Quantity, quality and how TeamDesk combines it

After the decision to stick with definite service the first thing we are interested in is, of course, pricing and the quantity of users one can add for the given price.

I must say that’s quite a task to find the best quality-price ratio.

It takes time, but I’ll try to spare you some, giving a brief overview of what major vendors offer.

It won’t be out of place to clear up the pricing policy and what to expect from the service in further app roll out.

In TeamDesk each user with an access to the app is considered as licensed user. I've checked the pricing policy as well.

So, if you want to grant data access for many users (without perviousely specified quantity) TeamDesk suggests such options:

Web-to-record - allows generating a HTML code for any form and from any table, and displaying it on your web site or using for data input in the app (for example, you can create different variants of feedback/contact form). This is how it works on Wine Tracker app example from TeamDesk Application Library.


Let's assume I wanna create a public form for adding new wine items into my collection. First of all I should create the form with the fields I want to enter and tune web-to-record for it:


After that by pressing Generate HTML button you get a code, which you can use for adding records into table.


If you are concerned about privacy, but you don’t want to pay for SSL certificate, use resource of your app and display this web-to-record form right there.


This is how it functions in reality:


Of course, you can color it and add different amenities (header/footer/images) in any HTML editor.

If web-to-record is not enough, there is more sophisticated variant of doing this - SOAP API. This is the set of interfaces which allow you to get and modify your app data. This method gives you an opportunity to implement whatever you want – but it requires programming skills.

Here is an example of its implementation through javascript in a given app. For those who want to get even more advanced variant on .NET there is another way to implement this.

Conclusions

TeamDesk has tools for work organization of unlimited number of users. The developers thought it out, well, that’s good. What is not that good is the fact it requires the basics of HTML or programming knowledge. Personally I don’t like it that much, and this is exactly WHY.

My point is TeamDesk developers should think it over how to grant unlimited users access without any programming skills.