Open Cloud Manifesto: hard to believe

Recently I happened to find an interesting post how LongJump proudly joins the Open Cloud Manifesto. In few words they try to define vendor-neutral interoperability standards for cloud based platforms. You may check out the details here.

It sounds like a good idea, the thing is if it will be implemented..

Well, personally I can hardly believe one will witness the success of this affair in the nearest future. To my opinion more realistic scenario of further developments would be the appearance of undoubted leader of this market. What would that mean for all market players? Actually, it will be critical for any vendor to have such functionality that enables easy migration, integration or import/export to the leading system on the market.

Let’s take a look at desktop software that exists for years. I can’t even picture anyone makes an attempt to create a spreadsheet that doesn’t read and write files in MS Excel format. Even Excel web clones, such as Google Spreadsheets or Zoho Sheet and almost all other web based databases are capable of reading and writing of Excel files.

Was there any need in manifesto for this? I think NO.

They had no other choice. As simple as that.

TeamDesk many-to-many relation check

I’ve been meaning to check out how many-to-many relation is handled in different systems. So, finally the time is right and I’d like to start with TeamDesk.

We have the list of students:


And the list of courses students can attend:


TeamDesk offers to choose many-to-many option by creating relation:


The thing is it has nothing to do with actual many-to-many relation and is used just in order to create related list and calculations in the system.

To create real many-to-many relation between "Student" and "Course" it’s necessary to add "Student Course" table, where we can store the year of participation and grade data.


And create 2 references (using one-to-many relation) form "Student Course" (many) to "Student" (one) and "Course" (one):


Let’s check how it works now. TeamDesk offers 3 ways to review and enter/modify the data.

Directly in the table "Student Course":


On student’s side:


Or on course’s side as well:


There is an opportunity to build different types of reports according these table data. For example, students from which countries attend specific courses? To get this report lets add the field "Country" to the "Student" table and through lookup column embed it into "Student Course" table:


This is how the raw data looks like:


Using "Chart View" we can build such type of report:



Conclusion:

TeamDesk is designed pretty well to handle many-to many relations. I think there won’t be any problem building view/report on data related in such a way.
There are several moot points though the vendor should take into account. Firstly, the very name of embedded many-to-many relation function misleads the user form the very start. Secondly, data input into related table "Student Course" is possible only one record at a time.

Attention: customers! To listen or not?

Facebook design upgrade caused a lot of hype out there. Customers' complaint made the service provider get things back. It had the opposite effect on tech community though.

The perspective Michael Arrington gave in recent TechCruch post makes sense, but is pretty tough.

If customer is a king and takes the upper hand in product evolution you may be really losing your kingdom. Period.

It takes a lot to be a real success. In any business. The key point is it’s always about customers’ benefit, improving the service you provide along the way. If it was as simple as it sounds.. Actually, there are always two ways to go. I must say dealing with web-based services vendors use different approach to this issue. The bottom line is who eventually wins?!

Salesforce Idea Exchange, a live example of vendor who is really listening to what customers have to say, can prove the opposite what Techcrunch is trying to state.

There is another example though. Once I’ve stumbled upon the blog with a very conspicuous title http://www.whybasecampsux.org/. I just couldn’t pass up and not figure out why Basecamp sucks so much, it was necessary to create a blog to tell this. Try not to listen to your customers, and you’ll find out why.

So, it really makes me wonder which option the vendors I am evaluating choose. The issue is pretty tricky, isn’t it?

Zoho Creator Marketplace for millions "for free" seekers. Marketplace?

Lately Zoho Creator updated their home page and disclosed the information that 300,000 small businesses, education institutes and not-profits used it. That made me ponder it for a while. This number is pretty big, isn’t it? This is exactly why I took a closer look at Zoho Creator Marketplace in order to give an in-depth perspective on this.

It seems such quantity of potential users should be of a great interest for VAR, Solution Providers or Individual developers, but I can hardly believe anybody builds a profitable business on that. To my opinion on this stage one can’t consider this as a marketplace, but it’s more like a try to create a COMMUNITY of Zoho Creator developers and users that would help each other. I think the vast majority of these 300 000 users are not ready to pay for development, as well as for readymade mature applications. But expect to get it for free. And this, for sure, can’t be presented as a marketplace.

If you are a Solution Providers or VAR looking for a marketplace for your products or ideas you'd better take a look at SalesForce App Exchange. Even despite the fact SalesForce has “only” 55 400 customers. The thing is marketplaces really differ. Customers too. Who can contrast quality with quantity?

Coghead customers, developers and partners: where are you?

It’s been already a while since Coghead collapsed and we can get some things straight here now.

Well, 2 years ago on TechCrunch I was surprised to find that 17 000 of developers were working on Coghead platform. There is quite a difference between paid subscribers and free trial users, and it looks like CogHead counted their trial users as actual developers utilizing their platform.

Anyway, it has been already 2 years since this data publication to actual Coghead failure. I think that’s been enough time for gaining even more customers, developers and partners. And the thing that really bugs me is: Where are they?!!

To my opinion, this entire affair was just a giant soap bubble regarding business. Keeping these doubts in mind, I visited "CogHead to QuickBase - Migrating Your Data" webinar that didn’t last long. I couldn’t believe it lasted just for 5 minutes, with 3 participants. But even if not take this particular case into consideration, there are many other things. Apart from all above mentioned info I monitor Twitter and Internet on the daily basis, but see no activity there. No news, no migration assistance requests… Nothing!

Here are just a few facts I could find. Delivered Innovation former Coghead partner switched to applications developed and delivered on the SalesForce Force.com platform. Caspio Bridge was the first vendor that announced a successful migration, you can check it here. And QuickBase was the second one to be proud of the next migration case, what can be seen here.

Can any of vendors that helped Coghead customers disclose real numbers?

Is there anybody who knows former Coghead partners that turned their partnership with Coghead into a profitable business?

Summing up all this, the last, and the most important question, is there any of Coghead customers who is looking for help? And needs any assistance in transition?

SaaS lock-in practical test

Although SaaS helps users to solve their daily business tasks in quite a different way, and this is exactly why I am so into it, there are some issues the customer inevitably faces within any system.

This time I would like to demonstrate on practice how really difficult it is to migrate the data from one SaaS vendor to another.

Blist is the system I’ve chosen to migrate the data from. In case you just need the list of whatever it may be, with the opportunity to embed it into your blog or website, blist is at your command.

The product I wanna migrate to is TrackVia and my choice is determined by the following factors:

First, lately TrackVia blog was full of posts promoting the option to embed view results into a blog/website again, again and again. This was the major reason I've chosen it for the app transiotion from blist.

Second, Chris Basham, CEO of TrackVia has left the comment here. He said TrackVia service Department wouldn’t mind to be tested. So, as long as I am a lazy fellow, as we all kinda are, I would’t mind if somebody could do all the hard work for me.

Let’s take a look at typical Blist list:


Looking at this app I anticipate the user will have definite problems while data transition. Actually, I can hardly recall a sole system out there that allows automatic importing of data with attachments or links to external files.

And there is one more thing, the column Reviews – the problem is it contains variable quantity of links.

The good news is it’s not my concern, that’s why I contacted TrackVia support and asked for help to migrate this Blist app into TrackVia. Matt Strenz, Customer Support Engineer from TrackVia, answered my questions:

"We used the export option in Blist to get this brought into a CSV file that we then saved as an Excel document so it could be imported into TrackVia. The one thing we want to mention is that we have ways of dealing with importing and exporting images that Blist or other services may not offer. … If the service they are coming from provides a way to get all images into a .zip file that follows some sort of naming convention we can programmatically bring these into a database."

So, I took the file Matt had sent to me and imported it into TrackVia:


This is how the result looks:


And here we are done with good news.

At first Blist surprised me, since developers didn’t foresee the way to get the images back. This is an interesting post I found in Blist forum on this topic.

After that, as I expected, I had an issue with Review field. I really doubt one can work successfully with such a data using paragraph field. I guess vendor is aware of that and it won’t be really out of place if TrackVia Support offered at least some formal solution to this problem.

Conclusion:

One can see its not that simple to migrate the data anywhere, even from such a simple app as we have. This is exactly why its so important to make the right choice of vendor, because in case you decide to move your app elsewhere, it will be really painful.

What is the real proof of service reliability?

We all are experiencing tough times. That’s why every step you take in business now can bring 10 times worse and deplorable results in case you make the wrong decision than ever before.

If talk about web-based services, what are the actual criteria of vendors’ reliability?

Really, how the common user can define if the service is trustworthy and what are the key factors?

There are 5 tips listed in TrackVia blog post by Ed Dunigan in order to clear things up what the customer should take into account and what makes the service reliable.

I tried to briefly sum it up:

1. Great back-up services
2. Test all features
3. Challenge the Service Department
4. Read the Manual
5. Ask to talk to current drivers

I really doubt those are the reasons to consider the vendor reliable and its enough to make right decision. Let’s see exactly why.

Firstly, I can hardly recall the vendor that doesn’t provide data back up in present time. This is not the issue to worry about. If the company goes down the customer will get the data back in any case. The other thing is that nobody cares what you gonna do with this data afterwards and how to migrate it somewhere else. So, transition plan is completely the users concern yet.

Secondly, don’t waste your precious time on testing ALL features the system offers. It’s better to spend it on checking if the service fits your specifics, trying to set up only the functionality you need right now.

And what I definitely wouldn’t recommend to do is to bother the Service Department asking them useless questions in order to try their knowledge.

Concerning Manual reading I’ll tell you this: if trying the service there is a need to constantly read the Manual, this is definitely not the solution you are looking for.

Well, there are many companies out there that setisfy all above listed points. There is a live example of the Coghead's failed venture that complied to the Ed's list pretty well. Did it stand to the Five Star Crash Test?

So, what is that than? I believe if the company is capable to stay afloat because of its own revenue it’s already something you can trust. Investors money is not something to rely on, especially now.

Before making any decisions, check everything properly.

Dabble DB doesn't go the royal road

So many folks out there are puzzled with a lot of stuff as they start to use any web based system. Naturally, vendors do their best not to scare people off from the very start. Too cumbersome forms and things that complicate the app use are not the way to attract customers.
It wasn't even a question before I noticed as interesting paculiarity while testing the next feature of the service.

Apparently, it’s not the case with Dabble DB.
Just recently one interesting Dabble DB blog post caught my eye. I was really confused to read this:

"… new Dabble customers are often confused by word variations compared to programs like Access and Excel."

Well, personally I had no problem with terminology and stuff reviewing Dabble DB functionality, that’s not it. I am just wondering how come (and who came up with the very idea) the vendor introduces new terminology that only muddles people, trying to retrain the customers and teach them new notions nobody uses. Except Dabble DB, of course.

All I wanted to say is that a lot of stuff complicates the common users’ life. There is no need to add to this.

Start from scratch or automatic jump start?

Currently Coghead customers have 2 options to choose from: start form scratch and automatic jump start. Both variants can be the way to go.

Starting from scratch gives the opportunity to look at the app you are using for you business optimization from another perspective. It helps to utilize the application differently, getting the most of it.

But building the app from the ground up takes some time and resources. So in cases when the time limit doesn’t allow doing so, or one should take really snap decision the shortest way is to choose.

My point is, if there is an opportunity to quickly try out the service in order to find out if it complies with your requirements, it’s better to do so. And tools each of these services has offered for automated transition make it possible:

Company	Offer
TeamDesk	Free migration of your Coghead application to TeamDesk Free Technical Support Free Trial
Qrimp	Free for the first 3 months Then 50% discount for the next 6 months Then full price for each month
Wolf	Free application transfer No payments for 60 days

The choice of the service, of course, should depend not only on automation tool. Such criteria as security the company provides, its stability, needed features of the system are the core reasons of customers’ choice.

So, why one should give these services a go?

I've always claimed only practice shows if the system fits the specifics of his particular business and is capable of solving his issues. And the presence of the automation tools helps to figure it out a way faster and with no pains.

As your app is developed with a whole lot of peculiarities and special features, one can review documentation, discuss a migration plan like forever. And eventually come to a standstill because of something you had no idea about crops up in the middle of the development.

Obviously, you can kiss good-bye efforts and time spent on the app fine-tuning.

The services providing the automation tool for data transition are worth trying: it costs nothing, saves time, requires no efforts and reduces the migration path literally by half.