Recently I’ve asked WorkXpress guys if their system was capable of implementing the similar functionality Caspio Bridge offered. I was pretty surprised at the answer WorkXpress customers didn’t need such a feature.Steve Becker from WorkXpress said:
"Caspio’s flavor of PaaS caters to web publishers and to producing public facing content that can be accessed without login credentials. It sounds like a great feature for this type of product to be able to allow search engines to index that content.
On the other hand, our flavor of PaaS produces "web applications" which require users to enter a login and password to access private content. Obviously, our customers don’t want a search engine to be able to crawl and publicize their private data records such as customers, invoices or inventory.
As always, we try to be responsive to our customer’s requests, and produce the features they are asking for. Our customers have not asked for this feature to date. As stated above though, Caspio does have a different customer base and fills a different niche than we do."
It’s difficult to make any conclusions how different WorkXpress customer base is and who their Ideal Customer really is.
We can take real estate agency as an example. Of course it has some database of this property and its logical to give an opportunity to view or search this database for potential clients on their site.
Could search engine availability of this information cause any damage for the company?
Maybe the problem is real WorkXpress customer base is not that large and there is no client that needs such a feature?
Jane,
ReplyDeleteFrank's response to your similar article on Quickbase is quite accurate; most of the PaaS products you report about rely on their API's to publish data to a searchable website, and WorkXpress is no different.
Our customers have always been able to leverage the API to easily publish WorkXpress data to their own websites, which is then searchable. In fact, many of our customers do use this method to populate their SEO optimized websites.
To their credit, Caspio has introduced a feature that holds value to their customer base. For us, use of the WorkXpress API has been sufficient to accomplish the same task for our own customer base.
I don't think any of this needs to be a "problem" as you put it for any of the PaaS providers. We are diligently at work every day adding features and focusing on our vision, which is a true 5GL development language that makes all aspects of systems administration and software development accessible to even semi-technical people. This particular feature is simply not on our short-term product roadmap, for better or for worse.
Regardless, thank you for your continued attention.
Kind regards,
Treff LaPlante
CEO WorkXpress
Jane,
ReplyDeleteI think it's important to correct a few misstatements in Steve Becker's posting, which is in no way a reflection on his product or company. Caspio has a very large international client base that requires the SEO functionality, which is widely used by our online news media, education and government clients, among others.
1. "Caspio's flavor of PaaS caters to web publishers and to producing public facing content that can be accessed without login credentials."
When you log into your Caspio Bridge account (http://www.caspio.com/bridge/) you have the option of secure login which enables 100% data encryption. When you deploy your DataPages on your web site, you have the option of securing them through the same industry-standard SSL security. This ensures secure data transfer between the user and our servers.
2. "It sounds like a great feature for this type of product to be able to allow search engines to index that content ... Obviously, our customers don't want a search engine to be able to crawl and publicize their private data records such as customers, invoices or inventory."
It is up to Caspio's clients to decide if they want their data indexed by search engines. Caspio's groundbreaking SEO deployment method is one of a handful of deployment models that empowers web publishers to easily make their data available to the largest possible audience.
Caspio currently powers more than 200,000 secure web applications, including law enforcement criminal intelligence data, student educational records, medical office records, banking and other financial data, etc.
3. "On the other hand, our flavor of PaaS produces ‘web applications' which require users to enter a login and password to access private content.
Caspio is the world's leading on-demand do-it-yourself web application creation platform and the company has been in business since 2000. Caspio's philosophy is to empower business users to create and deploy web databases, forms, and applications easily and without programming. Caspio's platform-as-a-service replaces coding with intuitive point-and-click wizards, enabling users to rapidly produce web database components for capturing, publishing, and managing data online.
4. "Caspio's flavor of PaaS caters to web publishers and to producing public facing content that can be accessed without login credentials."
Caspio's customers range from one-person entrepreneurs to Fortune-500 corporations, digital media giants, government agencies, and educational institutions. The company has a media services division, government services division, educational services division, and SMB division to serve its clients.
Caspio Bridge customers enjoy state-of-the-art infrastructure that ensures high levels of protection and availability of data and applications. At Caspio, we know security is critical to our customers. This is why Caspio employs multiple layers of security and reliability measures that are outlined at http://www.caspio.com/bridge/security.asp
Sincerely,
David A. Milliron
Vice President of Market Development
Caspio, Inc.
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmilliron
Treff, thank you for the answer. I totally agree with you API is quite enough to implement this SEO deployment as guys from TeamDesk and QuickBase said. The thing is Steve had not mentioned the fact WorkXpress clients did it through API. So, it sounded like they didn't need that at all.
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