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)