love it! The Big Beat Battalion did such an amazing job. They nailed it. These guys are pros and they were great to work with. Very down-to-earth and amazingly talented! You have to listen to the song to see what I'm talking about. You may or may not notice the friendly jabs at the end of the song, which are aimed at a couple of our competitors. That's OK, they'll notice...We picked on these two companies, because they help keep things fresh in our industry and we're glad to have such high caliber competition. Hopefully, they'll see these call-outs as the good-hearted hat tips we intended them to be.

Now, all we need is a video for our rap song - that should be fun! Feel free to use this song to create your own "Fear The Bug" Video.

Buggin' Out!

Coincidentally, today, we received a Geek Marketing Contest submission from Dan and MC Router (they are somehow affiliated with NerdCoreForLife). They wrote a song and did a video, which is great:

Watch the YouTube Video

The idea truly qualifies as something different that has the potential for a strong viral effect. We love it and we love the fact that NerdCoreForLife took the time to both create a song and video for the contest. That is just awesome! So far, this video is hands down the leading idea submission we have had for the Geek Marketing Contest. Barring any surprise 11th hour submissions, they are the likely winner, but there's still 1 day left and my last prediction was way off...

What are We Doing?

You may be asking yourself "what are these guys doing?" and "what does rap have to do with bug tracking and project management software?" Well, a few months ago, we probably wouldn't have dreamt of commissioning a rap song or running a Geek Marketing Contest to promote OnTime 2007. But then Angelo, our Marketing Director and I, went to a presentation by Seth Godin in New York City back in February. What we realized is that we're probably throwing away a significant portion of our marketing budget every single month. We spend all kinds of money on marketing efforts that are nearly impossible to measure, yet, at best, the results of such marketing efforts, if successful, are mediocre.

After watching Seth's presentation, we decided to brainstorm on some different ways to market Axosoft. The contest and rap songs are just the beginning. You're likely to see a lot more weird non-traditional stuff from us in the future. We already have the following non-traditional ways that we're promoting our products:

Full Single-User Versions of our Software (Even the Hosted Version!) is Free! - The single-user version of our software, the entire suite, has been free for nearly 4 years and this year, with the introduction of OnTime 2007, we're even providing the hosted version of OnTime 2007 free of charge. You can get the software here. It's great to see some of the other software companies following our lead in providing free single-user versions of their products, too.
Deeply Discounted 3-User Version for $197 with $100 of each sale Donated to a Charity - Starting February 20th of 2007, with the launch of OnTime 2007, we started selling a 3-user version of our software at a deep discount of just $197 (the software normally costs about $200 per user). On top of the discount, we're donating $100 from every sale to one of 3 charities (a charity for breast cancer, autism and multiple sclerosis). In just the first 40 days, we raised over $4,200 for these charities and we're on track to raise more than $20,000 this year alone! That's just awesome regardless of whether or not it has a viral effect. It's just a great cause.

Look for more unique stuff like this from us. We're always trying to keep it a little different and stay fresh.

Thinking of Outsourcing Support? Think Again!

Hamid — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:49:00 GMT

Recently, I called HP sales to find out if there was a place I could download the drivers for an HP Laptop I was considering purchasing. Since I hadn't yet purchased this computer yet, I figured it's a pre-sales call. I wanted to make sure the drivers were available prior to my purchase. You see, I always wipe all the software that comes on new machines because most systems are bloated with a bunch of trial ware that I don't need - the Apple "Stuffed" Ad nails it, yet again! I had already checked HPs web site and couldn't find the drivers listed for the computer model I was interested in, which was the reason for my call. However, the sales rep who answered the call heard me say "drivers" and immediately identified the call as a "support" call, not a pre-sales call. No problem, a quick transfer to support and I should have my answer. Needless to say, the remainder of my call went something very close to this:

The main difference with my call was that after 4 transfers and 28 minutes into the call, *I* was the one hanging up. That's 28 minutes and 4 transfers for trying to find out where I could download drivers! And I still didn't have my answer. This sort of service has become way too common. I've had similar calls with Microsoft and Dell (although Dell's business support is actually decent and US-based). The main problem is that these calls are obviously outsourced to Indian firms. Even though the support reps have a heavy accent, they've changed their names to be "American" sounding. You're not fooling anyone and trying to fool us with names like "Chris" and "Cindy" are plain stupid - it immediately gets me to start thinking why this Indian-sounding person's name is so American. There's nothing wrong with being Indian, so don't hide it! There is something wrong with cluelessness, cultural misunderstandings, lack of sympathy and unhelpfulness. Instead of giving them names like "Chris", try asking what the caller is looking for in the first 60 seconds of the call.

Angelo who also oversees Axosoft Support found the above video and forwarded it to our support team (originally in this article) to make sure we never make such mistakes. I was happy to see the video and I immediately thought I want to promote this video in the hopes that more companies will improve their support and stop seeing support as something they need to outsource to be someone else' problem.

Amazon S3 File Browser

Hamid — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:52:00 GMT

After yesterday's tech lunch, Tim Heuer, the local MS evangelist, came to our offices along with Scott Cate. We were chatting about some of the new technologies on the net including Amazon's S3 service. If you don't already know about Amazon's S3, it's essentially a storage mechanism that Amazon has put together that lives in cyberspace. Amazon provides the redundancy, infrastructure, bandwidth and unlimited storage based on a pay-as-you-go model and you do everything else through a set of APIs. Apparently after our talk, Tim put together a cool S3 File browser that lets you insert your S3 objects as links or as an image into Tim's Live Writer plugin.

Tech Lunch was Great Today!

Hamid — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 04:12:00 GMT

For the past year or so, Scott Cate of MyKB.com (also the local head of the .NET user group), Matt Birmingham of New Amsterdam Consulting and I have been meeting every Wednesday at a local Chipotle for lunch. We talk about the tech industry, how we can improve our businesses and the latest cool stuff we've been working on. Last week, Scott got the idea of sending an open invite to the Phoenix .NET User Group and I'm glad he did. It always feels like there aren't many tech companies in Arizona or that they're not doing anything exciting. We sort of feel like loners, especially when all the action seems to be in Silicon Valley. But the reality is that there's tons of cool stuff going on right here in Phoenix. Today I got to meet Robert Anderson, President of AspDotNetStoreFront.com (who makes a great ASP.NET based ecommerce solution) and a few of the guys from Integrum Technologies, a consulting group dedicated to Ruby on Rails. Pretty cool people. I'm looking forward to getting more stuff going locally.

Geek Marketing Contest: How About Some Rap Songs?

Hamid — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:55:00 GMT

I have to say it. I've been pretty disappointed with our Geek Marketing Contest results so far. A little more than 30 marketing ideas have been submitted and nothing so far that has been worthy of a $5,000 prize. There is still plenty of time, but if all we get is 50 or so marketing ideas, that makes the average marketing idea worth about $100. Believe me, the average marketing idea submitted so far is definitely not worth $100 (you can read them all here). So where are all the good ideas? Where are the videos, flash animations, good catchy stories?

Geeky and Nerdy Videos

There are some really cool nerdy videos out there that could be great marketing ideas. Angelo already pointed out the White and Nerdy video and my friend Tim Heuer recently pointed to another cool nerd video by NerdCoreForLife. As I was YouTube surfing over the weekend I also ran into several others, including one by MC Chris that's pretty funny. Here are the ones I just mentioned:

If you're in for some more controversial videos, MC Hawkings has some really funny stuff (I'll let you do the Google video search on that one).

A Call for Nerdy Raps, Videos, Images or Animations

One way or another, we're giving away $5,000 in our Geek Marketing Contest and as far as I'm concerned, the field is wide open. So how about a rap song, a funny viral image, a catchy flash animation or a video submission? $5,000 can buy a lot of video editing equipment. Here's a sample shopping spree that you could do on Apple.com with $5,000:

That's an Apple MacBook Pro (2.33Ghz, 2GB RAM, 256MB Video) + an External 23" Cinema Display + a Canon HD Camera + Final Cut Express HD. What more could you want? That's the full-blown editing studio. The entire shopping spree? Just $4,796.95! That leaves you with some change for an iPod:

The point is, you can do a lot of damage with $5,000 and the contest is wide open, so what are you waiting for? Jump in! Submit your idea, video, animation, story, song, or whatever else right now. To submit, leave a comment on this blog post. If you're submitting a video, upload it to YouTube and post the link.

OnTime for DOS

Hamid — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:23:00 GMT

I just ran into a marketing flashback project that we had done a while back. A couple of years ago, in an attempt to create a viral marketing site for OnTime 2005, we came up with a funny web site, ShipSoftwareOnTime.com, which among other funny things had an "OnTime for DOS" window listing a bunch of amusing facts:

Of course, nothing factual, but just the facts. It was a nice break from the day-to-day stuff that we did here and it reminded me of other unique marketing ideas we've done here at Axosoft. To put a smile on your face, click on the image above. (keep in mind, this is a 2 year old web site, promoting OnTime 2005)

It's IN to be Geek - Why Geeks Make Better Lovers

Hamid — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 23:14:00 GMT

Since we announced our Geek Marketing Contest a couple of days ago, my geek radar is much more sensitive now. Angelo pointed to a number of articles that revolve around geek marketing, but lately, everything seems to be geek oriented. Just now, I saw Wired Magazine has an article titled Top 10 Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers. That's great! I knew there was a reason I was cool - I'm just wondering why all of a sudden the world is realizing it. When did it become chic to be geek? (hey, that rhymes! how geeky!)

Some of my favorite top 10 reasons mentioned in the article for why Geeks Make Better Lovers:

Geeks Experiment
Geeks Pay Attention to Detail
Geeks Don't Get Shocked Easily (read the details on that one)

Anyway, it's a funny article for a Friday afternoon.

World's First Geek Marketing Contest: Win $5,000 for Your Idea

Hamid — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:21:00 GMT

Axosoft does all kinds of marketing and advertising. We do Google AdWords, SEO optimization, print ads and other online ads. We spend a lot of money on these activities and we're always trying to find a better way to do it. The more efficient we can be at marketing, the more resources that can be available for development. That's why we frequently try to do some unique marketing things. Last year, we gave away a 5-user version of our product for just $5 in a social marketing experiment. The deal was that for a period of 3 days, we sold OnTime 5-User Licenses for $5 and donated the proceeds to the Red Cross. In 3 days time, we sold more than 2,600 copies of OnTime and donated more than $14,000 to the Red Cross. I documented the details of the event in this blog post. That was super exciting, but marketing successes like that are rare and we haven't had another similar success for a long time. So Angelo and I thought we'd open up Axosoft's next super successful marketing idea to the public in a simple competition where the winner can win $5,000.

Win $5,000 Just for Posting a Unique Marketing Idea

So here's how this is going to work: We want to make this as public as possible and allow other companies to benefit from the idea pool that the $5,000 prize will generate. All you have to do to be eligible to win is to post your marketing idea as a comment to this blog post (and be a US Resident who's at least 18 years of age and not an Axosoft Employee). Yep, that's it! Crazy isn't it? It'll probably take you less than 30 seconds to submit an idea. Submit two or three! You can put multiple ideas in the same comment. Tell your friends or colleagues to submit their marketing ideas.

Geek to Geek Marketing <G2G>Marketing</G2G>

We're all big geeks at Axosoft (even if the sales team is not willing to admit it) and we love good, new and unique ideas, wherever they come from. Since Axosoft products are designed for highly technical people, we expect that geeks will have the best insight on how to market to our audience. This contest is designed to bring out the best ideas by some of the most talented individuals who normally wouldn't be asked to do marketing. So go ahead, do some marketing! Share your ideas - we know you got them!

Criteria for Winning

Keep the following guidelines in mind to help improve your chances of winning:

Post your idea as a comment to this blog.
It must cost less than $5,000 to implement your idea (this cost limit is independent of the $5,000 prize to the winner - that means the total cost of this experiment could be as much as $10,000 for Axosoft)
If you know nothing about Axosoft or OnTime, you might want to do a little homework to make sure your idea applies to our type of company and product line.
If your idea is complex to implement (in either time or resources), it lowers the probability of winning
If you do the leg-work for the implementation of your idea, it increases your probability of winning (for example, if your idea is to do a video, submitting a completed video with your idea, significantly increases your probability of winning)
You must submit your idea no later than May 15th, 2007

Remember that no proprietary ideas can be submitted. This is a public submission of your idea, which means anybody could see and use your idea for any purpose. That's part of the point. We want to encourage fresh and unique marketing ideas to flow and we anticipate that many will come from non-marketing people. Axosoft (and anyone who reads the submissions) may choose to implement many of the ideas, even though we will only select 1 idea to win the $5,000 prize.

Announcement of Winner

The winner will be selected and announced solely at my discretion on or before June 20th, 2007. Note that the submission deadline is May 15th, 2007, so it's quite possible we might test out multiple ideas in order to help us determine which idea was the best prior to picking the winner.

Things Might Change

You might have found this contest to be the simplest with the fewest rules that you've ever seen for a $5,000 prize. There's no 5-page fine-print set of rules. We intentionally want to keep things simple and let the ideas flow, but we also recognize that we might need to fine tune the rules to keep it on track. Therefore, we reserve the right to change the rules. If that happens, we'll work hard to preserve the spirit and simplicity of the contest.

Check Back Often

Since the ideas will be comments to this post, you can check back often to see other people's ideas and gauge how your idea compares. You might also get ideas from other ideas. Feel free to submit multiple times.

Good Luck!

Updates:

We just added a forum where you can discuss this contest and ask any questions you might have. This way, we can reserve comments for this blog post just for the actual marketing ideas / entries.

See Angelo's blog post, Calling All Geeks!, to read who should enter this contest and more...

MAY 8TH: As of May 8th, 2007, with approximately 45 idea submissions, we have not yet received any submissions of viral videos, flash animations or applications that might help spread the word viraly. I want to emphasize that if you can create a viral video, flash animation or even an application that can help promote Axosoft's OnTime, your likelihood of winning the $5,000 prize is extremely high! There's still time to create and submit your videos, flash and other potential viral apps!

OnTime 3-User Sales Generate $4,200 for Axosoft Charities!

Hamid — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:13:00 GMT

A little known secret: with the release of OnTime 2007, we introduced a specially priced 3-User version of OnTime for just $197 (a product that's worth about $600 - $199 per user x 3 Users). But here's the really cool part - we decided that for each of these special 3-User sales, Axosoft will donate $100 of the sale to any of the following charities:

Autism Society of America - Their mission: To increase public awareness about autism and the day-to-day issues faced by individuals with autism, their families and the professionals with whom they interact.
Komen for the Cure - Their mission: To save lives and end breast cancer forever by empowering people, ensuring quality care for all and energizing science to find the cures.
National Multiple Sclerosis Society - Their mission: To end the devastating effects of MS.

Why did we do this? Partly to give back to the community to do something good and partly to help benefit Axosoft by generating more goodwill and awareness. To pick the charities, we turned to Axosoft employees for suggestions and as it turns out, each of the above charities hits close to home for at least one Axosoft employee.

With the list of charities narrowed down to just 3, we decided to let customers make the final decision as to which charity should receive the $100 from their purchase that would be donated. For customers who didn't know which charity to choose, we also gave them the option to choose one at random. Here's how it broke down:

8 Chose Autism Society of America
4 Chose Komen for the Cure
6 Chose National Multiple Sclerosis Society
24 Chose to have us Pick one at random

For the "Pick one at random" choice, since 24 is evenly divisible by 3 charities, we're going to equally distribute the 24 choices to the 3 charities, with each getting an additional $800. So here's how the distribution of donations turned out:

$1,600 for Autism Society of America
$1,200 for Komen for the Cure
$1,400 for National Multiple Sclerosis Society

We plan to do this every quarter and I'll share the numbers with you after the close of each quarter. I'm off to sign the checks for the charities - this is one of the coolest things we've done at Axosoft. I'm very excited that we can participate in a small way to help improve people's lives.

How Team Bloggers Like TechCrunch Can Use OnTime to Manage Articles

Hamid — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:11:00 GMT

Early on in the development of Axosoft's OnTime, I made the conscious decision to focus all of our marketing efforts on software development teams. But as many OnTime users have already noticed, the OnTime product is extremely flexible and can manage any number of project types, not just software development.

In fact, a growing number of our customers are using OnTime to manage team-based blogs. Team-based blogs are becoming more and more popular and the editors of such blogs need a way to manage everything from articles to authors to their workflow processes: Articles go from a state of "New Article Request" to "Approved" (or "Rejected) to "Being Written" to "Ready for Review" and finally, to "Published".

I noticed there's nothing out there for team-blog publishers to be able to easily manage their articles and processes. In fact, a Google search for Team Blog Management Tools reveals how badly such tools are lacking. So I thought I'd write this blog entry to show how OnTime could easily be configured to manage a team blog.

To make the example more real, I've decided to choose a real team blog, TechCrunch, to demonstrate OnTime's capabilities and how TechCrunch might use OnTime if they wanted to manage their publishing process. Additionally, since bloggers love web apps and they hate installing any software, I've chosen the OnTime Hosted Edition for demonstration (all this cool stuff can also be done with the OnTime Windows client). I'm also going to log my time from signup to full setup. I want to see how long it takes for someone to configure OnTime for a team blog. So here it goes...

Signup for OnTime Hosted

The OnTime Hosted Signup process is extremely simple. Just a few required fields to create an account and Axosoft's Hosting Services kick in to create a full-fledged installation of OnTime with a private database and the web application within seconds. I received the email within 30 seconds of signup:

The email contains a link to the custom URL along with the admin user's login information.

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 2 Minutes

Logging In and Initial Setup Wizard

The login screen is straight forward and immediately after login, you're greeted with a short Startup Wizard that helps you start the customization process.

Once logged in, the OnTime Setup Wizard kicks in:

The Wizard asks that you change the admin password to something you'll remember rather than the 7 digit randomized password the OnTime hosted service has created for you:

In Step 2, the Startup Wizard asks what type of information you'd like to track. At this point, OnTime uses terminology for Software Development Teams, but don't worry, we're going to change all that. Here, we want to tell OnTime to just track "Software Features" (which we'll later rename to "Articles"):

In Step 3, you get the first chance to start the customization process. Here, we'll want to rename "Feature" and "Features" to "Article" and "Articles":

In Step 4, the system asks if you'd like to track time spent on each item. OnTime has a "Work Log" feature that allows users to enter the amount of time they've spent on work items. If you'd like to track author's times on articles, turn this feature on. Keeping it off will make the main User Interface less complex if you don't intend to track it (and of course, you can always change these settings later):

In Step 5, the Wizard asks if you want to create any sample data, such as a project, customer and a sample article:

Step 6 is just to address the two-browser world. Unfortunately, with all the cool AJAX features of OnTime Web Edition, browsers tend to treat the same command a little differently. For that reason, OnTime recommends using fixed-width dimensions if you are FireFox user and if you use IE 7, you can benefit from 100% of browser width:

In the final setup wizard screen, OnTime reminds you that you can access the setup wizard at anytime in the future from the Tools menu.

Now we're logged in and ready to go. Here's what the initial screen looks like:

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 5 Minutes

Setting up Users (Authors)

Even though OnTime is ready to go and you can start adding articles immediately, it's a good idea to start by entering and tracking all your authors. So now we're going to switch to the "Users" tab:

...and start adding users. We'll start with Michael Arrington as the first user and we'll use the built-in OnTime Security Roles (all roles can be customized, but the built-in roles will be sufficient for most sites and certainly for our sample):

Nothing complicated there. We'll go ahead and add all of our users, so at the end, our users tree should look something like this:

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 12 Minutes (includes time to add all 10 users)

Time to Customize

You may have noticed that OnTime is still using some of the terminology from software development. Things like "Feature ID" as a field name or "Ready for Testing" as a workflow state, etc. But all of these things can be customized, so lets start.

The first thing we want to do, is fix our field names. From the Tools Menu, select System Options:

Don't be scared. There are a TON of things you can customize here, but the vast majority can be left alone with the default settings. OnTime does a great job of starting you out with a good set of defaults, but giving you the power of changing it all to meet your needs. The area we're interested in is "Field Names -> Article Fields":

Here, we just want to change:

Feature ID -> Article ID
Name -> Article Title

Next, we'll want to setup the Article workflow. Now, I'm taking a wild guess here, but I've decided that the article workflow should go something like this:

Now, of course, you can have a much simpler workflow. Even a simple "Article Not Done" and "Article Complete" workflow can work . But for this example, we'll assume that TechCrunch has a workflow process that requires articles to be approved, by none other than Michael Arrington. So to modify our workflow in OnTime, from the Articles Menu, select Manage Workflow:

When we're done with our workflow modifications, the workflow screen will look something like this:

Now OnTime allows for multiple workflow definitions. You can create different workflows with different levels of complexity for each project. This allows for more sophisticated blogs to have fast-track workflows for some types of articles (like those being written live at a conference), while more research intensive articles can have a different workflow. For this example, we'll assume just 1 workflow for all articles as shown in the screenshot above.

To define the workflow steps, I went through and renamed the workflow steps from "Feature Requested" to "Article Requested" and so on. Here's a walk-through of one of my workflow step definitions:

In Step 2, Actions, I make sure that the OnTime system automatically assigns a Priority, Status and Assignee to new Article Requests:

Step 3 allows for conveniences, such as opening the edit screen to edit the details of an article when an article goes into this workflow step. In our case, we're going to leave the default settings:

In Step 4, Allowed Next Steps, we are able to enforce our processes. For example, we can determine that the only allowed next steps for a new Article Request is "Approved" or "Rejected" and only Project Managers can Approve articles:

And finally, for Step 5, we're going to take the default settings (when in doubt, using OnTime's default setting is the safest route):

For each workflow step, we can also define a set of users who should be notified when an item goes into that workflow step. To add users to the notification list for a step, simply select the step and at the bottom of the Workflow screen, click the plus sign to add Notifications:

One more thing we still need to customize. OnTime's default settings include a couple of fields that are specific to software development, such as "Planned Build Number". We can easily remove such fields from our implementation. From the Tools Menu, select the Manage Field Templates option:

From the templates list, choose to modify the "Feature Field Template". You can rename the template and also choose to uncheck all the fields you don't want to see. Additionally, from this screen, you can choose any fields that you want to be required:

Total Time Elapsed Since Signup: 21 Minutes

Ready to Start

21 minutes into the setup and you're ready to start using OnTime to manage your team's articles! You can't beat that. Sure, you could have used the default settings to get started right away, but with only a 21-minute investment OnTime is totally customized to work the way it should -- your way.

So lets get going. Go back to the OnTime Home page and from the Articles menu or the Articles toolbar, choose to add a new article:

Add all the articles you want to track using the same Add Article method. After adding several articles, you might have a main page that looks something like this:

Lets examine some of the elements on this main page. First, there's the "Users" tab. By selecting a user, you can view all the articles for that user. Selecting "[ALL USERS]" allows for all articles to be viewed, while selecting "[NO USER]" allows for articles that are unassigned to be viewed:

Then, there's the main "Articles" section that's a nice grid listing of all the articles. This is by far the most powerful portion of the screen. From here, you can easily add new articles, edit or delete articles, setup custom views, change your column settings (try drag-and-dropping columns), group your view by assignee, status, workflow or any of a number of different fields and also move items along on the workflow. In this screen capture, we have the articles grouped by workflow so we can quickly see the stage of each article:

To change your grouped view or to move an item along on the workflow, you can use the appropriate toolbar menus:

The Item details at the bottom right of the screen show additional information about the currently selected item. In this screenshot, I have the "Attachments" tab selected where a screenshot relating to the article is previewed:

And on the lower left hand portion of the screen, a quick Mini Dashboard indicates the status of the current items in view (based on user, filter and project selections). This allows us to quickly see the collective status of the items we're looking at:

What Else is there?

OnTime has a tremendous number of additional features that can make day-to-day life of a blog team super easy. Here are some additional features that I haven't covered:

Ability to Automatically Check POP Email Account and Create Articles - Sites like TechCrunch that have an email address where users can suggest articles (like editor@techcrunch.com) can have those accounts automatically checked by OnTime. Anytime a new email comes in, OnTime can auto-assign the Article a workflow step (like "New Article Request") and assign it to a user. It can even put it into a project specific to Customer suggested articles where it's easy to find. Then one of the editors can quickly go through all the items and using the Multi-Edit feature, either reject or accept articles.
Project Hierarchy - OnTime's project hierarchy feature is one of its most powerful features because it allows teams to organize their articles by department, category, type or whatever other taxonomy that makes sense. OnTime allows for project settings inheritance allowing each project to have its own workflow, field templates, etc. or inherit from its parent.
Filters and Reports - No management tool would be complete without good filtering capabilities. OnTime makes it super easy to filter the articles view by project or by user. Additionally, you can create any number of public or private filters to show articles that meet any number of filter conditions. Everything from a particular workflow step, priority, assignee or due date. Once you have the right items on screen, running a report gives you a PDF-ready document that's good to print or email.
Import or Export - If you already use a tool like Excel to manage your articles, it's easy to get that data into OnTime. OnTime has a built-in import feature that allows you to easily map the fields of OnTime to any fields you may have used in an Excel spreadsheet. Exporting couldn't be easier. Just click the export button on the toolbar.
Powerful Security - OnTime allows any number of security roles to be created, each of which can limit access to projects and type of access, down to the field level. If you have complex security needs, chances are, OnTime can handle them.

There are a lot more gems once you start using the application. I think the most powerful gem is that within 30-minutes, you'll be up and running with OnTime in a production setting using our new state of the art hosted environment.

A few Noteworthy Blog Posts

Hamid — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:31:00 GMT

Every now and then, I read a blog post that's more than just interesting. I thought I'd share a few with you. In the past couple of weeks, these posts have stood out for me:

In the "Ship Software OnTime" department...

Andrés Taylor writes about Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me. His advice is sound and would help any software development team come closer to the goal of shipping software on-time! Definitely worth the read.

In the "Entrepreneur" department...

Guy Kawasaki gives a glowing review of the book Founders at Work, but even though my copy of the book hasn't arrived, Guy's writeup is a great short read because of the cherry picked quotes from founders of Apple, Lotus, Hotmail, Yahoo and more.

In the "Cool" department...

This new AppleTV Hacker blog gives step-by-step instructions on how to rip DVDs for the AppleTV. There's all kinds of other hacks in there too - man that was fast!

In the "Sweet Endorsement" department...

Rob Howard, founder of Telligent, creators of the Community Server product that this blog is running, gives a pretty good endorsement to the BlackBerry 8800. For those of us in need of smart phones (all of which are mostly dumb), endorsements like these are a great way for us to find the right product. Too bad this phone is currently only a Cingular product. I've already sworn I'll never go Cingular again! (the Apple iPhone might make me take back my words, but I doubt it)

In the "Oh no! He's telling them everything" deparment...

Eric Sink has defected from the elite group of those "in the know" and decided to share the secrets of success with the public in his post Valuable Secret Strategy Tips. Eric is one of the founders of SourceGear, makers of Vault, a great SCM product that OnTime integrates with.

Yeh, they are a random collection of blog posts, but that's the stuff that interests me.

Axosoft Gives OnTime Team Apple TVs (See Some Pics of Apple TV Unboxing)

Hamid — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:02:00 GMT

With nearly 10 days to go in Q1 of 2007, Axosoft is already in the midst of another record-breaking quarter (our 14th record quarter out of just 15 quarters total - I know, it's hard for me to believe too). Besides being an exceptionally great financial quarter for Axosoft, we've also shipped some great software: a major new version of OnTime, the world's most advanced defect, feature and incident management system. And, just two days ago we launched the Axosoft Community Site, an integrated blog, forum and customer portal system. There is no other community site like it in the world.

So when you get this kind of stellar performance from employees, and you don't want to wait until annual reviews to reward them, what do you do? Well, today, I gave the entire Axosoft OnTime team brand new Apple TVs. Hot off the manufacturing presses, shipped directly from China just 2 days ago! I think today's the first day regular consumers in the U.S. could have possibly gotten their hands on an Apple TV.

Here are some cool pics from the meeting where I handed them out. Check it out:

Axosoft Community Site Combines Blogs, Forums and OnTime Customer Portal

Hamid — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:52:00 GMT

Yesterday, we launched the Axosoft Community Site. With over 50,000 users worldwide and rapidly growing, the OnTime user community is a sophisticated group of individuals who are some of the best software developers, testers and project managers in the world. For the past 4 years, our only offering to this community has been a user forum where both users and Axosoft employees participate in some lively conversations about the OnTime product line. But we wanted to kick things up a notch and offer our users the best possible community experience where they can participate in shaping Axosoft's future products and offer their expertise to their counterparts in other parts of the world.

This is by far the most advanced user community site I know of (please tell me if you know of a more advanced system) and we're super excited about it. We think it's going to improve our customer experience tremendously and allow us to accelerate the pace of improvements at Axosoft.

How we Built it:

Nothing like the Axosoft Community Site exists off the shelf, but many of the components do. So here's how we did it: First, we started with Telligent's Community Server to combine our existing user forums and blogs. Prior to this launch, we used InstantASP's InstantForums and for blogs, we used .TEXT V0.95. So transferring the data to the new Community Server product was in itself a huge challenge. After that was done, we brought in our own OnTime Customer Portal, a web product that combines bug reporting, feature request and support incident tracking systems and fully integrates it into our own installation of OnTime 2007 that we use internally to manage all projects. This is the first time we're using the OnTime Customer Portal and as first-time end-users, we immediately saw that there were some features that would make this product better than ever before (like external auth and easier integration into existing sites - these new Customer Portal features will be released in OnTime V7.0.2). Then we combined the authentication systems of our old forums, the blogging system, the Axosoft Online Store and the OnTime Customer Portal into a single master authentication system. The ruling party is a universal "Axosoft Account" that gives you access to everything Axosoft related. So now when you sign into the Axosoft Community site, you're also signed into the Axosoft Store where you can manage your account or any hosted installations of OnTime and you can report a new support incident or post a new blog to your blog (if you have an Axosoft Community blog). A single user id and password gets you access to everything.

To add more participation from the OnTime Community, we're also opening up Axosoft Community Blogs to anyone who wants to blog about OnTime, Project Management, Software Testing or Software Development. Staying on subject, but expanding the community to bring best practices about software development.

We hope you enjoy it. We sure had a great time building it.

OnTime 2007 Released - New Axosoft Web Site, Media Center

Hamid — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:43:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of OnTime 2007 for Windows, Web & VS.NET 2005. The new version adds a huge number of improvements over OnTime 2006 including new help desk incident tracking, a completely redesigned AJAX-based Web UI and a ton more.

With this release we've also completely redesigned the Axosoft Web Site and the Axosoft Online Store. Take a look:

New Axosoft Web Site

New Axosft Online Store

I think the new sites represent a huge leap in site design, content, navigation and ease-of-use in comparison to most of what's out there today. I'm especially excited about the new Axosoft Media Center page containing numerous videos and tutorials to help users get started with Axosoft products and even learn about Axosoft itself. Plus the new Axosoft Store allows for super easy configurations of OnTime 2007 to obtain immediate pricing feedback for any configuration of OnTime.

It was an exciting day!

A Second First Impression with Vista & an HP Notebook

Hamid — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 18:20:00 GMT

Yesterday, I had a second chance to build a first impression of Microsoft's Vista. You might recall I installed Vista on my Dell laptop a couple of months ago and have been using it since. So far, my experience with Vista has been less than stellar. I've had about a dozen blue-screens and more than a dozen additional complete freezes that require a hard reboot. I've had more problems with Vista in 2 months time than more than 5 years of using Windows XP, but I digress.

Yesterday, I bought my sister a new HP laptop from Costco with Vista pre-installed. This laptop had amazing specs and for just $999, I was quite jelous of what my sister was getting. An AMD-based dual core processor, 15” screen, 120GB HD, DVD Burner, 2GB of RAM (the specs are similar to this machine, but our Costco had 2GB models for the same price rather than 1GB). Plus it had a built-in camera (similar to the MacBook) and even a remote control that slides into the side of the machine.

At work, we have mostly standardized on Dell machines, so I haven't seen HP machines for a long time and this little notbook was impressive. The fact that it had Vista Premium pre-installed made me even more excited. Of course, when I dropped off the machine at my sister's house she asked me to set it up for her so she can start using it right away. I figured, “no problem,” this shouldn't take but just a minute or two. So I unpacked everything, and now I'm evem more impressed with the HP hardware as it has some cool media touch-buttons for volume and media playback, the remote tucks away on the side of the machine and it has a great overall look and feel to it. Very nice. I plugged everything in and turned it on.

“Please wait while Windows prepares your machine for first time use...”

It's an ugly screen that greets you, but hey, it's not a biggie. It's cool that it's preparing the machine. I don't want the machine to be surprised thinking “woh! what the hell is going on?” So go ahead and prepare it. We'll wait. Let it know that we're about to start using it and we might even push a few buttons on the keyboard.

So we waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited until finally, after more than 15 minutes, yep, that's 900 seconds for those of you who count startup-times by the second, the machine (are you ready for this?), REBOOTED. Oh, there was nothing wrong...this was part of the process. It was preparing the machine. Finally, Windows Vista was loading up...some better looking graphics this time around as we waited some more. After another minute or so, it asked for some user information. OK, now we're talking. The machine was finally ready for my sister to use, or was it? “Now it says it's testing my system's performance” my sister mumbled in confusion. Hmmm...the whole time I couldn't help thinking “couldn't HP have turned on the god damn machine once before packaging it up so that we don't have to be the ones waiting for this stupid thing to prepare?“

Another 15 minutes later and the performance test was over. All in all, it was approximately 35 minutes after the point I turned on the machine to the point where we were actually using it. WOW! More than 2,100 seconds. Is that the first-time boot experience Microsoft or HP was aiming for? Who were the idiots who said “yeh, that seems acceptable”? There was no value from having the user go through this waiting process while the machine prepares, except to completely kill the enthusiasm that one might have for using their brand new computer for the first time.

I have to say, so far, Vista has been a major disapointment.

OnTime 2007 Ship-Date Announced

Hamid — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 15:37:00 GMT

February 20th. That's the date OnTime 2007 (V7.0) final-version will be released. This version is by far the largest set of improvements we've ever introduced in a major new release. I couldn't be more excited! We've been using the new Incident tracking internally for supporting our customers, and the support guys absolutely love using it as it helps them prioritize and track all conversations they have with customers. The web & hosted versions are now on par with the OnTime Windows client, which makes setup and management of OnTime a 1-click process. You can setup a free single-user hosted solution or a multi-user trial in less than 30 seconds. We use the same hosted service that we offer to customers to run our own internal OnTime solution.

We've also updated the Axosoft Online Store to have the most advanced, yet simple to use, pricing and configuration system to help customers configure, price and buy OnTime 2007. I guarantee you that you've never seen a store like this. The store provides pricing on any configuration of OnTime in both Installed and Hosted options so you can easily compare the cost of each solution before making your selection. Check it out:

Try the New OnTime 2007 Pricing and Purchase Tool

Alright, back to working towards release. We only have 18 days left and a lot of work to do. Stay tuned.

OnTime Small Team 10-User Pack Phase-Out and Other Changes Coming Soon

Hamid — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:11:00 GMT

There have been a number of people asking about the lack of a 10-User Starter Pack in our new OnTime 2007 pricing. We've done this for several reasons. Currently, the OnTime Small Team Edition has a 10-user restriction, meaning if you want to go beyond 10 users, you'd have to first switch to OnTime Professional Edition for an upgrade fee of $1,000, then add the licenses you need for the additional users. To simplify things, we have eliminated the 10-user restriction in OnTime 2007's pricing.

So, we're only offering a 5-User starter pack for $495 with additional users priced at $199 -- no more penalties for going beyond 10 users and regardless of how many users you need, everyone starts with the low-price 5-user starter pack and adds additional users from there. Much simpler, and works great for everyone!

But of course, this does mean that the OnTime Small Team Edition for 10-user pricing (a smoking deal at just $995) will be phased out as soon as we move to OnTime 2007 pricing. Since OnTime 2007 pricing will go into effect starting February 1st, there's still a chance to buy the 10-user OnTime Small Team Edition for only $995 and still get the OnTime 2007 upgrade free! (and yes, you'll be able to add your 11th user for just $199 without a penalty as soon as we switch the store to the OnTime 2007 pricing).

So there you have it. If you've been considering the OnTime Small Team Edition 10-User pack, you have 6 days left to make your purchase before the OnTime 2007 pricing goes into effect.

By the way, on February 1st, we're going to announce the ship-date of OnTime 2007, which is coming up very soon! Stay tuned...

New OnTime 2007 Pricing

Hamid — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:20:00 GMT

Yesterday was a tough day for me. You see, this past Saturday, all of a sudden I got this feeling that we were going the wrong direction with our OnTime 2007 pricing. If you read my posts, you might recall that I announced OnTime 2007 pricing and requested feedback a couple of months ago. The feedback we received from customers was essentially a shrug, as in, “looks ok to me.” The goal of our new pricing, with 3 different editions (Standard, Pro & Enterprise) was to make the product more appealing to customers with varying needs and varying sizes. But this was actually making things somewhat complicated. Now customers would have to decide which edition is right for them with price being a motivating factor to possibly choose the wrong product for their needs. So we were adding a level of complexity with 3 different editions of our product and all we got was a shrug, no enthusiasm. We weren't going after a shrug.

I couldn't help thinking that maybe we're going about it all wrong. So yesterday, I had several OnTime 2007 pricing meetings with our sales team, customer relations and marketing. Sure enough, everybody was uncomfortable with our new pricing. They sort of liked it, but they knew they were going to have to do a lot of explaining to customers. Explaining which edition is right for which customer and possibly getting it wrong. Nobody thought that the price was too high, but there was a consensus that the pricing was a bit confusing. We didn't want to put customers in a position to possibly choose the wrong version of the product and have a poor user experience. Every feature we build into OnTime is designed with care and we go through significant effort to make sure all such features are useful to users. To limit these features based on which edition the user picks was unsettling.

So yesterday, we decided we needed a simplified pricing model that was fair to all customers. We re-wrote our goals to make sure we're going to meet every objective:

It must be simple
The software experience should be the same for all users
There has to be a low barrier to entry for small teams who are price sensitive
We must be able to address the needs of larger enterprises with the attention and priority that they require

So, here's what we've come up with:

Installed

1 Edition, OnTime 2007 (no more Standard, Professional and Enterprise)
All Users can Use Web, Windows or VS.NET client types (all licenses are essentially “Mixed-Mode“)
Free Single-User License (just like before)
5-User Starter Pack for $495 (keeping the barrier to entry low for small teams)
$199 for Additional Users (same price for everyone, all features included - this is huge as it means no price increase with tons of new functionality)

Hosted

OnTime 2007 Web Edition
Free Single-User License (this is new for hosted)
5-User Starter Pack for $49 per month
$19 per user per month for additional users

We're also reducing standard maintenance to 25%. How cool is that? The overall effect of our new pricing is to provide significantly higher product functionality at the same price. Oh, and one more thing...we're dropping the $1,000 upgrade fee for Small Team Edition customers who want to add their 11th user.

To address the needs of larger enterprise customers who need a higher level of attention, training and ongoing services, we've also added a Premier Maintenance Pack.

I'm really excited about the new pricing and the first indication that we've nailed it is that internally, everyone is excited. No more shrugs! We actually have some enthusiasm around the new pricing!

I've summarized the pricing model in the chart below:

Bug Tracking, Requirements Management & Help Desk: Integrated at Last!

Hamid — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 19:42:00 GMT

Working with different software development teams over the years, it always amazed me to see the number of teams that use the same bug tracking tool to track requirements or customer feature requests and sometimes even support incidents. I don't mean a tool that was designed to track the different types of items, but rather a tool designed just to track bugs. To distinguish between the different item types, many teams use an “item type” field to determine if an entry is a bug, a feature or a support call.

I've never thought this was a good idea. First, the type of information you want to track for each item type is vastly different. For example, having Repro steps for a feature makes absolutely no sense, while having an executive sponsor for a defect makes no sense. You might want to capture the details of a user's environment who is reporting a bug, while again, this information is completely irrelevant for a feature request. Likewise support teams will often want to capture every single call or support “incident”, even if incidents are similar or duplicates of one another, as long as they are from different customers. To a software development team, having hundreds of duplicate entries in the bug database is as close to a nightmare scenario as you can possibly get. Each of those duplicate items will have to be tracked, verified, rejected, marked as duplicate or closed. The fact is, each of these item types are very different and they are used by different roles within the development team. Feature requests or requirements are used primarily by system analysts and product managers while bug reports are primarily used by testers and developers. Support incidents are mostly used by help desk teams and support personnel. Any tool that tries to combine all the item types into the same bucket will inevitably disappoint its users.

For the design of Axosoft's OnTime, we've always believed in a separation of church and state. Bugs or Defects have had a completely independent tab from Features or Requirements. Each have their own workflows, custom fields, security, filters and so on. We later introduced team member Tasks that allow users to keep track of an independent (and mostly private) todo list. Tasks might have nothing to do with a defect or feature in the system. It might simply be to install a new version of a particular software - it's just something that needs to get done.

But of course there is a lot of goodness that can come out of using the same tool for tracking bugs, feature requests and support incidents. Users want to go to a single location for all related information and they often have to communicate about a particular support incident, feature or bug with a team member of a different role. There are a number of reasons to use the same system to track all of the above information:

Single sign-on to track all project related information
Easily communicate between team roles (analysts, developers, testers and support)
Search for related bugs, customer requests or incidents, especially helpful when on a support call
When deciding on new features, product and program managers can quickly examine the support incident list to see the most common types of incidents
Often times a new feature request or bug report comes from a support incident. Having the same system allows for a user to easily create a new bug or feature request from an incident.

Integrated Help Desk in OnTime 2007

With the introduction of OnTime 2007, Axosoft is adding incident reporting capabilities for help desks and support teams. This feature allows for a single, fully integrated solution to track issues, bugs, feature requests and of course, support incidents from a single, integrated solution.

(OnTime separates Defects, Features, Tasks and Incidents for a better User Experience)

(OnTime allows for renaming of item types to better suit each environment)

(OnTime also supports localized languages for maximum flexibility)

There are a number of things that are different about the incident tracking capabilities of OnTime 2007 from its defects, features and task cousins. First, incidents are customer centric, meaning that the first thing you do when creating a new incident is to associate it with a customer. You can even create a new customer or contact directly from the add new incident feature. Additionally, incidents have escalation and a few other features that make them unique. I covered some of the unique functionality in my Top 10 OnTime 2007 Features blog post.

One thing that's nice with each of the OnTime item types is that you can quickly convert an item from one type to another using the “Copy to [X]” feature, where “X” is one of the other item types. For example, if a support incident is really a bug that has never been reported before, you can quickly create a new bug entry from the support incident entry. Just use the right-click context menu and choose to copy the item to a bug, like so:

(OnTime items and incidents can be quickly copied to another type)

We'd love to get your feedback on the new Help Desk software functionality of OnTime 2007. If you hadn't already heard, the Beta 1 downloads and hosted are all available from this link:

Download OnTime 2007 Beta 1 or Try OnTime 2007 Hosted Now

Let us know how to improve the integrated helpdesk functionality of OnTime 2007.

Top 10 new Features in OnTime 2007: More Features, Less Fat!

Hamid — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 22:00:00 GMT

Here’s my list of favorite new features in OnTime 2007:

New AJAX-Based OnTime Web Interface
This one feature actually sums up more than 100 improvements in the OnTime 2007 Web UI. When we set out to create OnTime 2007, we wanted to make sure we deliver a similar user experience both on the web and on the Windows desktop client. The results have been absolutely amazing. Far better than even we could have expected. Take a look at the OnTime 2006 Web vs. OnTime 2007 Web main page:

OnTime 2006 for Web

OnTime 2007 for Web
And of course, that’s just one screen. Whether it’s looking at the details of an item, adding a new item, managing filters or security, the OnTime 2007 Web UI blows away the OnTime 2006 Web UI and it does it faster than ever before.
New Incident Tracking for Help Desk users
Once a software development team ships their product, the next natural step is for them or a support team to support the users. Many software development teams using OnTime have been using OnTime to track such support incidents. Of course, since OnTime was previously designed to just track defects, requirements and tasks, it left a lot to be desired for incident tracking. With OnTime 2007, we’ve made tremendous improvements for support teams. Specifically, we’ve added:
- A new Incidents Tab (renamable like other tabs) to track support related issues:
- Customers are Central to Incidents to make it easier than ever to associate an incident with a customer. You can even create a new customer from the new incident window:
- Custom Incident Numbers allow administrators to define an alphanumeric starting point for incidents that allows for a prefix and fixed digit numbering like so:
- Incident Escalation Levels allow support users to easily track issues that need special attention and combined with the new alerts feature, you can use escalation levels to cause alert notifications to be generated and sent to the appropriate people.
- All the Other Goodness that you’ve come to expect from OnTime are also available for incidents. Workflows, history, attachments, email conversations, alerts, work logs, related items and more.
A New Customers Tab
Whether you’re trying to find that super-important bug or feature-request that came from a premier customer or a customer’s support call history, the new Customers tab makes it extremely easy. Just type part of the customer or contact name into the search, hit enter and the customer list immediately returns a list of customers matching your search criteria. Click on a customer or contact and all the Defects, Feature Requests and Incidents associated with that customer (or that particular contact) are shown in the right:
A New Users Tab
Like the new Customers tab, the new Users tab is great for project managers who want to analyze the load of a particular user without having to setup filters for each user. From this tab, you can also quickly see all the unassigned items, search for a particular user or add and edit users:
New Alerts Capability
One of the coolest new features in OnTime 2007 is the ability to setup alerts that will notify you or anyone else of a particular event. Events can include the changing of one or more fields from one specific value to another. You can even setup events that will monitor a given filter result and notify you if the results change.

Alerts allow users to manage larger amounts of data using “manage by exception” methods, where they are only notified of things when something doesn’t meet predetermined criteria.
New Startup Wizard for Easier Configuration
OnTime has hundreds of powerful customization features. For some who haven’t yet used OnTime, this can be a little intimidating and can lead to the view that “OnTime is overkill for our needs.” Nothing could be further from the real user experience. Users who actually use the product report that they can’t believe how easy and intuitive OnTime is and the further they look, they’re amazed by its power and flexibility to accommodate users.

So to make things even easier than before, we’ve also added a new Startup Wizard that allows users to customize which item types they’d like to track in OnTime and what wording they use for such item types:

This Startup Wizard makes it easier than ever before to customize OnTime in less than 30 seconds.
New Customer Portal UI & Features
Like its big brother, the OnTime Web client, the OnTime Customer Portal has also been re-written from scratch to take full advantage of AJAX-based UI improvements. One of the most requested features for the customer portal was easier customer-facing filtering capabilities, which has also been added.
Improved Security Management
With the list of features continuing to grow, managing security privileges was starting to become a bigger challenge. So in OnTime 2007, we’ve reorganized security privileges by category to make them easier to identify and assign to the appropriate roles:
Ability to Send Emails Through a Queuing Service
In OnTime 2006 for Windows, email notifications, as well as emails sent for discussing a feature, defect, etc. were sent directly from the OnTime 2006 Windows client. That meant that each OnTime 2006 Windows user’s machine would need access to an SMTP server. Although this isn’t usually a problem, it can lead to some challenges for ensuring that email notifications are sent.

New to OnTime 2007 is the option of using a centralized OnTime Email Queuing Service to send emails. So now OnTime clients can simply queue emails in the OnTime database and allow the OnTime Email Queuing Service to send the email. This eliminates the need for each client to have access to an SMTP server and improves the reliability of email notifications and conversations.
Improvements to Performance, Stability & Other Under-the-Hood Changes
My favorite set of new features, which isn’t easily visible while using OnTime, is all the behind the scenes optimizations we’ve made to make the product better than ever. If this (everything under the hood) was OnTime 2007’s only new feature, it would be worth the upgrade! Let’s take a look:
- SQL Server-side Filtering, Searching, Sorting & Paging – In OnTime 2006 when you turned on a new filter or searched for a particular phrase, the filter or search would be applied on the client side. That means OnTime would retrieve all the items for the currently selected project from SQL Server, then perform the filter or search and show you the result. This meant that if the currently selected project had 1,000 active (non-archived) items in it, all those 1,000 items would be retrieved from SQL Server, only to show you the 18 items that matched your filter. For smaller databases and high-bandwidth scenarios, this was a non-issue. But for larger systems that had 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands of items, this was a potentially big bottleneck.
  
  In OnTime 2007, all the filtering and searching is done on the SQL Server. For OnTime 2007 Web, even the paging is done on SQL, meaning that if your results (based on your search or filter) contain more than 1 page worth of data, only the currently displayed page is retrieved from SQL Server.
  
  This performance improvement alone is huge for large databases, especially those with more than 10,000 items.
- Improved Memory Management – In OnTime 2007 for Windows, we’ve made a number of improvements that help with memory management, including load-on-demand so that OnTime controls for different items types are only loaded into memory when the user requests to see that information.
- Updated Toolbars, Menu Bars & ListView – OnTime 2007 for Windows users will also notice the new ListView with a very cool group selection feature that allows users to select an entire group by simply clicking on the group header:
- More Features, Less Fat – My internal mantra for OnTime 2007 is “more features, less fat.” The first evidence of this accomplishment is in our setup files. When comparing OnTime 2007 with OnTime 2006 setup files, you’ll find that most of the setup files are less than ½ the size they used to be. This is a direct result of our focus on more features, less fat.

OnTime 2007 is simpler, more powerful, faster and slimmer than ever before. But what does it really mean? We believe all of this is going to translate into helping software development teams Ship Software OnTime! Our goal, as always, is to stay out of the development team’s way by streamlining and automating the process, allowing them to focus on writing great code and shipping great software. If you’ve liked the OnTime product line up to this point, you’re going to absolutely LOVE OnTime 2007. And it’s only getting better. Wait till Beta 2!

A Quick Update on TransferBigFiles.com

Hamid — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:14:00 GMT

About a year and half ago, Dan and I had a crazy idea to see if we can build a complete, fully functioning web site to send large files of up to 1GB to someone (files that email programs typically reject) in just a weekend. After just 20 hours of development, on Sunday, June 5th, 2005, TransferBigFiles.com was born. We documented the making of TransferBigFiles.com if anyone is interested.

TransferBigFiles.com (TBF) allows visitors, without registeration of any kind, to freely send a file from their machine to anyone on the Internet using the TBF servers as a proxy. You can even password protect the files to enhance privacy. It's super easy and works like a charm. Here are some cool statistics about TransferBigFiles.com:

284,347 - Total number of files sent through TBF
729,149 - Times the above files were downloaded
15,725 GB - The cumulative file size of the files sent
72,618 GB - The bandwidth used to transfer these files
$18,000 - The approximate cost of the bandwidth usage (paid for by Axosoft)
5,000 - The approximate number of files that go through TBF in a typical day

But what's really amazing about the project is that in more than a year and half of flawless operations, we've hardly touched the site since the initial weekend. Old files are automatically cleaned up, emails automatically sent and statistics automatically updated without any maintenance work required by a human. In fact, the statistics above would have been significantly higher if we hadn't throttled the bandwidth to save on costs, since it had no way to recoup its bandwidth expenses.

In the last week, we've added unobtrusive Google Adwords to the download page and increased the bandwidth limit allowing the site to recoup some of the bandwidth costs. The result is an awesome transfer rate. I can now obtain 1MB/sec downloads from TBF.com!

Robert Scoble Interviews me for the Scoble Show

Hamid — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 22:40:00 GMT

Robert Scoble just published an interview he did with me about a month ago:

(This is his interview with me)

(This is a demo of OnTime 2007)

If you watch these videos, make sure you get to the end for a little special treat.

Scoble has interviewed some pretty famous people, including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Cuban and others, so I was quite nervous for the Interview. I think he does a great job of keeping an informal environment that definitely helps the person being interviewed. He also seems very insightful...he asked extremely good questions, considering none of it was pre-arranged.

Windows Vista First Impression: Error 0x8007045D During Install!

Hamid — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 15:43:00 GMT

On Friday, Windows Vista RTM finally became available for download from the Subscriber Downloads section of Microsoft's MSDN site. I was really excited that finally, I'm going to get Vista installed on my new Dell D620 laptop. I had previously given up on Vista Beta 1 as it had way too many problems to be used for a production machine.

Anyway, I burned a Vista RTM DVD and about an hour into the install, during an “Expanding Files” phase, at 94%, it bombed out that it was missing a file. Nothing about the filename, no ability to retry, no ability to try again. Just an “OK” button and an error number 0x8007045D. To retry, the entire install had to be retried.

Two more failed attempts and 3 hours later, after extensive searching, I found other references to this error number, but no real solutions. Finally I found an unrelated article that had made a suggestion saying that Microsoft recommends burning the DVD at 2X speed rather than any higher speeds. My immediate reaction was that there is no possible way that the speed at which the DVD was burned could have any impact on this issue. After all, if the DVD was going to be corrupt, why would the setup start at all? And why would 94% of the file uncompression proceed without errors?

At this point, I had no other options. I burned a new DVD using 2X speed rather than the default 16X speed. Walla! The install worked great and it only took me about 6 hours to figure it all out :-(

Technorati Tags: Vista Install 0x8007045D Error

Windows Vista RTM Today!

Hamid — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 17:32:00 GMT

Congrats to Microsoft for RTMing Windows Vista today!

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/windows-vista-releases-to-manufacturing.aspx

If I'm not mistaken, it should be available for download on MSDN Subscriber downloads in 1 week from today (they have a 7 day delay for RTMs).

Axosoft Data Center Upgrades

Hamid — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:09:00 GMT

In preparation for the OnTime 2007 Web Hosted rollout, we've made a number of upgrades to our data center infrastructure.

A Little About Axosoft Data Center, Limelight Networks

If you don't already know, we lease data center space from Limelight Networks. Limelight has state of the art facilities in Tempe, AZ, less than 10 miles from Axosoft headquarters. Their location is great for us as we are able to visit the data center in less than 20 minutes if we need to for an emergency, but besides the location, Limelight has one of the best facilities, network connectivity and redundant networks in all of Arizona.

Here are some highlights of Limelight Networks that might be of interest to prospective OnTime hosting customers who want to make sure their OnTime installation is in a respectable facility:

Limelight Networks recently obtained $130 Million in Funding led by Goldman Sachs Capital Partners
Limelight Network Operations Center proactively monitors Network connectivity 24 hours per day, 7 days per week
Fully redundant Internet connectivity through multiple back-bone providers gives as much as 750Gb of bandwidth availability!!!
Fully redundant power connectivity with battery backup and diesel-based power generators to operate the entire data center in case of a blackout
Fully redundant air conditioning for data center temperature control
Fire and Smoke Detection System with three separate FM-200 Gas-based (rather than water-based) fire suppressant systems protect the facilities in case of fire
24 Hour Physical Security ensures that the wrong people are not able to access the data center's production areas
Limelight provides content delivery for Amazon's Unbox and Microsoft XBox Live!

I think it's safe to say that Limelight's Tier 1 facility is top notch and something that can be trusted for providing mission critical applications.

A Little About Axosoft's Equipment

Even the best data center in the world can't save an application that's run on old, rusty, no-name hardware. That's why Axosoft has invested in state of the art Dell servers and in preparation for OnTime 2007 release, we've upgraded the OnTime hosting hardware to use the 9th generation Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers. Each of these 64-bit, 2 x 3Ghz Dual-Core XEON systems is fully equipped with the latest Intel 5160 processors, a minimum of 4GB of RAM (16GB on SQL Servers), redundant power supplies and redundant disk systems (RAID 1 for system and RAID 5 for data).

For SQL Data storage, we've also made significant upgrades going with an external Dell PowerVault MD1000 disk enclosure. This system can grow to 45 x 500GB SATA II drives providing as much as 22 Terabytes of raw disk space (before RAID).

All systems are connected internally on dedicated gigabit switches and externally, going through a firewall, they're connected through a 100Mb Internet connection (soon to be upgraded to a gigabit connection) to Limelights's redundant Internet connection. All this bandwidth provides OnTime users with so much bandwidth that we're utilizing less than 5% of our committed bandwidth as of right now. But we're planning for growth!

So What Does All This Mean?

The short answer is that Axosoft's OnTime Hosting Infrastructure can be trusted for mission critical applications. If the hardware and redundancy that I described above is significantly more robust than your internal IT infrastructure and you want to be up and running with OnTime 2007 in less than 60 seconds, then the OnTime hosting service might be right for you. But of course, as always, we're going to provide installed versions of OnTime for customers who's own IT infrastructure is sufficient for their needs.

OnTime 2007 Beta Accounts Limit Increased to 500!

Hamid — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 15:15:00 GMT

Wow. Within 2 business days of releasing OnTime 2007 Web Beta we had already hit the 200 account limit we had set for Beta 1. The response to the beta has been incredible. There was a period where we were getting more than 25 new account signups every hour. OnTime 2007 Web beta has already beat all of our previous response records.

Originally, we figured we wanted to limit the beta to approximately 100 accounts to make sure everything is going smoothly. Eventually, we increased the limit to 200 before releasing beta to make sure we give the beta a really good spin. With the 200 accounts already used up, and all servers humming along nicely, we've increased the beta limit to 500 free accounts (5 users for 3 months). So jump into the beta before these accounts are also used up:

Singup Page for OnTime 2007 Web Hosted Beta

Axosoft OnTime 2007 Logos, Editions, Hosting & Pricing

Hamid — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:02:00 GMT

UPDATED: The pricing and edition information in this post is outdated. Please see this post to see the new pricing information for OnTime 2007.

Just to be clear, we're still a ways away from the release of OnTime 2007. It's scheduled for Q1 of '07, but there are some details that we can start to share today, so here it goes...

OnTime 2007 Product Logo Revealed

The OnTime 2007 product logos representing each of the different editions will be...

We hope you like them. We went through about 50 design iterations before the new box emerged.

Three Different Editions

With the release of OnTime 2007, we're going to offer 3 different editions of OnTime:

OnTime Standard Edition - This version will contain all the core functionality of what makes OnTime great: tracking defects, features, tasks and (new to V7) incidents. You'll be able to create filters, users, run reports and even enforce your development process through a workflow. The target audience for this edition is teams of 1 to 20 team members.
OnTime Professional Edition - For larger organizations that have multiple teams, each with their own development process and different sets of custom fields, the OnTime Professional Edition will meet their needs by adding unlimited field templates, workflows, alerts (new to V7) and the full project dashboard. The target audience for this edition is teams of anywhere from 10 to 100 team members.
OnTime Enterprise Edition - For even larger organizations where complex deployments, user training and custom reports are all necessities, the OnTime Enterprise Edition is designed to meet their needs. The target audience for this edition is teams of anywhere from 50 to 2,500 members.

Hosting OnTime 2007

One of the biggest motivating factors for OnTime 2007 is eliminating setup and implementation barriers. We think we've accomplished that with our complete re-write of OnTime 2007 Web. Since it now provides a rich AJAX-based user experience, we're investing heavily in our hosting infrastructure to meet the anticipated demand. I'll discuss our data center upgrades in a later blog post.

Essentially, OnTime hosted will provide a similar, if not superior, experience to having it installed at your own facility. Best of all, with the new hosting investments we have made, you can be up and running with OnTime 2007 Web in less than 60 seconds!

Pricing

So what about pricing? The great news here is that for many customers, pricing will be as much as 25% LOWER than before with OnTime 2007 Standard Edition. On the other hand, prices are increasing for OnTime 2007 Professional and Enterprise editions due to added functionality, a different sales process, included services and training that we are providing to meet the needs of bigger customers.

We're also eliminating the Web, Windows and VS.NET specific licenses and moving to an all mixed-mode licensing structure where all users will have the ability to use any client type they wish.

And finally, we're providing a 5-User Starter pack at a substantial discount in each of Standard, Professional and Enterprise lines that will eliminate another barrier to entry for smaller teams with tighter budgets.

The following pricing chart provides all the details of the different editions and pricing for each:

As you may have noticed, the single-user edition will remain free and we're now introducing a free single-user hosted edition.

For a quick pricing example, to figure out the price for 8 users, you would first start with the 5-User Starter pack for the edition you are interested in, then add 3 additional users at the per-user cost. So 8 users for Standard would cost $842 ($395 + 3 x $149 = $842) for installed or $84 per month for hosted ($39 + 3 x $15 = $84).

Of course, we still have a few months before OnTime 2007 is finally released, so don't hesitate to let us know what you think of the new pricing model.

What About Existing Customers?

There are a few things existing customers need to know:

If your maintenance is current at the time OnTime 2007 comes out
- Your upgrade to OnTime 2007 will be free
- You will have an opportunity to pick whichever edition of OnTime 2007 you want
- If you are currently using OnTime 2006 Small Team Edition, you will be able to switch to any edition you want, however, if you go with Professional or Enterprise, there will still be an upgrade charge associated with your 11th user (just like there is today). If you choose OnTime 2007 Standard Edition, you can upgrade to any number of users based on the $149 per user price (without any additional fees).
If you don't have maintenance or your maintenance lapses before OnTime 2007 comes out
- You should get or renew maintenance now :-)
- There will likely be a 50% discount to upgrade to OnTime 2007, but getting maintenance today will make it significantly less expensive and increase your options.

We're extremely enthusiastic about the upcoming release of OnTime 2007 and your participation and feedback is essential to making it a success.

IT'S HERE!!! OnTime 2007 Web Beta (Hosted-Only for now)

Hamid — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:29:00 GMT

We're approaching the 1 year anniversary of OnTime 2006 (V6.0) release, which was November 14th, 2005. For the past year, we've been working on some important enhancements that help teams ship software on time. Much of our time has also been focused on developing OnTime 2007. This is my first announcement about OnTime 2007, and I’m very excited to offer this sneak peak. I believe Axosoft has just raised the bar considerably in the defect tracking / software project management world.

Free OnTime 2007 Web Hosted Beta Signups!

Lets start with the best part first. You can signup for OnTime 2007 Web Hosted right now, but before you do, watch this video that does a great job of capturing what OnTime 2007 is all about:

OnTime 2007 is 100% re-written from scratch to take full advantage of the latest AJAX and .NET 2.0 technologies, providing a rich user experience and helping users be more productive than ever before. Here are some of the highlights of what's new:

100% Re-written from Scratch to take full advantage of AJAX, Atlas & .NET 2.0 technologies
New 4-pane UI (similar to OnTime Windows Edition) with independent data updates for fast response times
New Incident Tracking capabilities to provide HelpDesk staff the same application and database that developers and testers use.
New Alerts System that allows users to define “triggers” that cause email notifications based on specific field changes or when items meet a certain filter criteria. For example, you can set up an alert to be notified by email if a defect has been in the system for more than ‘x’ days and has a priority greater than or equal to ‘y’.
New Customers and Users tabs that allow you to view customers and users hierarchically (just like projects) and instantly view Defects, Features, Tasks and Incidents associated with them.
New Screenshot Paste Feature that allows Windows users to run a click-once application to paste and edit a screenshot directly in the Web browser...no need to save the screenshot elsewhere first.
New SQL-Side Data Paging for optimum performance regardless of database size. This new enhancement makes even extremely large databases with well over 100,000 items snap the data you want quickly onto your screen.
Unbelievable number of new UI enhancements including:
- Drag-and Drop column sizing and ordering
- Right-Click context menu
- Dialog windows that “float” on top of the main page
- Continuously updated mini-dashboard
- Edit on the fly in the details section without opening the item
- Instant screenshot review
- Add/remove columns on the fly
- Search for Projects, Users and Customers quicker and easier
- Hundreds of other enhancements

We think this is all extremely exciting stuff and I'm sure you'll agree.

So where's the signup form?

OnTime 2007 Web Hosted Beta Instant Signup

Some details about this hosted beta:

The beta accounts will default to 5-users and will remain free for 3 months. If you need more than 5 users for the beta test, contact sales@axosoft.com and we can make proper arrangements.
After signing up for this beta, the system will automatically create a new OnTime 2007 Web installation for you and you will receive an email with login information within 1 minute.
Right now, we're testing OnTime 2007 Web beta in the hosted environment only. We expect to have an installed version (as well as the OnTime 2007 Windows and VS.NET versions) by mid-December.
We've created a discussion forum for beta users to discuss and comment on OnTime 2007. We will be monitoring this forum very actively during the beta test phase. (to access this forum, you must be a member of the Axosoft User Forums - a free signup)
You can read some of the FAQs about this beta here.

I'll be posting a separate article on pricing, features and the various editions of OnTime shortly. Stay tuned and keep us informed on your beta experience.

Component Art is Blogging

Hamid — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:50:00 GMT

Our good friends over at ComponentArt have started blogging: http://blogs.componentart.com/

If you don't know about ComponentArt and you're a developer, you should. They make some of the best ASP.NET controls on the market today. In fact, Axosoft has partnered with ComponentArt for our re-write of the OnTime 2007 Web interface using a number of ComponentArt controls. They've been great to work with, their components rock (as you will see in my upcoming posts on OnTime 2007) and their pricing and licensing is very reasonable. It's like having a few extra developers on your team who really know their stuff! Kudos to ComponentArt.

Lets Have Some Fun!

Hamid — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:31:00 GMT

In May of 2005, Axosoft pioneered a new pricing model that's definitely unique in our industry. We created a special “Small Team” edition of our software for companies that require fewer than 10 licenses of OnTime. For this group, we actually discount the OnTime product by nearly 60%, include the best possible license (Mixed Mode, allowing for access via Window, the Web or VS.NET 2003/2005, or all three), plus we throw in the OnTime Customer Portal (for up to 10 customer-users). Once those companies grow beyond 10 users, they have to pay us back for the price break we gave them when they were a small team before upgrading to OnTime Professional.

This type of “reverse” pricing discount was a risky move for us. With OnTime Small Team Edition, we are essentially investing in the growth of smaller teams. We understood that smaller teams have strict budgetary restrictions, and we wanted to make sure OnTime wasn't out of reach for them. This has turned out to be a huge success for us and the customers we were able to price into an OnTime solution! These customers have absolutely loved the fact that they can save 60% of the regular price and still get everything (there are no feature restrictions in the OnTime Small Team Edition).

Today, as Emeril Lagasse would say, we're kicking it up a notch. We're bundling OnTime Small Team Edition (5 or 10 Users) with 4 hours of web-based, instructor-led training, plus 1 year of upgrades and support. The cost price is just $988 for 5 users and $1688 for 10 users. That is absolutely unheard of! We don't know of any other company that provides a license + training + upgrades & support for 1 year for less than $170 per user - regardless of the industry! We like investing in small teams and it has proven to be less risky than we initially thought. When we help those small teams ship software on time, they grow, and we both benefit.

We're really spicing up this bundle, though, and making it even more fun. We're also throwing in Apple's new iPod Shuffle. This is partially a hat tip to Apple for continuing to set the bar and constantly improving things that aren't broken. So both the 5-User and 10-User bundles will inclue a new 1 GB Apple iPod shuffle absolutely free! Can it get better than this?

Why BlueRay and HD-DVD have both already lost!

Hamid — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:00:00 GMT

There's a great book called the Innovator's Dilemma that talks about why new technologies cause great companies to fail. The principle reason of failure is that businesses define their business incorrectly.

For example, car companies, airplane manufacturers and shipyards are not actually in the “car”, “airplane” or “ship building” businesses, but instead, they are in the transportation business. To be sure, they are in different types of transportation, but none the less, most people would never buy a car if they could simply use teleporters (or any other better means of moving themselves from point A to point B).

Likewise, I'm not interested in buying BlueRay or HD-DVDs. In fact, I don't even like buying DVDs because they take up space, I have to manage them and I have to run to my equipment area every time I want to change a DVD. All I care about is being able to enjoy a movie on my 55” plasma. I don't care about the techonology that will deliver it to me.

Today, Apple announced a product (currently dubbed iTV) that would allow me to watch a movie from my PC on my TV. Couple that with iTune's new ability to sell movies and bam, I have what I need for movies. Now before you tell me that Windows Media Center has been able to do this along with the media center extension, I'll tell you that Window Media Center has been a major failure, because they viewed the problem incorrectly (not to mention, it provided no means of me purchasing movies on my PC). The new Apple iTV device is a $300 device that sits in my equipment room and I never have to see it or touch it. Even better, I never have to buy another DVD, change out DVDs or buy a DVD case. So lets see, will my next device be a BlueRay DVD player, an HD-DVD player or an iTV? I think you already know my answer.

The great part about the Apple solution is that when high-definition movies become more common-place, all Apple needs to do is increase the resolution of their movies. No more new devices!

"Shipping Software On Time" Presentation

Hamid — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 13:34:00 GMT

This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to deliver a 10 minute presentation on “Shipping Software On Time” at a local event in Phoenix where Scott Guthrie (the “father” of ASP.NET) and Eric Sink (founder of SourceGear and author of “Eric Sink on the Business of Software”) were doing various presentations.

A few people had asked me if I could make my presentation available so that they could pass it along to their team. So I've uploaded the “Shipping Software On Time” presentatin to YouTube and wanted to make it available for people to see it here on my blog:

Feel free to send me any comments, questions or suggestions.

Who Ships Software OnTime?

Hamid — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 15:30:00 GMT

The other day, we decided to do a little fun experiment to see where our customers who use OnTime are on a world map. We decided to do this using Google's Map API service and loading up our customer database of over 5,000 companies to see how it all looks. The first thing we found is that you can't really load 5,000 pins into a world Google Map. It just doesn't work. It slows down to a crawl and actually getting the geocodes for 5,000 different pins from the server can be quite time consuming. Both IE and FirFox tend to choke when you go above 800 or so pins (addresses).

So we decided to filter the qualification of customers who get a pin to show about the largest 600 or so customers who have adopted OnTime worldwide. Here's what it looks like for the US:

The outcome was very cool, so we decided to make the map of OnTime customers available on our web site.

We learned a lot of interesting information from this little experiment, including:

Wholly cow! We have a lot of customers. :-) Thanks!!!
Google Geocoding was not available for a lot of countries, including, surprisingly, the UK! Even if we gave Google just the country name and nothing else, it still couldn't give us a long/lat that worked for the UK addresses.
Google tends to give bogus geocodes (long/lat) in rare cases if it doesn't know where an address is (and it doesn't know that it doesn't know), which is why sometimes (as in the image above) there are pins in the middle of the ocean (look to the left of Seattle)
We implemented our algorithm for geocoding as follows:

First, try to geocode the full address
If Google tells us it doesn't know the address, we would then resort to city & country
Finally, if it didn't know that, we would only give it country

However, when pins are on top of each other (as they would be if there were 10 customers in the same city, such as Sydney, Australia), you only see 1 pin. That's a bummer because you don't get the full effect of the number of customers in those regions, but not a big deal in the overall scheme of things.
Google Map API is very cool!

One of the other interesting things we found, as you might be able to notice from the image above is that there are probably good and bad states to live in if you happen to be in the software development business. So we thought it would be fun to do a top 10 best and top 10 worst states for companies that ship software OnTime ;-)

Top 10 Best States for Companies that Ship Software OnTime:

California
Texas
Virginia
Florida
Massachusetts
Colorado
New York
Maryland
Arizona (home of Axosoft)
Washington (although it's safe to say MS had nothing to do with Washington being in top 10)

Top 10 Worst States for Companies that [try to] Ship Software OnTime:

Alaska
Kentucky
North Dakota
New Mexico
South Dakota
Vermont
Wyoming
Mississippi
Rhode Island
Delaware

It's fun to zoom into your region to see if there are any companies near your home town that use OnTime. Let us know what you think of the map.

Global Warming is a bunch of Hogwash?

Hamid — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 01:14:00 GMT

What proof do I have to support my statement that “Global warming is a bunch of hogwash?” None, of course! Because if I actually tried to provide a shred of evidence, my whole argument would fall apart. That doesn't seem to stop many so-called “journalists” at a growing number of partisan publications. Aren't journalists suppose to promise to uphold a code of ethics? The Society of Professional Journalists puts out this Preamble:

“... Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.”

“Public enlightenment,” “fair and comprehensive account of events and issues” - those are noble ideas. When was the last time you read a fair and comprehensive account on anything? Instead of seeking truth, they are giving their views as fact; instead of fair and comprehensive, it's more like one-sided and brief; and instead of enlightening their audience, often times their intentions are to manipulate and spin. There are many exceptions to my statements, of course, but people like Anderson Cooper seem to be a dying breed. Instead, we seem to be bombarded by more and more so-called journalists who are in fact prostitutes. They tend to be on the right or on the left and whichever side they fall, there is no amount of data or facts that could change their minds. It's a shame that we call these people journalists.

Yesterday, I saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary, which is mostly based on a presentation on Global Warming that former VP Al Gore has been giving around the world for years. The movie is definitely interesting, causes you to think about all sorts of information and even more importantly, all sorts of mis-information. One of the lines in the movie that had stuck with me was the question of whether or not global warming was being caused or, at the very least accelerated, by human actions. If you were to ask me this question prior to seeing the movie, I would have responded “yes, global warming is probably partically caused by human actions” but I would have quickly followed it with “but who knows, the earth could be on some sort of warming cycle that we happen to be in the middle of.” As it turns out, the scientific community, people who spend their whole lives studying this issue, would not have a “but who knows” response. Out of 928 peer-reviewed scientific studies that were examined, the number of dissenting views as to the cause of global warming is a big whopping - are you ready for this - ZERO!

That totally blew my mind. I had figured there would have to be at least 5 or 10% of the scientific community that would disagree with the assessment that humans are causing global warming. Wouldn't you think? It seems like scientists can hardly agree on anything, doesn't it? Well, as it turns out, the reason we all think there are disagreements among scientists is because of journalists. When was the last time you actually spoke to a scientist? In The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore goes on to say that out of several hundred articles regarding global warming in various non-scientific publications, a staggering 53% left the reader with the impression that we don't know the cause. Where do journalists get their data? Have they done a comprehensive study of the findings that scientists have published? How could there be such a huge discrepancy between what scientists are publishing in peer-reviewed journals and what journalists are publishing? What's going on here?

It just so happened that within an hour of leaving the theater, I headed for a salon to get my hair cut. While waiting my turn I sat down and grabbed a magazine from the stack of magazines on the table. Bam! There it was, a cover story on global warming in a magazine I had never heard of until this point: NewsMax. I got excited. I saw Al Gore's picture on the cover. I saw the words Global Warming and thought to myself that maybe Al Gore was wrong; maybe the news and media are going to start covering global warming in the same light that scientists see it. Within seconds, the disappointment was already setting in. The full title of the article read “Al Gore Spins Global Warming.” Hmm...This should be interesting I thought. Maybe this article will show some of the contradictory scientific data that The Inconvenient Truth hid from its viewers. On to page 16 to read the full article.

In the first few lines of the article, the authors, Ponte and Morano (how fitting of a name), quickly refer to The Inconvenient Truth as a “science-fiction disaster movie”. Shortly after, they ask the question “but is the message of Gore's movie accurate?” and they go on to answer their question, as any journalist turned scientific expert on global warming would, “in a word, no.” OK, so far, they disagree. I got that. I'm actually excited to read an article with a different view, especially since it's just an hour after I saw the movie. I couldn't wait to read all the scientific data that totally discredited Al Gore's movie. Lets face it, Al Gore is not the most likeable guy. Since his comments about how he “invented the Internet” I've had it out for that guy. In the 2000 election, I was one of the idiots who thought he actually lost. And then here he was trying to tell us about global warming - what a bunch of political BS. At this point, I was rooting for the NewsMax article. Come on Moron! Doh! I mean Morano. Give me the scientific data so that I can live with the comfort of knowing that my actions are not causing global warming. I can't handle the guilt. I'm ready to blame mother nature or completely deny that it's happening. Just show me anything, anything that appeals to reason.

Reason, my friends, was too much to ask from Ponte and Morano. Not a shred of scientific evidence was provided in the article to support the view that global warming is not happening or that it's not being accelerated by human activities. Instead, they chose to do a smear job on Gore. First, they got hung up on one or two specific points of contention in the movie and concluded that if he's wrong about these 2 points, he must be wrong about everything including global warming. Another mini article in the same issue by Jim Meyers explores that Gore's movie must be the prelude to another Al Gore campaign for the Whitehouse. Yes, yes. Al Gore has been giving his global warming speech for the past 6 years to people all over the world, in India, China, South Korea and other developing nations, so that he could run for President in 2008. You have to admit, that's a brilliant strategy. If he could only get 5% of the vote of China's population alone, that would be enough to seal the victory for US presidency. But there is that pesky electoral college thing.

I'm actually quite happy to have read the NewsMax article. A little bit of research showed that NewsMax founder, Christopher Ruddy, does not believe in the journalistic code of ethics. Far from it. The entire organization has a conservative, right-wing view, and apparently, global warming is only a left-wing problem.

So the NewsMax article got me thinking...the issue of global warming needs more awareness. More awareness from the right, the left, the center and everywhere in between. It doesn't matter where on the political spectrum you fall because you're going to breath the same air as everyone else around you. So unless you're putting food on your table from profits of gasoline or coal, this is a movie worth seeing.

A Call To Action

I've made the decision to pay for every single Axosoft employee, their families and their friends to go see The Inconvenient Truth. If there are going to be organizations such as NewsMax who are going to spread false information, we all need to counter this effect by making sure that people are well informed. I remember these sorts of debates surrounded smoking cigarettes and whether or not it's bad for you, long after the scientific community had already concluded so. How many lives would have been saved if journalists had not participated in the misinformation?

I encourage you to go see the movie and if you happen to be in a position to encourage someone else to see it or like me, if you happen to be the CEO of your company, then do what you can to get the message out. It's worth it! To learn more about The Inconvenient Truth, visit the site ClimateCrisis.org.

OnTime 2006 Now Available in German, French, Spanish and Japanese!

Hamid — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 02:21:00 GMT

The short version of this story is that OnTime Language packs are now available for OnTime V6.1.2. You can download them here. But the following story is a bit interesting and might be really useful if you're looking to do any localization...

A few months ago, Dan Suceava, the Senior Software Engineer on the OnTime development team posted a blog entry about Localizing OnTime. OnTime was designed from the ground up with localization in mind, but for the most part, it was on the back of our minds, not on the forefront. After the introduction of OnTime 2006, we felt we had delayed the release of localized versions of OnTime long enough. We've had requests for localized versions of OnTime since V1 and we had put it off in favor of other features as long as we could. We are now past V6 and OnTime is extremely feature-rich - localization has been a little overdue.

Before we started with the translations, Dan decided it would be a good idea to see where the problem areas were. There were a lot of unknowns...Had we used any direct strings rather than using resource files? Had we sized labels and buttons way too small when they should have been just a tad bit bigger to fit translated versions? Had we created multiple resource entries for the same string? Were there other issues that we simply didn't know about? Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes were the answers.

To help the team quickly identify problem areas, Dan whipped up a VS.NET add-in that takes resource files and translates them to whatever language you want using Google's translation services. WOW! This tool is cool! It's beyond cool - it's the ultimate testing tool for any developer doing localization work. You don't have to wait days or weeks for your human translator to return translated strings. In just seconds, you can have a rudimentary version of translated strings for testing purposes. If that wasn't enough, the tool goes further and also identifies duplicate strings that you've created different resources for. Now that's a money-saving feature since most translators charge by the number of words they translate.

Now here is the really cool part. We decided to make this tool available for free to anyone who wants it. We're even including the source. Here is a link to download this ResxHelper tool (complete with C# source code - written for .NET 1.1):

Download ResxHelper.Zip - Google-Based Translation Add-In for VS.NET

It goes without saying that you will need native translators to do the real work, but the above tool is a great way to easily find the major issues; like which strings are not using resources and whether or not your menu control will work once it's translated to Japanese. By the time we started working with our native-speaking translators, most of the major resource-related issues were resolved.

There are a number of other issues too that we decided not to tackle with this version. For example, the OnTime installer, product documentation and sample databases will all be English-only. The Axosoft web site itself will also be English only for the near future. Although it would be nice to have all of these issues resolved, having the main application in the local languages sooner rather than later is very beneficial to our customers - especially the German, Spanish, French and Japanese speaking customers as of right now :-)

Axosoft OnTime: Client Comments & Case Studies

Hamid — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 22:14:00 GMT

Axosoft has been developing software for software development for four years now. During that time, we have received numerous emails from clients telling us how OnTime has saved or re-energized their projects, how much they love the UI and the ability to track their teams' efforts and progress. For the most part, though, these emails have been informal and they've served as internal motivation.

When we recently brought in Angelo Coppola to manage our marketing efforts, he started asking a lot of questions about our customers that we couldn't answer. He understood OnTime's features, that it had won many awards, and the various technical attributes that make OnTime such a great product. But, he wanted to know how our customers were benefiting from using it...and there's a big difference between a feature and a benefit.

For example, we learned from one client that they estimate the sales of one of their products doubled as a direct result of using OnTime to get development efforts on track. Well, "doubling the sales of your product" isn't an official OnTime feature, but for this company, it certainly was one of the benfits.

For a business at our growth stage, the time had obviously come to start making an extra effort to engage with customers. They are the real experts, and they can provide us with insights about our product that extend well beyond our four walls. Angelo wanted to engage in a virtual conversation with about 20 people who were most interested in talking about their OnTime experience. He wanted to learn what they thought about OnTime, Axosoft, the user experience, and what using OnTime really meant to them.

To do this, we narrowed down our customer list from about 5,000 clients to 1,200, based on certain "interesting" criteria. Then, we divided the 1,200 into six groups of 200 who he planned to send emails to one group at a time, requesting participation in a survey that would be limited to the first 20 respondents. That way we could refine the survey with each attempt, and based on a 1-2% participation rate, we'd end up with our twenty conversations.

We sent out the email to the first group. Wow! What a response! We shut down the survey after just 16 hours. We hadn't even made it through the "B's" in our client list. Over the next several days we analyzed our information. This was one-on-one information about real people using our product in the real world, and I am overwhelmed by what our customers have to say. Here are a few comments:

"The previous solution was an open source product that was brought in by a former manager. It cost us a lot more in time to maintain and enhance than it was worth, which is why I was glad to make the switch to OnTime."
• Hal G Floyd II, Vice President - Development, Abbey Group Consultants
    Software - ISV | USA

"We needed a tool that was more directed toward software development than Microsoft Project."
• Christian Hamel, IT Development Manager, Adonis Technologies
    Software - ISV | Canada

"With OnTime nothing is left behind. It's reports give me an easy way of showing that to our management."
• Ronald Schutte, Solutions Architect / Sr. Developer, Agens
    Employment Services | The Netherlands

"Within a few days we had the team using it. It is easy to use and can adapt the workflow to work the way we run our projects. Customer service and developers all use the system with a common understanding of the process."
• Jim Arbuthnot, Development Manager, AssistMed
    Healthcare & Social Assistance | USA, Canada

"In every team meeting we can see the advantages of using OnTime. We start with a short look at the OnTime database, and then everyone makes a statement about his or her activities. The average time we work on defects was cut down noticeably."
• Jan Dethlefs, Project Manager, APM Software GmbH
    Software - ISV | Germany

This effort has not only provided us with a look at OnTime's benefits, but it has added a new level of meaning to the work we do. There is a little bit of OnTime in thousands of projects out there, and that's a big responsibility for us to keep giving OnTime our all -- talk about motivation!

In many ways, the information we gathered through the survey and follow-ups is far more important to our potential clients than anything we have to say about the product ourselves. It tells them, "Yes, this product does what it's supposed to, and it will probably do even more than you expect...it did for us."

We've posted several more comments and even a few case studies on the web site, check them out. Oh, and when you see that all of the companies quoted and examined start with the letters 'A' or 'B,' you'll know why...

One more thing...be sure to look for Angelo's blog soon if you're interested in the challenges and (hopefully) triumphs of ISV marketing.

OnTime Wins Best Project Management/Defect Tracking Software for 2006

Hamid — Wed, 03 May 2006 20:24:00 GMT

ASP.NET Pro Magazine just announced their 2006 Reader's Choice winners and OnTime 2006 came in at the #1 spot beating TestTrack Pro, FogBugz, AQDevTeam, Active! Focus and Altova DiffDog. The great thing about this award is that the top products are picked by the end-users rather than a writer who's spent 2 hours with each of 10 tools. Even better, from what David Riggs, Editor of ASP.NET Pro tells me, the results were not even close. OnTime had 39% of the votes with TestTrackPro, the runner up, receiving just 25%. Now consider this: TestTrack Pro costs nearly double that of OnTime 2006 and has been around a few years longer. It feels great to beat a competitor by a landslide.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Axosoft just completed it's 11th consecutive record quarter and we're in the midst of our 12th consecutive record quarter. We're also moving our offices later this month to a state-of-the-art facility that will give us a bit of room to grow. We're hiring too, so if you know of a top notch software developer, send resumes here.

It's great to have the support of the OnTime user community for this great achievement. Thanks to all of you guys who use OnTime on a daily basis. We're working on some great stuff coming down the pipeline. Stay tuned...

Woooohoooo!!! Apple Does Windows

Hamid — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 14:56:00 GMT

FINALLY! Apple announced their “Boot Camp” product today which allows for users to boot Windows XP on the new Intel-based Macs. Here is the link for details:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

I can't wait to punish Dell and HP (Compaq) by not purchasing their products in favor of Apple's. For how many years did these guys stop the innovation in the PC market? It's payback time. Apple gets my support from this point forward. Who wouldn't want slot-load DVD, thinner machines, longer battery life, built-in camera (that doesn't look like crap) and other little niceties that we never find from the mainstream PC vendors? Not to mention, I can't wait to play with Mac OS X. This is big! It's bigger than big! Even if Apple increases market share from 3% to 5%, that's a 60% increase in it's PC revenues. There's a lot more than 2% of PC buyers who are going to take advantage of this announcement. Lets check back in 12 months.

Productivity Shutdown at Axosoft (Thanks to XBox 360)

Hamid — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 14:11:00 GMT

March 31st closed out Axosoft's 11th consecutive record quarter of revenues and profits. We've all been blown away with the results. Just at a time when we expected sales growth to slow down, we grew faster than ever before with more than a 60% increase in sales from the previous quarter and close to 200% from the previous year's Q1.

OnTime 2006 has been very well-received by customers and prospects. Since we released OnTime 2006 in November, we've beat every competitor when we've gone head-to-head, even some competitors we didn't expect (like IBM's Rational and even Microsoft's Team System!). The results have really been incredible and have been the accumulated accomplishments of awesome product development, customer support, service, training (which now includes online videos) and of course, sales.

So to celebrate and reward the awesome efforts of everyone, I decided to buy every Axosoft Full-Time employee an XBox 360 (finding the number of XBox's I needed wasn't easy, but that's another story). I gave everyone's system to them last night during an “XBox Party” we had to celebrate the quarter's success. We played Fight Night, Ghost Recon, FIFA '06 and Dead-or-Alive for hours, but the best-of-night game goes to Ghost Recon.

So if over the next few weeks and months you notice a little productivity slowdown at Axosoft, you'll know why. ;-)

OnTime V6.1 Released

Hamid — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:16:00 GMT

A quick note that Axosoft has released OnTime V6.1. This latest version adds a number of features that were frequently requested by customers including enhanced time tracking capabilities (using a new “Work Log” tab), enhanced custom reports (now you can copy a built-in report as a starting point for custom reports), Subversion support, complex search and a lot more.

Take a look at the full list of enhancements and bug-fixes here:

http://www.axosoft.com/Products/downloads.aspx?cn=otm_whatsnew_maint

You can download the new version from the Axosoft downloads page.

How Axosoft Sold $1.3 Million Worth of Software in 3 Days

Hamid — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:25:00 GMT

This is a story about understandings and ideas. Sometimes, when they collide great things can happen.

Recently, I had a little idea, and once it was set into motion a big drama began to unfold. Over the next three days, amazing things were going to happen.

My company, Axosoft, sold 2,633 units ($1.3 Million retail value) of its flagship product, OnTime;
Axosoft’s name was making headlines in the blogosphere and web sites all around the world;
Energy and motivation almost visibly swirled through our halls;
And, Axosoft owed the American Red Cross a check for over $14,000.

Background

I started Axosoft with equal parts understanding about myself and an idea for a product. I understood that I love the game of business and my favorite position on the field of play is entrepreneur. My idea was to express my lifelong passion for the software development process on two levels by designing a software product called OnTime. It is 1) an application undergoing the software development process itself and 2) an instrument to help other developers and teams successfully build software. Axosoft is what happened when understanding and idea collided.

I’m a junkie for the constant challenges, stimulation, and infinite possibilities. My role at Axosoft has evolved over the past 3 years, and today I spend the majority of my time collaborating with very smart people who work with me under the Axosoft umbrella. No matter what I’m doing, though, I always feel an undercurrent of desire to tell the world about our great products. On February 21, 2006, another understanding collided with another idea; if it worked the way I hoped it would, a lot more people would know about Axosoft.

Web 2.0

Before diving directly into the idea, I have to talk a bit about Web 2.0, how I came to view it, and how experiencing it from differing angles lead me to this point. When I first approached Web 2.0 as a developer and entrepreneur, it looked a lot like an old picture with a new frame. Over time, though, I had begun to use and enjoy Web 2.0 sites like Digg and del.icio.us. I was also being enriched by Web 2.0 technologies like blogging and RSS. My hand-to-forehead moment came when my understanding of Web 2.0 emerged from being an actual user, instead of an entrepreneur or programmer.

At its best, Web 2.0 is about user interaction acting as an essential ingredient of web pages and sites -- nothing more than a little code and the cumulative input of all of the site’s visitors. It's so much more than AJAX, big fonts, and six shades of green.

Axosoft periodically explores and experiments with new technology. As a result of our latest exploration, we threw our hat into the Web 2.0 ring by developing a free RSS to Email service, called Squeet. Squeet.com provides the best of RSS and Email (automatic delivery, unsubscribe at will, no sharing email addresses with content providers, advanced filtering, etc.), while scrubbing out the worst parts of both (no spam, no separate application to learn and run, no wasting bandwidth by constantly checking for new feeds, etc.).

So now I’ve experienced Web 2.0 as a user, developer and entrepreneur, and with it came a deeper understanding and appreciation of this new way of looking at the web. I started to wonder if Axosoft could harness Web 2.0's word-of-mouth PR potential. Is it worth exploring? Is it worth marketing capital and time expenditures? Is it really all it's cracked up to be?

That's when I got the idea. Collision!

A $5 Idea

To find out, I decided the best proof of concept would be to see how many copies of Axosoft’s OnTime Small Team Edition I could give away free by seeding a promotion exclusively in the blogosphere. Who best to seed the story? Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, who is one of the “edge cases” of the Web 2.0 movement, was my first (and honestly, only) choice to put things into motion.

I ran into an immediate challenge with the Axosoft Online Store. We had never created a method for zero-dollar transactions. Instead of diverting development time, coding and testing the necessary modifications, I decided to offer OnTime STE for $5 (it normally sells for $495) and to donate all the proceeds to the American Red Cross.

If Axosoft could learn a bit about how memes spread across the Internet, expand its user base a bit, and donate a few hundred dollars to a worthy cause, the experiment would be worthwhile. What happened next blew my mind...but it wasn’t immediately apparent that this test was going to work at all.

Succeeding in Seeding

By 2pm on February 21st, we had created a Web page on Axosoft’s site describing the offer and details of the experiment. No internal links whatsoever pointed to this page, so there was essentially no way to view it, or become aware of the limited time offer, unless one had a direct link.

I shot off the critical email to Robert Scoble, asking him if he would be interested in seeding this story. I subscribe to his Scobleizer blog (Squeet It!). As I said, I felt from moment one, that his blog would be the perfect garden in which to plant the seed: the right blogger and the right audience. I was pretty sure this experiment would hit a curiosity nerve with Scoble, too. Then, I crossed my fingers and the waiting game began.

While hoping for a response from Scoble, I couldn’t help submitting the promotion page to Digg.com. It was now 3pm. Shortly after the Digg submission, we received 2 orders at $5 each, but the Digg-related traffic soon began to fizzle. No more Digg-related orders were coming in and it didn't look like Digg was going to advance our story to more visible space. We were essentially sitting on a marketing message with no medium for spreading the meme. I was beginning to feel some disappointment as I prepared to head home.

The Scoble Effect

By six o’clock on the 21st when I headed home, there were still only 2 sales and it looked like that was going to be it. We had raised $10 for the American Red Cross, and we hadn't learned anything we didn't already know.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t get back online to track progress until later in the evening, about 9 o’clock, when I opened up my notebook.

Something had happened.

I received email notification of about 20 new orders! I had to figure out what was going on. First, I scanned down my list of email folders until I got to Squeet...then to its Scoble subfolder...there were a few unread Scoble articles. A quick click revealed the subject of the first new article: Project Management Software Maker Tries Memetracker Approach. Scoble ran with the story! The traffic to our web site was going up rapidly and the orders were rolling in.

What about Digg? Next, I checked out how the story was fairing over there, and there were a few more diggs, but still no real movement in the story. Our web site logs showed little traffic attributed to the Digg submission. I had to conclude the new sales activity was attributable to the Scoble Effect.

Now I was glued to my computer. It seemed that every few minutes we were getting another order. I’d get up to get a glass of water and when I returned, I would find more orders. I went to bed at about midnight, and by then we already had over 55 orders. Scoble published the story at 7:30pm. This was amazing!

It was obvious the ball was in motion and I drifted to sleep wondering how far it would go.

The Morning After

I think I managed to get over to my laptop for my first glimpse of the stats before fully awaking that morning. I probably “thought” about it all night as I slept. Between midnight and 7 a.m. we had received another 25 promotional orders. I was truly amazed; that brought the grand total to about 80, and traffic was still heading sharply upward with orders coming in faster and faster.

By 10 AM orders were up to 150 with traffic spiking even sharper upward. The realization that we had almost doubled the number of orders over the last 3 hours hit me, and I knew this experiment was going to succeed beyond my most optimistic estimates. By now, a good 25% of my time was being spent just filling orders. A process that normally takes minutes per day! What started as a trickle quickly became a raging river of orders for OnTime.

A little analysis showed visitors were arriving via several sites now. DownloadSquad (Squeet It!) had mentioned us, there were several forums including SlickDeals.net where this experiment was mentioned, and several other blogs were picking up the story, too. To my delight, some bloggers including Steve Richards (Squeet It!) were even reviewing OnTime!

I was able to track some of the blogs’ comment threads. Not only was our experiment spreading quickly, I was getting real time feedback from members of the community. Perfect! It was overwhelmingly positive and ranged from people who just liked the idea of experimenting with the social marketing idea to people who were already in the market for a bug tracking and project management application. Most were happy to take advantage of the great deal, but to my amazement, some people were so skeptical of the deal that they were posting messages about the legitimacy of the offer, the donation, and/or the company. Fortunately, there were many people responding to the skeptics in our defense. That was great to see.

Armed with the instant feedback, I also set out to address some people’s concerns by posting replies. The insight gained from reader comments also equipped us to refine the offer’s web page. I added two counters: one for the number of units sold and one for total dollars raised so far for the Red Cross. I also tweaked the content to more strongly express the legitimacy of the offer.

Record Traffic

A portion of the blogosphere had Axosoft centered in its crosshairs, and we were feeling it. By noon, orders reached 300 – doubling over the previous 2 hours. By 5 o’clock over 700 units of OnTime STE had zoomed out our bandwidth pipes. The entire office was buzzing with talk about units sold and site traffic. Emails were flying back and forth, linking to newly discovered blog stories.

Axosoft web stats for Month of February, showing regular traffic dwarfed by the 3-day Social Marketing Experiment

I envisioned Axosoft’s font size enlarging in tag clouds around the globe. But, we couldn’t stay wrapped up in the excitement for long: the phones started ringing at a faster-than-usual clip...sales and support were noticeably getting bogged down.

When Sima, who typically spends a few minutes a day on accounting (the rest is spent managing International Sales), burned through a ream of paper printing orders, it quickly became another office factoid. When she ran out of ink, we all got a good laugh. When the printer broke down, reality began to set in. Clearly, these were problems I was happy to have.

Sima sitting at her desk with a stack of 2600+ printed orders.

The Aftermath

As it turned out, Sima would break in her new printer by cycling it through almost five more reams of invoice sheets. Unless we figure out something more efficient, the promotion will require over 140 hours of data entry into our secondary accounting system (AKA QuickBooks). We also encountered about a 1% “problem” rate with challenges that took about 20 minutes each to handle. These included customers placing their order without the promotion code and immediately requesting a refund of the $495 sale. We even had several refund requests on $5 orders (even though the $5 was being donated to the Red Cross). Some common reasons were “I ordered 3, but only needed 2” or “I didn’t know what I was ordering, but I now realize I don’t need this software.” Ironically, the $5 refunds cost us at least 5 times that much to process. Of course, we processed every one of them, usually within an hour of the request.

All of these challenges provided us with a learning opportunity and gave us some fun conversation material, but the overall success of the campaign is the real take-away. Our final count was 2,642 units of OnTime STE. It still blows my mind. Axosoft kicked in an additional $1,000 to the $13,210 raised for a total of a $14,210 donation to the American Red Cross. We’re also going to cover the costs of Credit Card transaction fees (which are a whopping $1100 or so because of the high volume of small transactions - about $0.30 per transaction + 2.75%).

On paper, we moved over $1 million in product...and we lost money on the deal. But it doesn’t take much imagination to realize Axosoft will earn a return on the investment many times over. I don’t know how to place a dollar value on the publicity, the expanded user base, the knowledge gained, or the possible improvement in search engine placement that is yet to come. I do know we got it for a bargain.

The Digg Disappointment

Because we were promoting the Digg story, it eventually received over 120 diggs, but it never really moved to desireable real estate on Digg’s site. I’m left with more questions than answers about how Digg ranks its stories. At several points in, we had more Diggs than the (then-) most recent 3 front-page stories combined, yet we still never made it to Digg’s front page.

The Scoble Effect was easy to see, however. Exponential growth in traffic, sales, and blog spreading began almost immediately after he pointed to the experiment.

I want to thank Robert Scoble for seeding the story, his curious nature, and for his blogging activity in general. He has a great blog. I also want to thank everyone in the blogosphere who contributed to spreading the word, thus taking part in our experiment. To those of you who purchased OnTime STE: Thank you and Congratulations! This experiment was ultimately about learning how to reach you, and we did!

Referring sites during the 3 Days. Much of the "Direct" traffic was probably from Desktop RSS Readers.

Social Marketing Experiment Concludes

The power of the blogoshpere and social marketing is for real. There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most effective ways to market anything. The challenge of course, is creating a sustainable, repeatable marketing strategy that utilizes this power and effectiveness without giving away your product.

It’s not easy for a small company to generate buzz. In this case, we were able to do so because the buzz wasn’t really about Axosoft, it was about a social marketing experiment that happened to include Axosoft and our great prouct, OnTime. Just as Web 2.0 has given individuals an audible voice that has taken a chunk out of Big Media’s monopoly on ideas and reporting, perhaps small business will be empowered as well.

This is an experience that I know will help guide Axosoft (and me) in the future. I hope sharing this experience with the reader will provide some new insight and understanding. Hopefully, it will spark some new ideas. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when those understandings and ideas collide.

Technorati Tags: axosoft, blog, blogging, marketing, social marketing, experiment, scoble, scobleizer, entrepreneur, ideas, web 2.0, ontime, bug, bug tracking, project management, Hamid Shojaee, RSS, Squeet, Digg

Why Google Stock is not even worth $300!

Hamid — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 04:32:00 GMT

This is a bit off topic for my usual posts, but I just saw a headline that read “Google loses status as premium-priced Web stock” and it made me mad. So you're telling me that at $350 per share and a PE of 68, Google is no longer a “Premium-Priced” stock? Give me a break! I know people don't like to look at stock prices based on Market Cap and Earnings anymore, but those are the fundamentals. Ignoring the fundamentals is the reason we had a dot-com bust.

So lets do some comparitive shopping. Lets compare Google's stock to Microsoft:

Google:

Market Cap (at $345.70 per share): $102,170,000,000 ($102.17 Billion)
Earnings for past 12 months: $1,483,000,000 ($1.483 Billion)

Microsoft:

Market Cap (at $26.39 per share): $272,700,000,000 ($272.7 Billion)
Earnings for past 12 months: $12,471,000,000 ($12.471 Billion)

Keep in mind that Microsoft earnings are after all their one-time charges over the past year for antitrust lawsuit settlements. That means next year they're going to make upwards of $16 billion in profit. But for now, lets assume Microsoft is not even going to grow one bit. Lets assume Microsoft will flat-line from this point forward at just raking in $12 billion per year.

By earnings alone:

Microsoft is 8.4 Times the size of Google
If Google grows at 50%, 40%, 30%, 25%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 20% for the next 9 years respectively, in 2015, Google will earn less money than Microsoft earned in the past 12 months!

Assuming 0 Growth for Microsoft and the above aggressive growth rate for Google, during the next 9 years:

MS will earn $112 Billion
Google will earn $59 Billion

Anytime you buy a stock, you're taking a gamble. You're gambling that the stock you choose will outperform the “Built-In” expectation for the stock. So in this case, when compared to Microsoft, here is what you're gambling will happen when you purchase Google:

You're saying Google is worth more than 1/3 that of Microsoft. In fact, even if Google at some point in the future actually becomes 1/3 the size of Microsoft and its growth rate slows to that of Microsoft's, then it's stock price should be about $350. So you're not only gambling that at some point it will be 1/3 the size of Microsoft, but you're gambling that even after it's 1/3 the size of Microsoft it will still be growing MUCH faster than Microsoft. Otherwise you're wasting your money. You'd be better off putting it in the bank and earn 0.8% interest and don't bother with the downside risk.

Now, I'm sure many people are thinking, “yeh but Google grew 100% year-over-year, blah blah blah”. Come on people! Those kinds of growth rates don't last. Trust me, I wish they could! Axosoft grew sales 300% year-over-year between 2004 and 2005. If we could continued our growth curve at this rate, we'd be double the size of Microsoft in just 11 years!

These stupid analysts who are telling you that Google is a “Buy” or a “Strong Buy” at $500 per share are the same idiots who were telling you Pets.com and Garden.com are worth $1 billion each just 5 years ago. These guys should be shot.

Axosoft Testing Squeet, an RSS to Email Service

Hamid — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 03:39:00 GMT

Axosoft is getting ready to launch Squeet, an email-based RSS-reader that requires no software installation of any kind. You simply login to your Squeet account to setup your RSS feeds:

You can try it now without setting up an account. Just go to this link:

http://www.squeet.com

The service is (and will continue to be) free and it has several advantages to traditional RSS readers:

No software to install
No need to repeatedly visit a web site to check for new content
No bandwidth usage on your machine for repeated RSS Feed checks
RSS feeds are delivered to your Email on a schedule that YOU determine
RSS content can be indexed along with your other emails by Google Desktop
Easy online management of all your feeds, including ability to pause feeds and schedule delivery times

Squeet.com will check any RSS feed for you and email you such feeds based on 3 schedule types: Live, Daily Digest or Weekly Digest. Live, of course, emails you feed entries as they become available, while daily and weekly digests allow you to receive all the unread entries at a given day and time.

Give this Email-Based RSS Reader a try now and let me know what you think.

Pictures from Axosoft's OnTime 2006 Launch Party

Hamid — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:55:00 GMT

Last night we celebrated two major milestones in Axosoft's history:

The launch of OnTime 2006 (V6.0), the 6th major release of this product
On November 1st, OnTime hit a sales milestone of passing the $1 million mark

We celebrated the OnTime 2006 launch with about 40 or so local techies at the Wrigley Mansion (see picture below). We had a blast (or at least I had a blast) and thanks to Bob McCarroll for the lovely pictures that he took during the event.

The Wrigley Mansion

Fun Times!

Some Fantastic Products

Hamid — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 20:56:00 GMT

Every now and then, I come accross some really fantastic products that really jump out at me. The usual suspects such as Google Desktop, Virtual Earth and the like spread quickly and don't need my mention, but there are some other products that are truly fantastic, but because of their niche apeal get very little attention.

So here are a few that I think are worth mentioning:

MailEnable - This super easy mail server offers a free “Standard Edition” which includes all the essential mail server components (POP, SMTP, List Server) and a lot more! We often recommend a MailEnable server to our OnTime customers who want to setup a separate SMTP or POP server for email notifications and the new email conversation feature in OnTime 2006. Fantastic product!
DataDynamics ActiveReports - You may have already seen my post about how I hate Crystal Reports. Well, ActiveReports is a far superior alternative to Crystal. DataDynamics ActiveReports is a fantastic reporting tool that's designed for developers and offers the perfect re-distribution license (royalty free). Even their end-user report designer is royalty free. I totally get the sense that these guys understand ISV needs, unlike Business Objects. Additionally, ActiveReports for .NET is designed and developed in .NET with a simple XCopy deployment, unlike Crystal's convoluted merge modules. The new OnTime 2006 Reporting system and Custom Report Designer are now based on the ActiveReports engine.
DataDynamics SharpGraph - While all the other graphing tools vendors are totally missing the boat with products that cost thousands for royalty-free redistribution (and offer separate web and windows modules), DataDynamics is kicking butt with a $349 product (licensed per developer, no royalties). Whether you want pie charts, bar charts, 3D or 2D, Web or Windows, this product does it all. The OnTime 2006 Mini-Dashboard and Full Dashboard use the SharpGraph engine for the pretty graphs. I highly recommend it.

I'm sure there are other products that I'm forgetting, but for now, these were what came to mind.

OnTime 2006, New Axosoft Web Site, New Axosoft Store Released!

Hamid — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 23:00:00 GMT

After the release of OnTime 2005, we set out our top 10 list for what we would love to have in the next major release of OnTime. Our top 10 list included some really hefty features which included “the most powerful workflow in our industry”, as one goal, “a complete re-write of our reporting system from Crystal Reports to Active Reports”, as another and the ability to fully customize the product on a per-project basis.

We decided to take them all on and then some. We set out a very aggressive schedule and went to work and I'm pleased to say that OnTime 2006 (the 6th Major release of this product) includes all of our top-10 items and then some and is once again, on-time! (actually a few hours ahead of schedule :-) The OnTime 2006 final release is available for immediate download.

This release is the biggest release in Axosoft's history and with that, we thought it might be nice to get a new look for the web site and the store. So we've re-designed the entire site. It should be easier to find everything, more informative and a more crisp, clear look-and-feel.

Hope you like what you see...feel free to comment about the site and the new version of OnTime.

Apple Influences OnTime 2006 Pricing

Hamid — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:07:00 GMT

Over the past serveral weeks, we've had a number of meetings regarding OnTime 2006 pricing. The general consensus has been that we would significantly increase our prices for OnTime 2006 accross the board. We had a lot of really good reasons for the justifiable price increase. Here are the top two reasons:

OnTime 2006 adds a TON of new functionality that's only available in Enterprise-Level systems. Features such as Process Definition and Enforcement through workflow, Inherited Project Settings, Field Templates for customizing add/edit forms, Custom Reporting, Time Tracking, Email Conversations and much more added to our argument for higher prices. Such features are typically only available in competing products that cost 5-30 TIMES as much as OnTime. In some cases, our new functionality is not even available in ANY competing product. So this new functionality was our first justification for significantly higher prices.
When you price a product below your competitors, you risk having potential customers believe that your competitors must be better than you (this point is well illustrated in Eric Sink's article on product pricing: http://software.ericsink.com/bos/Product_Pricing.html). In our case, the price of OnTime 2005 is less than 1/3 its closest competitor and with OnTime 2006, unless we increase our prices, we would be less than 1/5 our closest competitor. That's crazy! Nobody is going to believe we have a better product. We must increase our prices.

We had a new price target of around $249 per user (up from $149 per user now). This would still keep us below competitors, but show the world that OnTime 2006 is a serious contender.

We also argued that maybe we should provide some of the new functionality, things like Custom Reports, SCM Integration and the new Email Conversations features as separate add-on products that would be sold separately. Custom Reporting modules from some software vendors can cost, $5,000 or more. A $1995 price for OnTime's Custom Reporting feature would have been very reasonable.

Then something unexpected happened. Apple released the new iPod Nano followed by the iPod Video and their new iMacs. All of these products replaced an existing product from Apple and in the case of the iPod, Apple was replacing products that already owned > 70% market share. The new products are truly great and they represent a major enhancement over the products they replace. What did Apple do when they released these new products with significantly enhanced functionality? They kept the price the same!

Wow! I had to order one of the new iPod videos just to see if it was as cool as it seemed and I must say, it's insanely great! I've been blown away by the new iPod and its video capabiliteis and I highly encourage you to go out and buy one right now. But I'm going off on a tangent, so getting back to OnTime pricing...

After Apple's release of insanely great products which are huge improvements over their own products, which were already better than everybody else' product with a lower price, we came to the conclusion that hey, if Apple can improve an already great product and keep the price the same, then so can Axosoft!

OnTime 2006 Small Team Edition & Professional Edition Pricing Will Remain the Same!

There are 2 exceptions to our pricing remaining the same:

OnTime 2006 Enterprise Server pricing will be significantly lower! Our price for OnTime 2005 Enterprise Server was $995 for the server itself and $50 for each client. The new price for OnTime 2006 Enterprise Server will be $495 with no per-user pricing for CALs! So if you wanted to buy OnTime Enterprise Server for say 20 users, the price has been reduced from $1995 to just $495!
OnTime 2006 Customer Portal pricing will be significantly higher. The price increase on the Customer Portal is mostly due to the fact that we got it wrong in the first release. We priced 100 customer version of OnTime Customer Portal for only $495, less than $5 per customer. In some cases, the Customer Portal was replacing full OnTime licenses which would normally sell for $149/user with a $5/user product. So with the release of OnTime 2006 Customer Portal, we've added significant new functionality to the customer portal, including enhancements to security on a per-customer basis, but we've increased the price from $495 for 100 customers to $1,495 for 100 customers. We have also introduced more pricing tiers that will allow smaller groups to add customer portal at an affordable price. Additionally, OnTime 2006 Small Team Editions will still include some customer portal licenses to get smaller teams access to this great technology, free of charge. The prices for OnTime 2006 Customer Portal are still extremely low and we might still need to do another increase before we get it right, but at $15/customer, we're getting closer to a number that works for everyone.

So to review, we've added an enhanced Workflow, Inherited Project Settings, Unlimited Field Templates, Custom Reporting, Email Conversations and more to OnTime 2006. Old Price: $495 for up to 5 users, $995 for up to 10 users and $149 per user for OnTime Professional. New Price: $495 for up to 5 users, $995 for up to 10 users and $149 per user for OnTime Professional! That's right, no change in Small Team Edition or Professional Edition pricing.

The full pricing details and announcement will be available on the Axosoft web site when we launch the OnTime 2006 product.

OnTime 2006 Beta 2 is Here - MORE NEW STUFF!!!

Hamid — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 18:25:00 GMT

The feedback on OnTime 2006 Beta 1 has been amazing. Users tend to really love the new functionality, power and flexibility provided by inherited project settings, enhanced workflow, custom reports, field templates, required fields, improved security and other new features.

We're Adding More New Stuff!

OnTime 2006 Beta 2 adds even more new functionality. Take a look at what's new:

Email Conversations - Now you can log all email conversations about a defect, feature or task in the OnTime system. This new powerful feature allows for new issues to be raised from email with the ability for each OnTime user to easily reply to the conversation thread and have all of that email conversation neatly organized for each item.

With this new Email Conversation feature, OnTime can easily act as a simple HelpDesk tool or IT Ticket Tracking system.

New Time Tracking (Work Log) Feature - OnTime 2006 Beta 2 adds the ability to log time worked by any user on a given defect, feature or task. With the click of a button, or as part of the workflow, OnTime can also automatically update the "Actual Work" on a given item using the sum of all the work that was logged on the item. Customizable Work Types allow users to easily mark work as Billable, non-billable or any other type they create.

New Dependent Pick-List, Multi-Select, Checkbox, HTML and Text Custom Field Types - Wow! This feature is really awesome. While some of our competitors don't believe in having custom fields in a bug tracking application (cough-jo-cough-el), we strongly disagree! In fact, OnTime has had the ability to track custom fields since 2004 and in OnTime 2006, there are 4 new custom-field types:

Dependent Pick Lists - With the new dependend pick list capability, you can easily define related pick list types who's values will depend on the selection of another pick list. For example, having two pick lists such as Product and Version is common, where version might be dependent on which product is selected. Rather than stopping at relating just 2 pick list types together, OnTime supports unlimited number of dependent picklists!

Multi-Select Pick Lists - Sometimes you need to have the ability of selecting multiple items out of a pick list, such as which Operating Systems this particular defect applies to. Now you can!

Check Boxes - Check boxes allow for a simple on/off bit to be set for each item that has one or more check boxes defined.

HTML & Text Fields - Long text fields, such as HTML text boxes (with formatting) and simple Text boxes are also now supported in OnTime 2006.

And of course, all the other custom field types (such as numbers, dates, money, decimal, small text, etc.) are still supported in 2006.

New Related Items Capability - The new related items functionality in OnTime 2006 allows for defects, features and tasks to all have the ability to be related to one-another using relationship types which can be custom defined. You can even use the multi-item edit menu to relate multiple items at the same time. When you duplicate an item, or copy it from defect to feature (or vice versa) an automatic relation can also be created to indicate that these items are duplicates of each-other.

Perfoce SCM Support - We've also added a plugin for Perforce SCM support. This adds to the SourceGear Vault and VSS Support we already announced with Beta 1.

Enhanced Look for OnTime 2006 Web - The UI changes in the web are minor, but noticeable. We've improved the menu and given the web a cleaner look. For release, we plan to do even more and possibly provide an easy way for each user to have their own look-and-feel style based on a different CSS file.

With the exception of Perforce SCM Integration, all the new features listed above are also available in the OnTime 2006 Web product as well.

Plus there are lots of bug fixes since Beta 1 and lot of other cool little features, too many to list. So grab your copy of OnTime 2006 Beta 2 (it's now open to the public and free for single-user installs). Let us know what you think.

Download OnTime 2006 Beta 2 Now

See OnTime 2006 Beta 1 Features

Final Designs for OnTime 2006 Boxes

Hamid — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 17:46:00 GMT

With OnTime 2005, we introduced 3 new products: OnTime 2005 for VS.NET, Customer Portal and Enterprise Server. To represent each of these products, we decided to have a software box. So we had a total of 6 differen product boxes. That became a little confusing for customers. The boxes gave the impression that it's possible to purchase each product (such as the OnTime Customer Portal add-on) by itself without the need to purchase one of the main OnTime products.

With 2006, we have an opportunity to fix this issue, so what we have decided to have only 2 boxes that represent the entire OnTime 2006 product line:

One for OnTime 2006 Small Team Edition:

One for OnTime 2006 Professional Edition:

These are the final box designs. We will have to figure out another way of representing OnTime SDK, Customer Portal, Enterprise Server and each of the Windows, Web and VS.NET clients.

Choosing a box design for OnTime 2006

Hamid — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:08:00 GMT

As we get closer to the release of OnTime 2006, one of my tasks has been to choose a box design and logo to represent the new version of the product. Our graphic artist, Bob McCarroll, is amazingly tallented and came up with a few designs for us to choose from:

A little bit of explanation on these box designs:

Top Left - If you can't tell what this is, you're lucky and you probably will wish you didn't know after I tell you. It's a crushed bee! The nasty stuff you see is the bee's head splattered all over the place. The thought behind this design was that OnTime helps you “cursh” bugs, but I think the message may have been lost in the graphic nature of the design.

Top Right - This design has a custom-designed lady-bug with an arrow gowing through it, symbolizing that OnTime lets you hit your project targets while killing bugs. The thought was a good one, but I think the overall image is not very impressive and can be a bit confusing (what's the arrow for?)

Bottom Left - This design has dozens of bugs running around and the popcorn looking images that you see are the bugs being blown away. Again the thought behind this design was that OnTime helps you kill bugs, but the image was once again somewhat confusing (what's the popcorn doing on the box? :-)

Bottom Right - This is a simple, clean box with just the custom-designed lady bug. Do you notice the “6”es on the bug's back? This of course symbolizes the 6th major release of OnTime. This ended up my favorite and although it's not the final box design, this is the design we're starting with for the new OnTime 2006 product line.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What do you think of the above designs? Did we choose the right design? Should we have gone back to the drawing board? Let me know what you think.

OnTime 2006 Bug Tracker, Beta 1 Released!

Hamid — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:25:00 GMT

OnTime 2006 (V6.0) Beta is here! OnTime is so much more than just a bug tracking application and this new beta adds tons of incredibly cool new functionality in this major release of OnTime. It's OnTime's 6th major release and it's by far, the biggest improvement to the OnTime product line, EVER! I’m going to jump right into it. Lets start with a nice screenshot of OnTime 2006's main window.

NOTE: I've taken all the screenshots using OnTime 2006 Windows client. However, most of this functionality (with the exception of linking SCM files and Mini-Dashboard) are also available in the OnTime 2006 Web client.

Here are what I consider to be the top 10 features in OnTime (in no particular order)...

Unlimited Field Templates

Now you have the ability to create an unlimited number of field templates for defects, features and tasks. Field templates allow for the customization of add/edit windows to include on the fields that interest you. Each field template can be assigned to a project or to a certain workflow step.

Define View-Only, Required & Editable Fields

When defining a new field template, you can now define whether or not a particular field is visible and if it's visible whether or not the field is also editable and a required field. This feature provides great flexibility over what information your team members write about each new defect, feature or task that’s added to the system. Additionally, since a different field template can be assigned to each project and for each workflow step, the visible, required and editable fields can be different for each project and for each workflow step!

Field Templates (or Custom Fields) by Project

I know this has been a huge request in OnTime 2005…the ability to Customize the product by Project. Well, it’s here! OnTime 2006 now allows for each project to inherit its settings from its parent project (the default) or to set the project’s settings independently. This screenshot shows how to set Field Templates by Project:

By setting a different field template for different projects, each project manager can now easily customize the same OnTime installation for their own projects.

Workflow by Project

Many project managers don’t agree on what the workflow for each item should be. In OnTime 2005, everyone was forced to use the same workflow. No longer. OnTime 2006 allows for each project to either inherit its workflow from its parent project (default setting) or use a completely independent workflow. You can even force the use of the defined workflow for any given project as demonstrated in this screenshot:

This functionality allows for different project managers to have completely independent workflows for their own projects.

Source Control Integration

Now you have the ability to link any number of files from your source code control system to the OnTime 2006 defect, feature or task that you’re working on. From within the OnTime Windows or VS.NET interfaces, you can easily checkout linked files and view their history information. The design of the source control integration is a “plug-in” model so we can easily add multiple SCM systems in the future. Initially, we will support Visual SourceSafe and SourceGear’s Vault. Here is a configuration screen for the Vault plugin:

To learn more about the Source Control Integration (and see more screenshots), be sure to read Jonas’ blog. He’s the guy who worked on most of the SCM stuff and he has a 3-part series about the SCM integration in OnTime 2006.

Custom Reports & Report Shortcuts

This is one of the biggest features in OnTime 2006. Custom Reports was a top request among OnTime users and we’ve finally got them! We’ve made it super easy to create custom reports in OnTime, but in addition to being able to create reports from scratch, you can easily create “Report Shortcuts”. Report Shortcuts are a new feature that allows each user to easily customize the filter settings of any report and have the report be immediately accessible from anywhere in the OnTime system.

The following screenshot shows how a custom report is defined.

One of the nice things about the Custom Report implementation in OnTime is that you can even write reports based on ad-hoc SQL queries or Stored Procedures that you write. So you can easily have integrated reports in OnTime that aggregate data from multiple tables and even databases.

Unlimited Workflow Definitions & Unprecedented Workflow Power

The new workflow functionality in OnTime 2006 is unprecedented in any bug tracking or feature management system today. First, you can now define any number of workflows sets:

Each workflow set can have its own defined workflow “steps”. Each workflow step now has the following functionality:

Automatically Modify ANY Field’s Value

OnTime 2005 had only a handful of pre-defined fields that could be automatically modified in a workflow step. Now, OnTime 2006 allows for any field to be automatically modified, including custom fields. This screenshot shows how field modifications are defined:

Restrict Item Edits to a Specific Field Template

When an item is in a certain workflow state, you can restrict which fields are editable during that state. For example, you can define a workflow template that makes all fields view-only so that when an item has been “Resolved” it can no longer be edited. You can also define a Field Template that asks the user for only 1 or 2 pieces of information during a certain workflow step. The possibilities are limitless.

Ability to Restrict “Next Steps” & Security Roles for Each Step

For each workflow step that you define in OnTime 2006, you can now define what the possible next steps are. Additionally, for each possible next workflow step, you can restrict which User Roles can put the item into the next step. This level of power and security allows for the utmost flexibility in defining your software development processes.

Customizable Notification Lists for Each Workflow Step

In each workflow step, you can now define who should receive an email notification for that step. Besides the ability to add OnTime users and customers as the recipients for notifications, you can also use special tokens such as the person who last updated the item or the person who originally reported the item as demonstrated in this screenshot:

Ability to Launch an External Process

Want to make sure that some external system is updated every time a defect or feature is Resolved, Rejected or In Progress? No problem! Kick off an external process, a custom application or whatever you like. You can even pass into your application any of the OnTime fields for the item that’s moving through the workflow as demonstrated in this screenshot:

The above workflow functionality is truly amazing. The power and flexibility that the OnTime 2006 workflow implementation brings to software development processes is unmatched.

Customized Field Labels

OnTime 2006 now allows for the customization of field labels for every defect, feature and task fields. Additionally, you can even rename the main OnTime “Defect”, “Feature” and “Task” tabs to whatever you like. Here are a couple of examples:

Project Dashboard and Mini-Dashboard

This is one of my favorite features and its likely to be one of yours. If you’re a project manager, you’re going to love it and if you’re a developer or a tester, you’ll definitely find the mini-dashboard very useful.

Lets start with the Mini-Dashboard. The optional Mini-Dashboard sits at the bottom left side of the main OnTime window and always provides you an up-to-date pie chart of the current work in your OnTime view. Your project selection, filter settings and search criteria are all taken into account. It looks like this:

The Mini-Dashboard allows you to quickly see the amount of work that meets your current filter criteria. So filter your list to just “My Defects” and voila! You know exactly what percentage of your work remains open. Filter your list for a specific project and again, the pie chart is already up to date providing you a view into the amount of work that is listed in your current view.

The full Project Dashboard provides 3 categories of information that are absolutely imperative to the work of project managers.

This information includes:

User workload – The user workload information provided in a table and 2 pie charts in the upper left provides a quick view of which users have the most amount of work assigned to them.

Trend Analysis – The trend analysis is an absolute must as you come close to the end of a release cycle. Project managers always want to know if they’re moving in the right direction, and the 4 bar-graphs in the upper right provide the best information that they could possibly want about their project’s trend.

Project Summary – The project summary information provides a summary of all the defects and features for the project and provides 4 pie graphs, 2 for defects and 2 for features. The pie charts break down the total work by both the number of items in the system and the number of hours of work that those items represent.

Customer Portal Now Has Project-Based Security

If I had a nickel for every time an OnTime customer asked for Project-Based security in the Customer Portal Module, I could retire! OnTime User Security Roles already have project-based security, but the OnTime Customer Portal offered only a single security setting for all “Customers”. This worked great for our ISV customers who use OnTime to track the defects and features for shrink-wrapped applications they distribute to thousands of customers, but our Consulting customers who use OnTime to track all of their customer’s projects (where a project is often for only one customer) wanted better control over which customers can see which projects. In OnTime 2006, the Customer Portal has been vastly improved with the following new functionality:

Ability to create multiple logins for each customer
Each customer login has its own security privileges, including the ability to give some customer logins read-only access while others have read/write access.
Ability to associate each customer with up to 2 project branches, one for read-only access and one write access. This provides the flexibility of having “Queue” folders for customers to make their own requests which easily being able to see another folder containing all the approved items. Consultants will love the fact that their customers will no longer be able to see each other’s items.

With this improved functionality in the customer portal, there will be a higher price. Pricing for OnTime 2006 is not set yet, but the Customer Portal module in particular will be substantially higher than before.

As you can see, there is a LOT of new functionality in OnTime 2006 and there’s even more planned for Beta 2. All of the above functionality, with the exception of the “Mini-Dashboard” and the ability to Link SCM files is also available in the OnTime 2006 Web edition.

We’re super excited about the OnTime 2006 release. The final product is expected to be generally available early in the first quarter of 2006. We’d love your feedback on all this new stuff, so let us know what you think.

FAQs

Should I wait to buy OnTime 2006 rather than buying OnTime 2005 now?

No. Here is why:

OnTime 2006 pricing will likely change, especially for Customer Portal. If you buy OnTime 2005 with maintenance now, you can avoid any price changes because your upgrade will be free!
OnTime 2006 will easily upgrade your OnTime 2005 installation. OnTime 2005 customers will find that it’s as easy as clicking “YES” to upgrade their existing OnTime 2005 databases after installing the OnTime 2006 system. All your existing data stays intact.
Familiarity with the OnTime 2005 product will help you take advantage of OnTime 2006’s new features. OnTime 2005 has a TON of functionality. If you are already familiar with that functionality, it will be very easy to learn the new functionality provided by OnTime 2006. If you wait until OnTime 2006 is released, users will have a steeper learning curve.
Every day that you delay using OnTime 2005 is another day that your team is less productive. Don’t delay using the OnTime 2005 system because of new functionality that’s coming out…we’re always adding more functionality. By waiting, you’re keeping your team’s productivity lower than it could be if they were already using OnTime 2005.
OnTime 2005 Customers are eligible for the OnTime 2006 Beta. The easiest way to beta test OnTime 2006 now is to be an OnTime 2005 customer.

So don’t delay your OnTime 2005 purchase and avoid any price increases.

Can I upgrade only part of my team to OnTime 2006 Beta?

Typically, no. OnTime 2006 has a number of database modifications which prevent the previous OnTime clients from being able to access the new system. So when you’re ready to move to OnTime 2006 Beta, you need to either setup a completely independent installation, or you need to upgrade all of your OnTime clients. If you are using only the OnTime Web version, then only the web server needs to be updated.

Will Axosoft support go-live license with OnTime 2006 Beta 1?

Yes, absolutely. As long as you understand that this is a beta product which might have some unresolved issues, we encourage you to go live with OnTime 2006 and we will fully support your through our online forum, email and discussion group.

Do I lose my beta data when OnTime 2006 release comes out?

No. Since we are supporting go-live with Beta 1, we will allow you to easily upgrade your OnTime database to Beta 2 and to the final release.

Is there a product documentation for OnTime 2006 that I can download and read?

Not yet. The product documentation for 2006 is still under development and not far enough along to release. The good news is that OnTime is designed to be intuitive, so I'm confident you'll find your way around. If you're already familiar with OnTime 2005, you won't have any problems learning the new stuff.

How much will OnTime 2006 cost and what about upgrades?

Pricing for OnTime 2006 is not yet determined; however, if you are an existing OnTime customer with current maintenance when OnTime 2006 is released, your upgrade to OnTime 2006 will be free. If you don’t currently have maintenance in place, it is strongly recommended that you add maintenance to your account before the release of OnTime 2006 as this could be a substantial cost savings compared to doing so after the release.

Ready to Try the Beta?

Download OnTime 2006 Beta Now

PDC '05 - What a Great Show for Axosoft!

Hamid — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:37:00 GMT

Wow! If you read my blog, you already know we were attending this year's Professional Developers Conference which was held last week in Los Angeles, CA. What an amazing show. The whole team had such a great time.

There was tons of drinking, partying and of course, lots of good technical material to take away. To top it all off, Axosoft had an amazing reception at the PDC. Our booth was jam packed with people wanting to see demos, picking up CDs and even existing customers stopping by to let us know how much they love OnTime. It couldn't have gone any better!

Here are some pictures to tell the story...

Mike (rear) and Dan pose for the picture on the 7-hour road-trip to LA

Jonas helping put the finishing touches on the booth setup

The Axosoft booth was jam-packed nearly the whole time!

Yours truly, demoing the software :-)

We demoed some of the OnTime V6 functionality too. I think V6 is going to really rock and I can't wait until we release it. I'm going to work on a blog post talking about some V6 functionality soon. Stay Tuned...

A Review of OnTime by Scott Hanselman

Hamid — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 04:06:00 GMT

Scott Hanselman has done a review of OnTime on his web site:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ReviewOnTimeDefectTrackerFromAxoSoft.aspx

A few of my favorite quotes...

“There is an SDK in the form of a rich Web Services interface...This is pretty powerful stuff and it's a shame more applications don't take the effort to expose their core engine as Web Services.”

“The [OnTime] WinForms and the [OnTime] WebForms applications have surprising parity of look and functionality...The WinForms has a nice, speedy UI...I was able to add a custom field to my bugs (I added "locale") and associate a pick-list with choices (en-us, es-mx, etc) without trouble.”

“All in all, OnTime 2005 Small Team Edition offers a great deal of value for the $ in my opinion.”

Learn to Ship Software OnTime at the PDC

Hamid — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:02:00 GMT

As many of you know, Axosoft will have a 10x20 booth at this year's PDC. We've setup our booth so that we can demo the OnTime 2005 product line. Here's what to look for:

We'll be doing short 10-minute demos of OnTime 2005 and possibly previewing the new functionality in OnTime 2006. Lots of exciting stuff. Stay tuned...

My Letter to Steve Ballmer about Google

Hamid — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:17:00 GMT

A Little History
When I started working at Microsoft, I was blown away by its competitive nature. Microsoft competes to win and when it sets its focus on a target, the target has eventually become irrelevant within a short period of time. Microsoft and its employees are some of the most competitive bunch I've ever seen. I learned a lot.

Was AOL a Real Competitor?
Once I joined in on the competitive nature of Microsoft, the second thing that surprised me was Microsoft’s attention and focus on AOL. I never got the infatuation with AOL and I wanted my company (Microsoft) to stop focusing its efforts on beating a company that I thought was irrelevant. Instead, I argued, we should be focused on Yahoo. I wrote a letter to Steve Ballmer, Kevin Johnson (VP of Sales) and the head of MSN (who’s name escapes me now). My letter pretty much said something to the effect of:

MSN Sucks. Yahoo Rocks. AOL is irrelevant. We need to focus on beating Yahoo.

Remember, at the time, Yahoo was the Google of the net and Google didn’t yet have today’s popularity. The first person who replied to my email was Steve Ballmer; he respectfully disagreed. I later ran into Steve at the Microsoft Global Summit (an internal pep-rally for MS’s sales/consulting people) and we had a similar discussion about AOL and Yahoo, but I didn’t get anywhere.

I love Microsoft and I want to See it Win
A few nights ago, after Google released its Google Talk, it occurred to me that Microsoft’s focus on AOL between 1999 and 2003 is probably the sole reason why its losing so bad to Google. While AOL and MSN continued to build bloated software that tries to do everything for everyone, Yahoo and Google were busy building “minimalist” products that were really good at delivering core functionality in compact, fast and simple products. Somewhere along the lines, Yahoo departed from its original mantra and started making their home pages more and more complex and Google took over.

Had Microsoft been paying attention to Yahoo instead of AOL, MSN wouldn’t have a reputation for creating bloatware and it might have beat both Yahoo and Google. Now, 5 years later, Microsoft is behind Google and unless it changes its ways, it will become irrelevant.

So, once again, I shared my thoughts with Steve Ballmer. Here is the letter I wrote to him on Friday night…

[formalities removed]

Why Microsoft is Losing to Google

Microsoft’s focus on AOL (and Sun and Oracle) in the early 2000s is the reason why Microsoft is having its ass handed to it by this little company. The focus on Sun and Oracle was the right thing to do back in late 90s, but by 2000, it was obvious that Sun and Oracle were no longer a big threat. The only real threats were LAMP and [at the time] Yahoo. Microsoft identified the LAMP threat fairly easily by 2001 and therefore, I believe the LAMP threat is now contained, but the Yahoo threat (what Google is now successfully doing) was completely missed. Having missed this threat for 5 years is the reason Microsoft is currently losing to Google.

MSN is NOT the Answer to Google!

You will not beat Google with MSN. Why? Because MSN was a failure from the start. It had an identity crisis and built the impression in everyone’s head as a BLOATED piece of garbage. MSN could come out with the greatest invention tomorrow and no-one will care. It will be impossible for MSN to remove its bloatware image. Just look at Instant Messaging: Google comes out with a product that doesn’t have multi-user chat, video or 90% of the other features of MSN IM, yet everyone loves it – including most Microsoftees! Google Desktop is beating MSN Desktop search, even though MSDN DS is better.

Google Will Beat Microsoft!

Unless Microsoft makes some major changes, Google WILL beat Microsoft. Everybody loves the underdog and right now, your biggest enemy is the fact that people are rooting for the underdog: Google. No matter how untrue, Google is perceived as an innovator – they really are not innovating at all! In fact, they are doing exactly what Microsoft did in the 80s and 90s: Create 20% of the stuff that 80% of people want and make it super easy to use! Microsoft beat Lotus, Word Perfect, Novell and other competitors using this same strategy. Now its getting beaten by someone who’s doing the exact same thing.

What to do NOW to Beat Google in 5 Years

Here are the things I think Microsoft needs to do ASAP:

· Longhorn (Vista) should be the last release of a MS OS – Yep, forget about this bloatware crap every 5 years, or even every 2 years or even ever 1 year.

· Sell the OS as a Service – How about $49/year gets you a state-of-the-art OS that’s always up to date with the latest technologies. Auto-update the OS with small, incremental upgrades. People will be more likely to switch to Vista, support will be easier, your costs will be down and you’ll get $250 out of each user every 5 years rather than $99!

· Release a New Series of “MINI” Tools Under the Microsoft Brand, NOT MSN – These tools will have a direct target -> Google! Keep MSN around for the people who want the fat, bloated stuff (feature-rich :-), but then release a new series of Tools that has 900KB install files (like Google Talk). These Mini-tools can be included as part of the “OS Subscription”. Here are the ones I think would be important to have:

o Microsoft Mini Chat – a simplified chat client without the frills but with the ability to talk w/other IM clients

o Microsoft Mini Mail – a simplified mail client that contains both web/based and a Vista client app – both super simple to setup and use

o Mini Search, Mini Sidebar, even a Mini Browser!

o … - You get the idea – The key is to have these tools be simple, fast and branded under Microsoft, NOT MSN.

· Keep up the Great work in the Dev Teams, SQL Team and Office – Those tools don’t have any real competitors right now.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. It’s 1am and I got out of bed to write this email.

In case you’re wondering, Steve did reply. That’s what I love about Microsoft: no-one is too important to skip emails. When the CEO of the company replies to a partner's email, that sets a “no exuses” tone for the rest of the company. We’ll see if it had any value to Microsoft in a few years :-)

Integrated Project Management for VS.NET 2005 Now Available

Hamid — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 22:28:00 GMT

We just released the latest version of OnTime 2005 integrated inside the VS.NET 2005 environment. For all those who are interested in simplifying your bug, feature and task tracking inside the VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 environment, you can do it now for free (single-user version).

Bug Tracking Software or Project Management Software?

Hamid — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 20:00:00 GMT

Have you seen this ad?

If you've seen this ad, it could have only been in one place: MSDN Magazine July 2005 Edition. The above text was the entire contents of the full-page ad in MSDN magazine.

If you saw the ad, the question is, did you do it? Did you go to www.ShipSoftwareOnTime.com? If you did, you were one of the hundreds of people who visited the site during the month of June and early July (the July edition of MSDN magazine actually hit the streets on June 5th). As you might have guessed by now, the ad was one of Axosoft's ads.

We normally run a much more informative ad in MSDN magazine (and some other magazines), but we wanted to break with tradition and try something new. We wanted to see if a “curiosity” ad would generate even more interest than the typical “informative” ad. To prepare for the ad, we created a satire site based on the daily events of Project Managers, Developers and Testers. We also created (my favorite page) OnTime Facts. The site was a fun little marketing test. At the very least, we can tell you exactly how many curious readers read the July issue of MSDN magazine :-)

Was it all worth it? The jury is still out, but now that the visitors to the site are starting to taper off, I wanted to start sharing this ad with my blog readers. What do you think? Is it a fun site? Should we do more stuff like this or stay with the traditional informative ads?

Now, why did I title this blog entry “Bug Tracking Software or Project Management Software”? Well, this is something we've been struggling with: do we position OnTime as a bug tracking software or as a project management software? The answer to this question might seem obvious...OnTime helps software development and test teams ship software on time by keeping track of all the activities of each team member. Therefore, it's a Project Management Software. But, when people think of project management software, they think of MS Project - a product we almost never run into as a competitor to OnTime. We do, however, run into other “bug-tracking” software. So positioning in the wrong space might hurt us, rather than help us.

We need to answer this question before the PDC as we'll have a number of marketing materials that will have to position us one way or the other...the struggle continues...

A Quick Take on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

Hamid — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 14:20:00 GMT

I’m on my way back from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I think my blood alcohol level is still above the legal limit. As I write this blog entry from row 7C of this Airbus 320 on an America West flight, the celebrations of the MS Partner conference are continuing back in Minneapolis with another huge party and live entertainment provided by the B-52s. I had to leave that love shack – I don’t know how some of the attendees do it: Conference keynotes and sessions from 8am to 6:30pm, then drink like a fish between 7pm and 2am. Repeat process for 4 days, then crash! To my surprise, more than half of the attendees were from overseas; don’t even think about trying to keep up drinking with Europeans.

The sold-out event was lots of fun and a must-attend event for any serious Microsoft partner, but it did have some shortfalls. For obvious reasons, Microsoft’s focus for the event was on partners who are value-added-resellers of their enterprise products. Even though Microsoft supposedly had an “ISV” Track for the sessions, they fell way short of my expectations. Nearly all the keynotes and sessions focused on how great Microsoft’s platform, solutions and offerings are and how easy it is for resellers to sell these products. This would be something I’d expect if Microsoft was trying to get us to partner with them, but they were doing these presentations for partners, not prospective partners. No need to sell us anymore. We’re already sold!

There were some hidden gems and small sessions that were very interesting. I attended a couple of sessions presented by third parties that highlighted ways to communicate more effectively with customers, partners and trade publications. One of the most interesting sessions was given by Paul Abrahams of Waggener Edstrom, a PR firm that works with Microsoft, AMD and others in the tech industry. His presentation talked about the importance of telling a story when communicating with the media, or if you want to make a memorable impression on the reader. That’s great advice which I plan to implement at Axosoft. Our customers must have hundreds of great stories that might be of interest not only to us, but possibly to other customers, vendors and partners. (by the way, if you are a customer who has a story you’d like to share, email it to me – hamids at you know where.com). Paul's presentation was very entertaining. He most certainly presented a great story.

Speaking of customer stories, while scanning through the exhibit hall, I happened to run into a couple of Axosoft customers who were exhibitors at the event. As I glanced at the logos of each booth, the logos of C360 and Bluespring Software jumped out at me. I recognized their logos because they happen to be featured on our testimonials page. To my great delight, both C360 and Bluespring Software are extremely happy customers of the OnTime product line and plan to purchase more licenses. C360 specializes in tools around the Microsoft CRM offering and Bluespring Software has great Enterprise software for creating automated processes around CRM, ERP and SFA applications. I highly encourage you to check out their web sites for more information. It’s always fun to randomly run into companies who's software development efforts revolve around the Axosoft OnTime product line.

So what is the moral of the story?

First, the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference, with all its content flaws, was of great value to Axosoft – and I’m not just saying that because I’m under the influence of alcohol. The networking opportunities and the ideas that flowed from talking with dozens of other ISVs, resellers and system integrators were extremely useful. I strongly recommend it to any Microsoft Partner. Hope to see you there next year.

OnTime 2006 Sneak Preview of the Features & the Microsoft PDC 2005

Hamid — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:35:00 GMT

We've been quite busy at Axosoft. Contrary to what you might think we've been busy with (if you read my blogs), OnTime 2006 is what has been keeping us plugging away. I can't share much of the details, but I did want to let you guys know a couple of the more concrete additions to the OnTime 2006 product:

Massively Revamped Workflow - OnTime 2005 provides a nice little workflow to automate some basic actions with just the click of a button. Users love its simplicity, but power-users crave more flexibility. With OnTime 2006, the revamped Workflow will keep the simplicity while quenching the craving for power and flexibility.
Project-Specific Functionality - Some users of OnTime track multiple unrelated projects in the same OnTime database. With the introduction of OnTime 2006, most aspects of the system can be customized on a project-by-project basis, allowing independent teams to more easily share the same OnTime database.
Enhanced Reporting - Think of the wholly grail in reporting...that's what we hope to achieve with the next version of OnTime's reporting facilities.
Source Code Control Integration - Not much to say about this yet, other than the fact that OnTime 2006 will have it.
Plus a LOT More!

There is a lot more planned that I can't share with you yet, but be ready to be impressed. For those of you who want to see a preview of the product and plan to attend the PDC this year, stop by our booth. Axosoft will be at the PDC!

Remember, for all those who have purchased OnTime 2005 with Maintenance, OnTime 2006 is a free upgrade!

By the way, if you are wondering how OnTime compares to other bug-tracking systems, take a look at the comparison of bug tracking software page on the Axosoft web site.

An Update on TransferBigFiles.com (the Free "Send Large Files" service)

Hamid — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:12:00 GMT

WOW! The demand for this service has been incredible. Sending large files on the Internet is apparently a big problem that is faced by most everyone. By the second day after launch, TransferBigFiles.com was using up more bandwidth each day than all of our other web sites combined (axosoft.com, the store, blogs, forums, etc.) use in each month! By the end of the first week, we already had over 10,000 downloads through the site. At this rate of growth, our little weekend project is growing quickly into a mature product offering.

Unfortunately, with the growth, we also had some growing pains. Some people have already abused the site to try and use it as a 1 to many filesharing medium for copyrighted material. To prevent this type of abuse, we've had to make some minor modifications. For example, we added a restriction on the number of times each file can be downloaded (this will prevent people from posting copyrighted material on the site and posting a public link). We also created a page that allows users to report abuse of the site. Additionally, we now have a management console where we can easily block files that are in violation of the Terms of Use.

We've also added some public statistics right on the front page of the site for those of you who are wondering about the traffic. The stats are updated every hour automatically.

Just a Weekend Project! The Implementation of TransferBigFiles.com

Hamid — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 22:42:00 GMT

20 hours. That's the amount of work we estimated each one of us would have to do to write the code, setup the database and move the servers for what would become TransferBigFiles.com. With that estimate in hand, we decided we'd work two 10-hour days: Saturday and Sunday, 8am - 6pm. Here is how it went down...

If you want to know more about the beginnings of this project, take a look at these blog entries:

Day 1 - Saturday

By 9am, we had made good progress. The SQL database was created, the graphics were done (logo & the #s, 1, 2, 3, 4) and we were well under way with the implementation of the Sprocs for the database when we realized the first hole in our project plan. We had forgotten to estimate time for a Data Layer. In most of our application designs, we create a simple data layer on top of Microsoft's Data Application Block. Our data layer typically provides simple objects which make life a lot easier when dealing with the database. The omission of the data layer in our timeline was not a big deal, as it would be done in about 45 minutes and we easily had more than 45 minutes of buffer in our timeline.

The next 4 hours we spent on TransferBigFiles.com's home page. We already knew what the page should look like from our design the previous day. Just implementing the UI part of the page (just HTML & Javascript) took longer than I had expected. With Dan and I pair-programming the page, it took us about 2 hours for UI and another 2 hours to implement the code-behind for the page. Everything looked great and our tests were going smooth as silk, except for the fact that we were still unaware of a major problem we were about to face.

By 3pm, while playing around with the work-in-progress, Dan tried to upload a 200MB file through the service. Suddenly, nothing seemed to work. Memory usage shot through the roof, processor was going crazy, the app did a full crash - all this and we were just uploading 1 file! How was this thing going to handle thousands of users? With more testing we realized that files larger than about 25MB were going to be a problem. This was a huge set-back. 25MB was just too small of a file and renaming the service “TransferLittleFiles.com” was not an option.

After more digging we realized that the problem was with ASP.NET's built-in file upload mechanism. It turns out that ASP.NET allocates memory for the ENTIRE post (which is how files are uploaded by default). This was causing the system to allocate large amounts of memory. To make matters worse, ASP.NET has a feature that monitors the process' memory usage. If the memory usage goes above a certain percent of system memory, it automatically shuts down the process to ensure against memory leaks. This prevented us from being able to successfully upload large files.

Google to the rescue - Googling the problem we found that the most practical solution was to use a commercial ASP.NET upload component. The rest of the day, I spent researching components while Dan started implementation of the file retrieval page for TransferBigFiles.com.

Day 2 - Sunday

At this point, I was starting to have my doubts about whether or not we would make our self-imposed deadline of 6pm. We had run into some unanticipated problems which were not yet resolved and we were still working on the development machine - nothing had been tested on the production servers. By 11am, we had made a decision on an upload component. We went with Media Chase's FileUploader.NET, which is a $249, .NET component to do exactly what we needed. Their component allows for large file uploads without any noticeable affects on memory and processor usage. This was a huge relief and it bought us an unexpected feature. The Media Chase component offers a nice upload progress and status feature which is much nicer than IE's built-in file-upload indicator.

We were back in business! By lunch-time, we were confident that we were making good time. We even took a 1-hour lunch at a nice fancy restaurant. We came back, finished things up and started to load the application on to the production servers. The deployment to the production servers went relatively smooth. We were deceived, once again. Our 2nd biggest challenge still lied ahead.

Going back to our design for TransferBigFiles.com, we had planned on using UNC paths to access the 1TB+ NAS Server. We figured this would be the most flexible solution that would allow us to easily add more NAS units as we need more storage space. To make sure load-balancing would be done, we created a simple web-service which returns the appropriate UNC path to the web server. Ideally, the web service would first look to see which server is least busy and provide the path to that server. For now, the web-service would simply return a single UNC to the only NAS we have allocated for TransferBigFiles.com.

The problem we now faced is that by default, ASP.NET applications can't access resources on a secondary machine. This meant our entire design of using UNCs to access our NAS storage was flawed. We had to figure out a way to fix this, so again, Google came to the rescue. As it turns out, the ASPNET process and the user that IIS runs under don't have any network privileges. The solution was relatively simple (run the IIS process as a different user that has proper privileges on the NAS), but this little problem set us back by at least 2 hours! By 4pm, we had it all working, so we started testing.

4:40pm, with a little more than an hour to go on our self-imposed deadline, we loaded up Dan's SUV with the servers in the back and headed to the Limelight data center to install the servers at their final location. Our biggest problem at the data center was getting the firewall setup. I had forgotten how to setup NAT on our firewall and couldn't get any traffic to reach the main web server for TransferBigFiles. Finally, at 5:58pm, the firewall issue was resolved and it was all working. It was done! 2 minutes ahead of schedule ;-)

Here we are at the Limelight Datacenter setting up the servers:

We have video taped about 20 minutes worth of film for our weekend project, but unfortunately, I don't have the time right now to edit the video and make it available. Plus, Microsoft's Movie Maker has been crashing on me lately (just opening the MPG files!).

Summary

This was a great project! I'm actually quite surprised at how much fun we had working through the weekend. It was quite satisfying and I hope you've enjoyed reading along.

The fact that we were able to imlement TransferBigFiles.com in a weekend shows .NET's power and ease of development. I really don't think we could have done everything we've done without the use of Visual Studio.NET and SQL Server 2000. We also used SourceGear's Vault as our source-code control product. Although I wish Vault had better integration with VS.NET (it took us nearly 30 minutes to add our solution to Vault on Saturday morning - a task that should have taken less than 1 minute). But Vault is great and it still does the job. And of course, to track the project and perform time checks, we used our very own, OnTime 2005 product. OnTime provided a great project management and task tracking tool for our needs.

Sending Large Files on the Internet - the free and easy way

Hamid — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 20:42:00 GMT

Before writing the full story of what we did this past weekend to implement TransferBigFiles.com, I wanted to provide a quick guide on how the service works.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the home page of this site is the main page used for sending files. There is no registeration required, no need to provide information about yourself. Just a quick and easy way to submit the files you want to send and enter the recipient(s) whom you want to receive the file.

Need to send more than 1 file? No problem, just click on the “Send More Files” link to open up 4 additional file selection boxes to be able to send up to 5 files at the same time. Need more than 1 recipient? No problem. Click the “Send to more recipients” option to open up an additional 4 locations to enter recipient emails.

But my favorite part of the site is actually hiden under the 3rd step (“Optional Settings”):

When you open the section, you can choose several additional options that make this free service super nice. You can optionally include a message, require a password to retrieve the file, send the email notification on your behalf and you can even be notified once the file is actually retrieved.

These optional features makes TransferBigFiles.com the best free file-send service available today.

So if you like the service, tell your friends and blog about it. Enjoy!

TransferBigFiles.com (beta) is Launched!

Hamid — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 01:02:00 GMT

WE DID IT! Dan and I are sitting here in the data center right now and we just finished setting up the TransferBigFiles.com servers. Everything is live and ready to use. The full story will follow. In the mean time, check it out:

http://www.transferbigfiles.com

It's 6pm. It took us two 10 hour days (8am - 6pm Saturday and Sunday).

We're excited and tired, so we're outta here!

Tomorrow, 8AM Starts the TransferBigFiles.com Project

Hamid — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 23:57:00 GMT

Not a single line of code has been written, nothing has been tested, the hardware is not even in the right location, yet by 10pm on Sunday night (June 5th), we expect to launch the beta of TransferBigFiles.com. So why am I so confident that we'll be able to get this project done by 10pm on Sunday, even though we're not going to start it until 8am Saturday morning?

Part of the plan to build the TransferBigFiles.com site was to design the project during serveral lunch sessions prior to the start of implementation. As excited as we are about this project, we didn't want to lose sight of the fact that Axosoft is all about helping software development teams deliver their projects on time. (TransferBigFiles.com does not stay true to this montra). So we decided that work time will be spent on improving Axosoft's OnTime product line, while play time (Friday afternoons, lunches and weekends) can be spent on whatever crazy side project we come up with. So far, we've spent about 4 hours on TransferBigFiles.com and we have setup the hardware (actually, Jonas setup the hardware) and we have a simple design for our site:

As you can see from the whiteboard session, the design is super simple. 3 SQL tables, 1 web app, a simple web service and a simple cleanup Windows service all running on 2 physical servers will make up the entire site. Spending lunch-times on the design didn't work so well, so we literally came up with this design late this afternoon in about an hour and a half. I'm sure we're going to hit some major hurdles over the weekend :-)

I also drew the “front-page” of what the final site should look like. This hand drawing is done on a tablet PC, but it should convey the idea:

So the combination of the whiteboard session along with the drawing of the main page of the site gave us a good list of all the “Features” that we need to implement. We entered our list of Features into OnTime, estimated the time to implement each feature and it looks like we have about 20 hours of work to complete. Since our estimates assume pair-development, that's approximately 40 man-hours of work:

None of these items have been started yet. We will begin at 8am tomorrow morning...stay tuned.

By the way, if you missed the first few blogs about TransferBigFiles.com, take a look at these:

OnTime 2005 Performance Tips

Hamid — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:39:00 GMT

When compared to most defect management systems available, the OnTime 2005 performance, especially when it comes to searching and filtering, is unmatched. But even though OnTime is faster than most competing products, as the size of your database grows beyond 4 or 5 thousand items, performance can seem a bit sluggish. This blog entry will help you get the most out of OnTime 2005 when it comes to performance for larger installations.

The #1 tip for improving the overall performance of your OnTime installation is to first make sure you are running OnTime V5.1 or higher. V5.1 introduced a number of performance related features and the development team paid special attention to improving the efficiency of various parts of the system. Without doing any of the tips mentioned below, going with OnTime V5.1 (vs. 5.0 or 4.X) can improve performance by as much as 50%.

Now, assuming you're running V5.1 or higher, here are some additional tips to help improve performance:

For Either OnTime 2005 Windows, Web or VS.NET Clients

Tip #1: Select a Project other than “All Projects” on the Project Tree - OnTime uses a smart caching technique when pulling data from the database. When you select a project on the project tree, OnTime only pulls down the data for that project and all of its child projects. So when you select “All Project”, every single non-archived defect, feature or task is being pulled down from the database. In the Windows Edition, it caches this data on the client side so it no longer needs to request the same information. As you click on each project, the client-side cache grows and therefore, performance continues to improve. So by selecting just the project that you work in most frequently, you should notice a significant performance improvement.
Tip #2: Use the New Archive Feature to Archive Old Items - OnTime V5.1 introduced a new archiving feature that allows you to easily archive older items that are no longer needed. Items which are closed, belong to a project that no longer exists or items that are no longer relavent can easily be archived. Best of all, you still have easy access to archived items (using the defect/feature/task menus), but by default, archived items will not be pulled down from the database. You can easily archive items by creating a simple archive filter and using the new archiving feature, select your new filter during the archive.
Tip #3: If Formatting is Never Used in Detail Fields, Use Text-Based Details - By default, OnTime allows for HTML-based formatting of all the detail fields. With the introduction of OnTime V5.1, we now allow detail fields to be either Text or HTML. If your team does not use any HTML formatting, you might consider changing all detailed fields to the “Text” format. This will especially improve performance on web clients as the text-box control has significantly less overhead than the HTML-based control.

Tips Specific to OnTime 2005 Web Server

Tip # 4: Turn off the Actions Column if You Don't Use it - Many users of the OnTime system rarely (if ever) use the actions available in the Actions column of the OnTime Web client. Each user can now select to remove the Actions column from the “Tools -> User Options” menu. Removing the Actions column helps page preparation time and reduces the HTML payload significantly improving the overall performance of OnTime Web Edition.
Tip #5: Turn off Multi-Edit Menu if not Used - If you don't use the Multi-Edit menu, this is another feature that can be turned off. The Multi-Edit menu creates a substantial amount of HTML code that increases the payload size of the page. If you don't use this feature, remove the menu from the “Tools -> User Options” menu.

Hopefully these tips will help you in getting the most out of your OnTime installation.

The Hardware is Here!

Hamid — Wed, 18 May 2005 20:32:00 GMT

A few updates about our crazy project:

We have received the Dell hardware we ordered! (it looks great, but it’s not setup).
Dan and I have had 1 lunch meeting so far where we discussed the requirements (see below)
We’ve picked the name “TransferBigFiles.com” for our project. I’ve registered this domain name at GoDaddy.com.

Our video of the requirements session didn’t come out great due to sound quality. It was our first video, what can I say? We did an outside session at Boston Market, so there is a lot of noise that makes it difficult to hear our conversations. I’ve edited the 10 minute session down to about 2 ½ minutes of video, but future videos should be of much better quality. We'll do future videos indoors :-)

Here is a list of the requirements we came up with for TransferBigFiles.com:

Allow for the upload of files up to 1GB in size
Allow for up to 5 recipients to be identified for receiving the file
Allow sending of multiple files at the same time
Allow a message to be sent to the recipient as part of the file notification
Optionally allow for password protection of file
- Password should be optionally sent with email to recipient
Optionally allow sender to identify themselves
User Interface must be simple
- Optional features should be done using client scripting to avoid round-tripping
System needs to store files up to 5 days to allow time for the recipient to retrieve the file
For added security, the system should create an image containing confirmation text that is required to ensure the user it manually filling out the page

Description of the way the system works:

Visitor uploads files and identifies recipients in 1 page submission
System stores the file for up to 5 days
System sends email to recipient with a link to a page where the file can be downloaded

Based on our current work-load and availability, it looks like we won't have time to implement this project until the first or second weekend of June.

We have ordered the hardware!

Hamid — Wed, 04 May 2005 23:59:00 GMT

We have ordered the hardware for our crazy project to help people transfer big files on the Internet. We decided to go with 1 main server for web and SQL and a separate, external 1.2 TB Network Attached Storage (NAS). This hardware layout will allow us to grow our disk capacity easily by just adding more NAS units as needed. With each web server and each 1.2 TB NAS unit taking up only 1U of rack space, we'll be in good shape for scaling the system if we need to add more capacity.

It was important to us to get rack-mounted hardware as we will be placing these servers in our Limelight Networks data center and we have 1 cabinet of space to house all of our server equipment, so space is somewhat limited. In our case, we should only need 2 or maybe 3 “U”s of rackspace (we would need 3Us if we get a separate firewall and switch for splitting up our bandwidth usage from Axosoft's servers).

So in case anybody is interested, here is what we bought, the reason behind our choice and the pricing of each equipment:

Dell PowerEdge SC1425 Server

The specs:

2 x 2.8Ghz Intel Xeon processors
1GB of DDR2, 400Mhz, 2 x 512 DIMMs
Rapid Rails for Dell Rack
24X CD-ROM
1 SATA 160GB Hard Drive

The Price: $1097 (+ $61.43 tax, Free Shipping)
Reason for Choice:

We were going to go with PowerEdge 750, but the price difference was

Dell PowerVault 745N NAS W/HW RAID

The specs:

P4 2.8Ghz Intel processor
512MB of Memory (2x256MB DIMMs)
Rapid Rails for Dell Rack
4 x 40GB 7200 RPM SATA Drives (net of only 120GB with RAID 5)

The Price: $1,566 (+ $87.71 tax, Free Shipping)
Reason for Choice:

We chose 4 x 40GB drives because Dell charges $500 per drive for upgrading to 250GB drives. We found Hitachi 400GB drives on the net for $261 each, so upgrading to 400GB drives afterwards will actually save us money.
We considered going with a Linux-based NAS to save on the OS costs, but we later decided sticking with the Microsoft platform and all Dell equipment was important to our project.

4 x Hitachi 400GB Hard Drives

The Specs:

SATA 7200RPM
8MB Buffer

The Price: $261 each x 4 = $1044 (Including shipping!)
Vendor: www.ZipZoomFly.com (Seem to have the best price on these drives plus free 2nd day shipping - we couldn't find a better deal!)

Total hardware cost so far: $3,856.53

This cost is unbelievably low considering what we are getting. I personally had estimated our server costs to be more than $5,000 (not counting switch and firewall needs). Additionally, I didn't think we would get 1.2 terabytes of usable NAS-based storage space (including RAID 5) for this cheap. Incredible.

So now we wait for the arrival of the equipment...

A crazy idea (and a plan)

Hamid — Wed, 04 May 2005 01:26:00 GMT

The other day, Dan (an Axosoft co-worker) and I were talking about a service we use to send large files to customers or to obtain large files from customers. The service is called yousendit.com and it works something like this: you go to a web site and upload the target file and provide the recipient’s email. The recipient receives an email message with a link to a web page where the user can download the file. Easy to use and extremely useful.

It’s a great service, but the problem is that it’s not always reliable and it has some limitations. So just as a crazy thought, Dan and I were talking about what it would take to build such a service…

We did some brainstorming over lunch and determined that the application itself should be relatively easy to write. At the core, it’s just a file upload utility, right? How hard can that be? We also determined that for the service to work well, we’ll need a lot of disk storage and tons of bandwidth. So we did a little math and determined that the most expensive part of such a service would be the bandwidth requirements (more on bandwidth later), but the hardware should be relatively inexpensive. So we thought, “wouldn’t it be fun to write such an app?“

Of course, Dan and I are both full time employees at Axosoft, so doing something like this would have to be extra-curricular activity, but we’ve decided to do it. More precisely, we have decided to do it in 1 weekend. At least, that’s the goal.

So the plan is this…

We order the hardware we need (we're going all Dell)
Design the project over several lunch sessions while we wait for the hardware to arrive
Write the app, setup the hardware, install and turn it live in 1 weekend
We document the whole thing in our blogs, including some videos of the whole process

A crazy idea, I know. I’m all about crazy ideas. We’ll see how it turns out.

New Features in OnTime V5.1

Hamid — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:59:00 GMT

A lot of people have been asking me about a product roadmap for the OnTime Project Management system. I wanted to give you guys a quick preview of some of the new features under development in V5.1:

Paste as Attachment - This cool new feature allows the OnTime Windows and VS.NET clients to easily capture and paste an image from the clipboard directly into OnTime as a file attachment. But the best part is that the new paste as attachment tool allows images to be manipulated directly in OnTime so you can easily crop and highlight or free-hand draw on the image prior to saving it. This is by far my favorite new feature.
New Archiving Feature - The new archiving feature in OnTime will allow administrators to archive older defects and features so they don't slow-down your system. For example, you'll be able to easily archive all closed items that are more than 3 months old or all the items that belong to a project that's no longer active. When such items are archived, the system no longer needs to pull them down to the client and therefore performance is signifantly enhanced. Best of all, you can still easily see all archived items by enabling the “view archived items” feature from the toolbar.
HTML or Text Based Details - In OnTime 2005 we introduced the ability to save detail information about a defect or feature as HTML. However, some customers wanted the simpler text-based input fields which can be a little snapier and easier to use. In V5.1, we'll give the system administrator the option to use either text-based or HTML-based fields.
Custom Fields for Tasks - A lot of customers have been asking for the ability to create custom fields for tasks. In V5.1, you'll have it!
Email Notifications for Tasks - I have to admit, not having email notifications for tasks was an oversight in V5.0. We'll address this issue with the release of V5.1
Huge Performance Improvements - With the release of V5.1, performance is no longer a back-burner activity. We've made a special point to improve the overall performance of the OnTime system significantly. There are tons of performance improvements including better caching, archiving and the re-architecture of certain parts of the system to respond much faster. You'll notice these improvements in performance from all 3 client types: Windows, Web and VS.NET.

The above improvements were all for the OnTime clients, but there are some major improvements in the OnTime Customer Portal too:

Attach Files in Customer Portal - With V5.1, your cusotmers will also be able to attach files to the defects and features they submit.
Edit Submissions - Now your customers will be able to optionally edit their own submissions if you enable that feature in the OnTime Customer Portal Admin.

There are a lot of other small enhancements, but the above list is a great start if you're wondering what's coming down the pipeline.

So when is it going to be out?

We expect the V5.1 release to be available sometime in early May. Stay tuned...

Great book: The Art of the Start

Hamid — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 05:29:00 GMT

I just picked up a copy of “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki (founder of Garage.com). Just a few pages into it and I can already tell I'm going to love this book. Many of his suggestions are contrary to all the “common wisdom” that's out there on how to start a new company or product.

Let me explain. In my previous start-up, Vitrix (now Time America), at the advice of our “seasoned” management and board members, we spent countless hours writing and re-writing business plans, coming up with Mission Statements and creating rosy financial projections that somehow always showed us becoming a $100 million company within 5 years. Year-after-year, we missed these stupid projections, employees made fun of the mission statement and we were slow to create something great.

Even though we started with good momentum at Vitrix, eventually, the conventional wisdom and seasoned management that we brought in slowed us down to a crawl. The company, which is now an OTC publicly traded company (TMAM.OB) has stagnated over the past several years and has never made a profit. I left this misery about 5 years ago and I've never regretted my departure for one minute.

Getting back to Guy's book...Guy spells out many of the things that I've always known but never had the right words to explain. For example, he talks about having a “Mantra” instead of a mission statement. A mantra is not necessarily something that you write down, it's just something that you and all your employees simply know and follow. For example, Axosoft's mantra has always been about “developer productivity”. It's not something we've never needed to write down, but it's something we all know and operate by. We help developers be more productive, period. That's how we determine which features go into our products and which features stay out. It's a simple test: “Does doing [X] help developer productivity?” if the answer is yes, then [X] makes the list, if the answer is no, it's out!

Another great piece of advice he offers is “Get Going!” Forget about taking weeks and months to come up with a perfect business plan and financial model. Just create the damn thing first! Figure out everything else later. This is contrary to all the advice I received when I co-founded Vitrix. Fortunately, I didn't make the same mistake when I started Axosoft. Although we now have a solid financial model and business plan to help us grow the company and project future revenue, I did away with all that stuff at the beginning. When we released OnTime V1, we released it for free - unlimited users! The free product was a huge success and helped launch OnTime into quick adoption by thousands of developers world-wide. I was never worried about making the product free because I knew V2 would be better and we would make up the lost sales for V1 when we release V2.

Could you imagine if I had tried to explain a “free” product in the business plan? I could just see the potential investors scratching their heads and saying “OK, lets say you sell 10,000 copies of your software...how much are you going to charge for it again? $0? Hmm...10,000 x $0 = $0, I'm out!”

Anyway, I love the blunt advice that's given in Guy's book and I highly recommend it to anybody considering a startup. I'll be blogging about The Art of the Start many more times as I continue to read it (bare with me, I'm a slow reader :-)

An example of incredible marketing - you gotta check this out!

Hamid — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 04:19:00 GMT

If you want to see some pretty cool marketing technique to promote a new Hitachi technology, check out this funny flash annimation:

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

It's worth the 5 minutes of your time.

Bug Tracking Priced for Small Teams

Hamid — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 06:39:00 GMT

Alright, for a while now I've been trying to figure out a good way for us to offer our products to small software development teams at a price they can afford. I think this past weekend, with a little help from friends at The Business of Software, I've finally come up with a good solution to the pricing problem for small software development and test teams.

The bulk of our revenue comes from larger teams of 20, 50 or 100 team members, but often times the small software teams of 5 or 6 people have really tight budgets to work with. The OnTime 2005 Mixed Mode licenses for 5 users normally runs at about $1,000 and add to that the new OnTime 2005 Customer Portal and bam, you're already talking about a $1,500 purchase for a 5-member team. This pricing is actually extremely competitive and in some cases costs thousands less than our competition, however, when it comes to small teams, they often don't care. They either make due without expensive software or they think writing their own is cheaper than buying a $1,500 product.

So tomorrow, we are releasing the OnTime 2005 Small Team Edition. This product is essentially the same as the OnTime 2005 standard product and includes the most attractive, “mixed-mode” license as well as the OnTime 2005 Customer Portal. The cost? Only $395 for up to 5 users and $895 for up to 10 users.

So if all the features and functionality of the OnTime product is in the OnTime 2005 Small Team Edition, then what's the catch? There is a catch. The OnTime 2005 Small Team Edition can not be expanded beyond 10 users (at least not without first upgrading it to a standard version of OnTime). I suspect that many small teams will find this new pricing for the OnTime Small Team Edition very attractive. We'll have to wait and see.

OnTime Tip: Customize the Add/Edit Form

Hamid — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:24:00 GMT

One of the most popular features of the OnTime 2005 product is its ability to fully customize the add/edit form. The standard OnTime Add/Edit form contains all the built-in fields and any custom fields you may have created. So here we see the standard Add/Edit with just 3 custom fields:

However, some teams might want to use a streamed-down version of OnTime's Add/Edit form. You can customize this form to only contain custom fields or a combination of the custom and built-in fields. To customize the Add/Edit form for defects, from the Tools Menu, select “Manage Field Templates”:

From the Manage Field Templates screen, you can easily choose to show or hide any of the built-in or custom fields. You can also reorder the fields. In my example, I've chosen to only show a handful of fields and reorder them so that my “Target Release” field is before the “Date Found” field:

As you can see, the new “Add Defect” form is now much simpler. The same customizability is also available for OnTime Features.