AceProject Archives - Page 11 of 17

To know your user, surf in his browser for a day

With AceProject, we support 5 browsers: Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.

At Websystems, most of us use FireFox or Internet Explorer. Hence, we tend to want to test AceProject with our preferred browser, in our preferred language.

But we still support all the other ones

To make sure all browsers and languages are used to test AceProject, we’ve decided to rotate browsers throughout the development cycle. Right now, I’m testing on Opera. I poersonnaly use FireFox and Chrome as my primary Web browsers. Opera is a different animal. Everything looks a little bit different in this browser. To the point where, as I am testing, I wonder: “is this an AceProject bug, or is it one of Opera’s quirks?”

Suffice to say, the way someone experiences a web site can be significantly different from browser to browser. It’s worth trying out other browsers, to surf the web though someone else’s browser.

By Daniel Raymond|2009-03-27T14:45:00-04:002009-03-27|

Build something great or make a profit?

Here’s a very interesting (and inspirational post) from Rands in Repose. The post uses the building of the Brooklyn bridge as a metaphor for breakthroughs. In the beginning of the article, he explains the intentions of the ferry operators in New York City before the bridges were built: they didn’t want to build something great. They just wanted to make a profit.

Go read the article. It’s worth the fifteen minutes you’ll invest.

Do you want to build something great or make a profit?

People who just want to make a profit are not pushed to greatness. People who want to build something great don’t care about the money. It’s the same with business and projects.

However, something strange happens. People only interested in profit inevitably end up loosing to the people who want to built great things. And people who want to build something great usually end up with a better product.

Greatness lives in small things, too

When we build a new version of AceProject, when we decide the new features we’ll add, or which ones […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-03-25T12:32:00-04:002009-03-25|

Another scoop on AceProject 4.7: Workload management

We’re working on the second development phase for AceProject 4.7. There will be three phases in AceProject’s 4.7’s development cycle.

In phase 1, we modified task dependencies.

In phase 2, we tackle how user workload is managed in AceProject. We found that the User Workload report was hard to read. It was difficult to assign several people to do the same task, and yet count their assigned hours efficiently. Here’s what we did:

A typical work day

In AceProject 4.7, you’ll be able to set a typical workday length, in hours. This is useful to avoid setting the same work day length for all your users.

Once you’ve set a default for the account, you’ll be able to enable that feature for your users. Moreover, you’ll be able to set different work days for users that don’t follow the main schedule. For example, if someone on your team only works half-days, you’ll be able to set it up accordingly.

By Daniel Raymond|2009-03-20T15:35:00-04:002009-03-20|

Offline makes my laptop feel useless

I’m sitting in the train, coming back home
to Quebec from Montreal. Via Rail, the train company, offers WiFi connectivity
for 8.95$ per day. That seems a little expensive to me, so I decided that me
and my laptop would go alone. Offline.

That’s when I realized how much time I
spent online, for my personal and my work life. AceProject is an online project
management system. Everything we do at Websystems is somehow connected to the
Internet: the CRM, the system, our VOIP phones, the email server. If we were to
lose our Internet connection at the office, most of us would be sitting idly
until it comes back.

So here I am, sitting in a train, without
Internet access on my laptop. And my laptop feels useless. If I can’t read my
RSS feeds, check website performance statistics, stay up-to-date on customer
requests, manage my projects or even keep up with the daily email, what’s left
to do for a project manager/sales & marketing person?

I’m still looking.

By Daniel Raymond|2009-03-13T12:50:00-04:002009-03-13|

Project roles: sponsor VS manager

While working on a project, I realized the project team was not clear on the roles and responsibilities of the project sponsor VS the project manager.

Who’s the sponsor anyway?

The project sponsor is the person who pays for the project. Because he or she is paying for the project, they get to decide on the project scope, schedule and budget. They’re the ones really taking the big decisions.

Don’t confuse sponsor and client, however. The person who buys the product is not necessarily the one investing in its development. For example, we develop AceProject and then sell it to our clients. The clients get the product after the development project is completed.While their opinions are very important to the development process, they are not the ones funding the project.

When we are developing custom features for a client, then the client is also the sponsor, because they are privately funding the project. Otherwise, the project sponsor here at Websystems is Daniel, our President.

What about the project manager, then?

The project manager makes sure things get done. The project manager […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-03-12T13:38:00-04:002009-03-12|

Websites should work on all browsers

I keep finding websites that NEED Internet Explorer to work correctly. On the last website I visited, a government directory, the search function would only work with Internet Explorer. This is inexcusable. While Michel, our graphic designer, keeps telling me how hard it is to make AceProject look the same across five browsers (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Chrome), it can be done.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. But it has to work.

Forcing your visitors to stick to a specific browser or a specific screen resolution will only increase your bounce rate.

On AceProject’s website, only 49% of all visitors use Internet Explorer, while 40% use FireFox, 4.75% use Chrome and another 4% uses Safari. If we only support Internet Explorer, we would turn our backs on more than half our visitors.

By Daniel Raymond|2009-03-09T17:35:00-04:002009-03-09|

About buying mailing lists: permission marketing is getting refined

Everyday I receive unsolicited emails selling my ‘high-quality” email lists to market AceProject. All those emails promise me that the lists are 100% opt-in, qualified buyers who just can’t wait to learn about my product. I also see the same offers from magazines and online community sites. Magazines and community sites will often have nice colorful graphics about their audience.

And the price is interesting too. For a few hundred bucks, I can bug thousands of project managers and try to convince them that AceProject is the tool for their needs.

The problem is they don’t know me

Those people whose email addresses are on those lists may have accepted to be contacted, but they did not agree for me to email them. This is a problem. They did not give me permission to market to them. Furthermore, what really is the probability that someone on this list goes “Wow! This is exactly the product I was looking for! I must purchase it right this instant!”

Slim to none. Because my email is just one of may spam messages […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-02-24T19:14:00-05:002009-02-24|

Good customer service leads to sales

We’re shopping around for a CMS for AceProject’s web site. In our search, we found KenticoCMS, a nice product that seemed to fit our needs. So we installed the demo to play around with it.

That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part happened a couple of day later. I received an email from Juraj, asking if I had installed Kentico yet and if I got started evaluating it.

No sales pitch. Just a nice offer to help me and answer my questions.

I have to admit this was one of the best sales pitch I ever received. Because it was not about Kentico getting something from me. It was about me getting something out of them.

The value of a customer does not appear after the sale

A lot of companies will put value on a customer once the sale is made. They want to make sure the customer will remain loyal. That is a valuable goal to have.

However, getting a customer to like you enough to stay with your product for a long time should […]

By Daniel Raymond|2009-02-19T14:05:00-05:002009-02-19|

The tale of two icons

In AceProject 4.7, we introduce non-mandatory dependencies. Those are dependencies that don’t require the predecessor task to be completed before the successor can start. For example, you don’t need to be done buying presents before you can start wrapping the ones you’ve got already.

Graphically speaking, we needed an icon that people would click to switch the dependency from mandatory to non-mandatory.

And that’s where things get interesting

How do you symbolize mandatory? Our graphic designer, Michel, and I looked up on Google images and in icon banks, we could not find a consensus, a standard symbol that would mean mandatory. We didn’t want to invent something. If you need to explain your icon, you’ve defeated the purpose of using an icon.

This is when Michel had a great idea: why not use the line that illustrated the dependency between tasks so show whether it’s mandatory? A dotted line () would mean non-mandatory, and a solid line () would mean mandatory.