Data-Driven Web Applications at Work

Quickbase fails

2010-07-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

Recently Quickbase customers experienced service outages repeatedly. It has been really an unexpected surprise for Quickbase users.

Recent outages brought QuickBase uptime for the past 90 days to as low as 95% level:

And even though they were assured the problem is temporary, the number of service failures exceeded acceptable limits. You can check out the retrospection of problems reviewing Intuit's Quickbase Fails Days After CEO Pledges Fix.

Quickbase official blog states the situation is unacceptable. As an apology Quickbase offers one month credit to all users, so you can check out their official letter to Quickbase customers HERE.

Anyway, this situation has brought QuickBase service reliability into a question, and many customers have lost their trust to this vendor for good. Even worse, some customers' databases are still broken, leaving them in a real frustration. That's why the competitors don't waste time and have already made their special migration offers to Quickbase customers.

So far, the following vendors offered their platform to be used as a reliable QuickBase alternative:

Check out Caspio special migration offer HERE.
TeamDesk special migration offer you can review HERE.

Vendors ready to help DabbleDB customers

2010-06-15T01:42:00.000-07:00

As long as Dabble DB is out of the game now customers must be looking for other place to move their data.

It's not pleasant to discover one day the service you relied on let you down. But the good thing is some vendors are eager to help DabbleDB customers to make the transition faster and easier. Special offers make the process less painful.

So, lets check out vendors ready to help with their special offers.

Here I made the list of web based systems for moving the data:

Company	Offer
Caspio Bridge	Free 14-day trial Free first month of Value Package (regularly $39.95) Free migration consultation Free instructor-led training Free unlimited support 20% off custom development services
TeamDesk	Free automated migration using Dabble DB backup file Free Technical Support Free Trial
QuickBase	3 Free Months while you migrate your database applications 2 Free Hours of migration support and consulting
Zoho Creator	Free migration Unlimited Support

I wish all former DabbleDB users to make the right choice this time.

DabbleDB is out of the game

2010-06-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

10 June 2010 Smallthought Systems, a company behind DabbleDb online database has been acquired by Twitter.

No doubt that will be a new and successful stage for Dabble DB team. So, congratulations! But does this situation really differ from going out of the business Coghead?

Is there any plan Dabble DB can offer their customers?

Unfortunately, it seems Dabble DB customers are alone with their problems now:

"We will do whatever we need to do to make sure that, at any time, you can export all of your data, including attachments, in a structured format suitable for import into other systems."

As I see it this situation has brought up the problem into question again.

Which criteria one should take into consideration choosing the SaaS vendor?

Can the vendor be trusted so one builds a business with it?

Want to make Caspio forms dynamic? Scripting is the way.

2010-02-25T06:17:00.000-08:00

Caspio is positioned as a solution for building powerful web database applications and forms without programming. But why in the majority of cases when the user wants to add some dynamic behavior to the form he must use JavaScript?

I'd like to thank Frank Zamani for help and detailed answer about dynamic capabilities of Caspio Bridge.

Most features in Caspio-powered forms configured at design time and forms usually don't change behavior no matter how the user at run time acts. However, there are areas where behavior is dynamic:

Cascading dropdowns and listboxes, where the options in each field of the group depends on what is selected in the parent field can be implemented without programming. More details here.

Unfortunately, in all cases dynamic forms must be handled by JavaScript.

"Dynamic displaying/hiding or requiring fields is currently handled by JavaScript. That’s about to change as we will bring more of these options right into the platform."

Well until this happens, I think dynamic behavior capabilities of data entry forms в Caspio Bridge are pretty limited except dependent dropdown.

Zoho Creator can make forms dynamic. Get ready to script.

2010-02-24T05:53:00.000-08:00

Wanna add some dynamics to your Zoho Creator forms? Then get ready to master Deluge Script first.

First of all I'd like to thank Latha from Zoho Creator support for the detailed answer and sample application.

"Zoho Creator can perform the functions you mentioned in your blog like Hide/show field values based on values in other fields, change the value of a field based on value selected in another field, validate field values, make read only values etc. by adding Deluge Script."

I'd like to make several examples of how Deluge Script looks implementing all above mentioned actions.

Сustom validation of form data:

Modify form contents dynamically, on form load:

Perform an action after a form data is persisted (for example, send email notification):

Perform field actions (like show/hide fields based on value selected in another field):

Display items in a dropdown based on selection made in another dropdown:

Conclusions:

Well, Zoho Creator makes forms really dynamic and the flexibility you get can surpass other systems, but just in case you are capable of Deluge Scripting. I think, the main peculiarity (or problem?) of Zoho Creator is the fact the user can't do a thing without Deluge Script. Of course, you can do a lot of stuff with it, but unfortunately there is no golden mean option.

TeamDesk forms can be dynamic.

2010-02-18T10:32:00.000-08:00

In case you'd like to make your forms dynamic in TeamDesk two features are available for this: form behavior and dynamic calculation.

Form behavior allows us to control column behavior in forms. You can specify the condition and the set of changes to apply to the form's columns when the condition is met. It's possible to show/hide column on "view" form and hide, make read-only, editable or required on "edit/add" form.

TeamDesk tracks when column used in the criteria formula changes its value and dynamically applies changes on affected columns in the form.

You can check the peculiarities of the implementation here.

The second opportunity to add some dynamics in TeamDesk is dynamic calculation. Any data column in TeamDesk has "Default/Calculate" property where you can write the formula that will work not only when new record is created, but also when any column used in the formula changes its value.

The details of its implementation one can specify here.

Conclusions:

TeamDesk can make your forms dynamic. I really like that form behavior is not attached to any specific form and at the same time works for all forms set for the table in a view mode, as well as in edit mode. It's also good that system handles dependencies automatically (even though in the very beginning it takes some effort to understand that), so if you use [A]+[B] formula as "default/calculate" value in [C] column, system will automatically recalculate [C] if [A] or [B] changed by user on the screen.

There are also some peculiarities and limitations in TeamDesk I'd like to outline.

Calculations and form behavior in the system are done on the web server, not in a user's browser and it causes a little delay. I think here some visual feedback can solve the issue (in order to show wich columns will be affected).

Please note also what form sections and detail views can’t be controlled by form behavior or other way dynamically.

Keep in mind specifics of QuickBase form rules.

2010-02-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

In Quickbase your forms can behave differently based on specific conditions. You set the condition and tell system what action (or actions) to perform.

Let's check how QuickBase funciotns. Each rule contains 2 parts: conditions and actions are to be done, when the condition is true.

QuickBase supports following variants of conditions:

Field condition (for example, when the Status field is "completed.")

When the record is opened/saved.

When current user has definite role.

There is also a possibility to set multiple conditions in case the user needs to check several conditions.

Within the Action section, tell QuickBase what you want the program do when data in the form meets your condition(s).

Quickbase supports such variants of actions:

change a field to a particular value or the value in another field

hide/show a field or section

make a field required or not required

make a field read-only or editable

display a message

You can combine multiple actions in one rule if needed.

In case you'd like to specify the peculiarities of the implementation you can check it here. There is also a real life example of the setup and one can see it here.

Conclusions:

Quickbase form rules work well and really allow implementing everything in a pretty simple way. There are some peculiarities though I'd like to specify.

Quickbase form rules run in a user's browser and within data-entry FORMS only, not in grid-edit. So, if you try to implement any business logic with its help, don't forget to turn off spreadsheet-like editing of the report.

Maybe it's just me, but the setup when two or more form rules show or hide the same element looks a bit complicated (you should combine them into one rule, using the Multiple Conditions selection).

In case you have different forms for different kinds of users be ready to create form rules in each form and support its consistancy as each form has its own set of rules.

Let's check the situation with some dynamics in forms. Can users count on it?

2010-02-09T09:27:00.000-08:00

I am about to test the ability of web based systems to control column behavior depending on data in other columns. For example, such options as hide, show, mark as required or change column value when some condition on other columns are met.

So, lets find out the peculiarities of such functionality in Quickbase, Caspio, TeamDesk, ~~DabbleDB~~, ~~TrackVia~~ and Zoho Creator. We'll try to look into the specifics of its implementation and if there is such possibility at all.

Update

Sabina Iseli-Otto from Dabble DB:

"Well, you get a short answer from us: we don't support dynamic column behaviour at all."

Update2

Matt Strenz from TrackVia:

"The ability to have dynamic data entry forms that will show different fields or options based off results in another is not something that is currently available in TrackVia but this is on our roadmap of enhancements to make in the future. We’ve done this at no cost to customers on a case-by-case basis for Website Forms."

Which web based databases have native client for iPhone?

2010-01-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Don't want to disappoint you, but most web based systems don't offer native client. They rely on iPhone almost full Safari version as web browser and that's it.

DabbleDB officially confirmed the system didn't have native app. Therefore this affects the possibility of working within the system through Safari web browser in their knowledge base.

Zoho Creator announced they had optimized web layout for iPhone and even created special mobile version.

I've also found indirect confirmation on TrackVia forum the system works on iPhone.

I guess Caspio, TeamDesk and WorkXpress are also available through web browser on iPhone and iPod touch.

Check out the good news now.

Recently Intuit guys have announced on their blog their partner MCF Technology Solutions presented new iPhone application in called PocketBase. Instead of accessing QuickBase via the iPhone’s web browser, MCF Tech has leveraged QuickBase’s API to present QuickBase applications with native iPhone functionality. Currently the application doesn't allow to add/remove records, you can view it only.

I think this is the step in the right direction, because working with such an app is far better than through browser. Anyway mobile devices have a way smaller screen and require other approaches to resolve this issue.

What do you think?

Update from Andrew Catton:

Dabble DB pages are optimized to work both with iphone and android (we think this is the right way to do it, as the pages interfaces are much better suited to a small mobile screen than the core app, and you're more likely to be quickly entering data or checking a pre-defined view in this scenario). More details here.

Calculator to compare prices of web based systems

2009-12-18T04:23:00.000-08:00

Now you can compare prices and choose the solution easier.

Just with one clik the calculator I've added to the blog shows which web based system is more affordable for you.

Update:

Recently TeamDesk has changed their prices. The calculator is updated as well.

WorkXpress customers don't need SEO deployment?

2009-12-02T06:39:00.000-08:00

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?

What if use TeamDesk to make data available to search engine?

2009-11-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

Caspio announcement of new SEO technology makes you wonder if other vendors can offer their ways in this respect. How TeamDesk solves this issue and what one can expect from the system if talk about making data available to the largest possible audience?

This is what Kirill Bondar, the representative of TeamDesk Support, said:

"For every application TeamDesk provides SOAP API to allow data manipulation from third party web pages or applications - it's a part of standard functionality. All you need to start working with an API is a SOAP-enabled language like C#, VB.NET, Java, PHP or Ruby. Of course you can use API from JavaScript as well - the connector classes are provided.

To see it in action, you may want to check TeamDesk application library."

"Its content is managed by our team through regular TeamDesk application that allows editing the title, keywords, descriptions, place images and attach support documents, categorize applications and many more."

As you can see the TeamDesk uses the same approach QuickBase offers. The good news is you can use TeamDesk as back-end database for your site for only $9/month. But one should note this implementation requires knowledge of scripting and is not available in simple wizard-like style as Caspio offers.

When will Zoho Creator get to the point to make app data available to search engine?

2009-11-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

Is there a way to get an access to the data stored out of Zoho Creator ecosystem? Is Deluge Script the only way to access and manipulate data in Zoho Creator?

I asked these questions Zoho Support to figure out how to implement SEO deployment method within Zoho Creator platform.

This is what Charles form Zoho Creator answered:

"Currently this is not possible in Zoho Creator. However, as a first step, we are planning to address this in a completely different way. In this case, users would not need to have any servers on their end. We will let users add their domain name mapped to an application and the entire application will be served from a sub-domain which will have the application name as the prefix (sub-domain name). For example, if your company name is xyz.com and you have an application named products, you can access the page from products.xyz.com. Going forward, we will provide direct deployment to servers that support PHP, ASP, and JSP."

Well, it's kinda difficult to make any conclusions based on future plans not seeing any specific implementation. But as I see it now Zoho Creator is not that search engine friendly, as it dynamically generates pages using JavaScript on the end user's browser. So, search engine recognizes only lots and lots of JavaScipt code but content of your app.

How does QuickBase make data available to largest possible audience?

2009-11-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

With recent Caspio Bridge announcement of new SEO deployment method I wondered how many vendors out there catch up with that. Apparently, QuickBase has something to show us in this respect as well.

I asked QuickBase support if there was any chance to accomplish it in QuickBase and this was the answer Kirk Trachy provided me with:

"QuickBase customers have been managing their web content with QuickBase for years. In fact our website is littered with content that originates in a QuickBase database and is presented dynamically on our website via PHP SDK and our native QuickBase API. SEO is naturally built into the content as our web server renders dynamic pages. This is standard use of our free API and you can use any of our six SDKs to do it - free. You can use PHP, VB, Ruby, JAVA, C# and Pearl and if you want to do client side stuff you can use JavaScript."

The screenshot shows the look of QuickBase backend database:

The content is created and edited in QuickBase application. Then on Intuit servers the results are published on QuickBase web site using Quickbase SDKs and API:

Data is dynamic – including text, graphics and SEO. The benefit of managing web content in a database like QuickBase are many. Now contributing team members can update the content they are responsible for and updates to titles, text, graphics and tags including SEO keywords is immediate and without the delays and bottlenecks of waiting for the webmaster to make these changes.

Along with good news from QuickBase there are several moments you should take into account in case you consider QuickBase as back-end database for your web site. Even though the use of API is free, QuickBase's cheapest license costs more than Caspio: their minimal payment is ~~$249/month~~ $299/month. ~~Note, in case you need more space for images or videos additional 100MB cost $100/month~~.

Update

QuickBase has recently changed their prices. Now minimal payment is $299/month with 1 Gig of file attachment space and unlimited applications. You can add additional gigs for just $25/month.

Will Caspio SEO Technology be a Breakthrough for Cloud Database Apps as promised?

2009-11-09T12:14:00.001-08:00

Recently Caspio Bridge has announced groundbreaking new SEO deployment method, empowering web publishers to easily make their data available to the largest possible audience.

This is what Frank Zamani, founder and CEO of Caspio, says:

"Caspio's new SEO deployment model is a game-changer, opening up unlimited possibilities for our customers to reach search engine users and leverage data for profitable business ventures."

Let's take a closer look what's that about.

As with all deployment models of Caspio Bridge, the deployment code does not contain any of your data. It is a set of instructions that retrieves the appropriate data and application interfaces from your Caspio Bridge account, in real time at the moment it is accessed by a user.

The difference between SEO deployment and other deployment models is that the deploy code does not run on the end user's browser. Instead, the SEO deployment code runs on your server. This is critical, because the search engine crawler must believe that the data resides on your own server. When the page with the SEO deployment code is accessed by a user or Web crawler, your server executes the deployment code, retrieves the data from Caspio, and delivers it to the requestor.

This is the look of wizzard that generates code for SEO deplyment:

Caspio provides the deploy code in three languages: PHP, ASP and ASPX.

There is one important moment of all this, the price:

"SEO deployment is available now to Caspio Bridge Professional or higher packages starting at $189.95 per month."

This sum is not that small I must say - $2279.40 per year.

I wonder if this new opportunity will really be a "game-changer", what other vendors can offer and at which price?

Calculating working time. Let’s sum up.

2009-10-13T05:27:00.000-07:00

I’d like to sum up the results of testing in one place to make the picture of calculating working time capability more clear so users could see at once how good the system is solving this issue.

This is a brief description of what we’ve got trying to calculate future date or time duration within web based systems:

TeamDesk

TeamDesk almost completely managed to implement our task. The system’s only shortcoming was End Date calculation if working hours fluctuate every day. Nevertheless, it is the best result so far among the vendors pretending for a "no-coding" technique.

Caspio

Caspio Bridge’s capability of executing customer’s own code on server using SQL triggers opens wide horizons for implementing complex business logic in applications. The only problem is that you should be quite familiar with SQL in order to use it to the full extent. There also one more point that draws my attention: though I don’t know how data isolation is implemented in Caspio, but I think that possibility of running own code on server could present higher security risk of unauthorized data access.

TrackVia

TrackVia can perform complex calculation, but the system is not able to calculate End Date while accounting working days (not even talking about hours). The main problem is that the function weekdays is not designed for worldwide usage.

Zoho Creator

Zoho Creator proofed to be able to calculate End Date and Duration, correctly accounting working days and hours. I had no doubts in this tool even before starting our tests since "Deluge Script", which Zoho is based on, is actually nothing less than a programming language.

Dabble DB

Unfortunately, DabbleDB does not offer the ability to calculate duration for arbitrary "work hours".

PerfectForms

In PerfectForms behaviors are just another way of programming through flow charts. Besides, it’s more difficult to see complete app logic picture as each particular behavior distorts it. On the other hand "behavior" provides users with some flexibility so you can program business logic and calculations of the form.

QuickBase

As testing showed variable hours of operations and the weekends different from Saturday and Sunday can't be implemented with built-in QuickBase functionality. I think it’s possible in QuickBase, but only in case we always have 8 hours working day with Saturday and Sunday as weekends. To calculate working time and you will have to do some coding through one of six SDKs or HTTP XML API.

Taking into account all the peculiarities of calculating working time we can say it is not such an easy task for web based systems. If go programming way as Zoho Creator does the task is not that difficult, but it requires different skills. There is another option to implement through setup. In this case you should keep in mind that capabilities of these systems are pretty limited too. Of course, some of them can manage it better, this time TeamDesk proved to be the most advanced system calculating working time.

QuickBase surprises calculating working time

2009-09-24T05:25:00.000-07:00

QuickBase is one of the most mature products of the online database market. One can think with years of experience and such a huge client base there is no issue the system can’t solve. That’s why it was quite a surprise that the task to calculate working time with working days and hours was a hard nut to crack.

This example is prepared with Kirk Trachys help and I’d really like to thank for the assistance. He commented on the implementation peculiarities of End Date (Test 1) calculation taking into account hours of operation and holidays in QuickBase:

"QuickBase has some native field types and formula functions that address the calculations of dates, workdates and weekdays. Many calculations can be as simple as: WeekDayAdd([Start Date],[Business Days]). Where this takes a start date and you add the number days to it and it only calculates for Monday through Friday days. The result will jump over weekends and resume the next week if necessary. In the calculations below we created a field to accept a Start Date (01-01-2009) and another to accept the number of hours a task might take (120). Since each weekday was 8 hours we calculated the number of days by making them divisible by 8 hours resulting in (15) Business Days."

"Now that we have calculated the business days we need to account for the holiday schedule so we add the holiday dates (see table below) and then calculated if there were any holiday dates that should be added to the calculation. We calculate this by totaling how many times a holiday is present between the [Start Date] and the [Start Date Plus Business Work Days]. This holiday count is added to the business days and applied as a total to the WeekDayAdd function. The End Date then reflects both days based on hours as well as any holidays. Below is the same form as above but with the formulas displayed as text to the right of each field:"

"All of this was calculated in one table. When calculating date ranges that bridge over multiple year periods one will want to use a relationship to multiple records."

"QuickBase provides over 160 formula functions and operators with six SDKs and an open HTTP XML API."

Conclusions

From Kirks description and the app we can see "Hours of Operation" info is not used during the calculation. So I assume, variable hours of operations and the weekends different from Saturday and Sunday can't be implemented with built-in QuickBase functionality.

Even though Kirk didn’t manage to calculate duration between two timestamps (Test 2) I think it’s possible in QuickBase, but only in case we always have 8 hours working day with Saturday and Sunday as weekends.

The situation is the same as with TrackVia: WeekDayAdd function can’t be applied worldwide and count the data as needed and built-in QuickBase functionality doesn’t allow to implement this calculation without it, using hours of operation info.

Unfortunately 160 formula functions and operators can’t help you to calculate working time and you will have to do some coding through one of six SDKs or HTTP XML API.

Are you a fan of flow charts? The way PerfectForms calculate working time.

2009-09-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

If you like to create flow charts and define properties take a closer look at PerfectForms. The same Adobe Air platform Coghead used with similar in many respects ideology built around the form that lets you implement pretty complicated business concept.

I really appreciate the help of Paula Selvidge and the example she prepared.
This is how the result of working time calculation looks like in PerfectForms:

Paula commented on the results of implementation methods of Filter weekends and Filter holidays when calculating total available time.

Filter Weekends

"I have employed two ways to address weekends in this application. The first way is via the function Date Difference in the Formula Editor using this function one chooses the start and finish date. Then they choose the unit value (h for hours, m for minutes, d for days). If you type in "wd" (weekdays) for the value you will filter out weekends from the day count."

"The second way used a Simple Branch behavior that checked if the word "Saturday" or "Sunday" matched the date being examined. I used the Weekday Name function in the Formula Editor to return the name of the date being examined and I simply checked to see if it was on a Saturday or Sunday."

Filter Holidays

"Since observed holidays vary from country to country and business to business I decided to manually create lists of the holidays that would be checked during the form operation. Like the weekend solution, I have employed two ways to resolve the problem.The first solution uses a Multiline Text Input box with the holiday dates to check. This field is hidden on the form."

"The second solution that I also employed was specific to the working time calculation. Where we set the beginning and end date for a project and get the workable hours. In this solution, I created hidden date fields with the holiday dates inserted."

"Next the form would check if any of these values existed within the dates selected. When it checks for Christmas it would look like this:"

"Checking if the date I labeled as Christmas was within or on the dates entered."

This is how form customization looks in PerfectForms:

This is the algorithm (Behavior as they call it in PerfectForms) of what happens by pressing "Until Completion" button to calculate Working Days and Hours of Work:

And by pressing "End Date" button to calculate Days of Completion we have the following algorithm:

Conclusions:

As you can see Behaviors are just another way of programming through flow charts. To be honest I am not a fan of such a method for I think this way is more cumbersome if compare it with a text method. Besides, it’s more difficult to see complete app logic picture as each particular behavior distorts it. On the other hand "behavior" provides users with some flexibility so you can program business logic and calculations of the form.

TeamDesk calculates work time without any coding

2009-09-11T00:42:00.000-07:00

I am not sure who should take credit for that - MS SQL server itself, or was it TeamDesk’s natural ability to perform calculations, but TeamDesk almost completely managed to implement "end date and duration calculation" task, accounting working time and holidays, while using only a built-in functionality without any coding.

First of all, special thanks to Kirill Bondar from TeamDesk for implementing a sample application and explaining its functionality in details.

Here is the sample data which is going to be used for End Date and Duration calculations.

Working Times table:

Holiday’s table:

"Calendar" is a key table which is going to be used for all the calculations.

Here is how Kirill explained its structure:

"We've created Calendar table that lists all the dates and linked it to Working Time and Holidays tables. The only data column there is the date; Start and End Time columns draw the information from the Working Time or calculate as 0:00 for holidays. The Hours formula calculates the duration between Start and End Date. This table acts as a uniform source of information for any given date."

Here is how this table’s data looks like:

Let’s review End Date calculation function implementation (Test 1) first.

Here are Kirill’s comments describing this function implementation details.

"End date calculation would cause some difficulties in TeamDesk; the task is similar to calculating the running balance capped by Working Duration specified by the user; we can't do that directly. So we've made one assumption: the working hours for each day are either eight or zero.

Then we calculate number of working hours that fall on start date, calculate the number of working days (with an eight hours assumption) and use Calendar table and Index function to get the End Date from Nth working day. Remaining hours are added to the day's Start Date to determine End Time."

Here is how End Date calculation results look like:

I would especially outline the way how End Date is selected from the calendar.

Here is how Summary Column parameters look like:

Here is a many-to-many relation that it utilizes:

Now let’s move to the Duration calculation function implementation (Test 2).

Here are Kirill’s comments describing this function implementation details:

"Calculation of the working duration seems to be a simple math: one relation between Working Duration to Calendar records that fall between Start and End Dates to calculate the total of working hours between these two dates. Then we have to take in account partial days on Start and End Dates: two more relationships and some math to subtract the duration (if any) between Working Duration's From (Time) and the Start Time from Calendar; and the same for the End Date."

Here is how Working Duration calculation results look like:

As you might guess, the summary column does the main job here as well.

Here are Summary column parameters (this column calculates full working hours between two calendar dates):

…and many-to-many relation used for its calculations:

Now working duration calculation, accounting partial days, is nothing but a simple math and may be easily calculated using TeamDesk’s formula-column:

Excluding To (Hours)	Max([To (End Time)] - Max([To (Time)], [To (Start Time)]), 0)
Excluding From (Hours)	Max(Min([From (End Time)], [From (Time)]) - [From (Start Time)], 0)
Working Duration	[Full Days] - [Excluding From (Hours)] - [Excluding To (Hours)]

Conclusions

As you can see, TeamDesk almost completely managed to implement our task. The system’s only shortcoming was End Date calculation if working hours fluctuate every day.

It is nice to see that there are still some systems capable to implement various business tasks without coding, even though I would mention that configuring Relation and Summary , as well as writing formulas takes some efforts from the user.

Nevertheless, it is the best result so far among the vendors pretending for a "no-coding" technique.

Zoho Creator – write a program to calculate working time

2009-09-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

If you like challenges and are not afraid of some programming - then Zoho Creator would help you implementing your tasks with no compromises.

First of all, special thanks to Mr. Gaev for detailed explanations and to Nandhini from Zoho Creator team for the sample application implementation.

Here is a sample data that is going to be used for working day and hours’ calculation:

Working Hours table:

Holidays’ table:

Naturally, Zoho Creator doesn’t have a ready-made function to process these tables and calculate working time, but Deluge Script allows creating a User-defined Function to perform this job.

The main function that is going to be used for End Date and Duration calculation is getWorkingHours. It calculates number of working hours in any particular working day, and it accounts holiday schedule as well. Here is how it looks:

int getWorkingHours(date date)
{
    working_hours = map();
    for each daily_hrs in Working_Hours  [ID != 0]
    {
        working_hours.put(daily_hrs.DayOfWeek.toString(), daily_hrs.Total_Hrs);
    }
    holidays_list = List();
    for each holidays in Holidays  [ID != 0]
    {
        holidays_list.add(holidays.Date_field);
    }
    if (holidays_list.contains(input.date))
    {
        return 0;
    }
    else
    {
        dayofWeek = input.date.getDayOfWeek();
        return (working_hours.get(dayofWeek.toString())).toLong();
    }
}

Now we may calculate End Date (Test 1):

date getEndDate(date start_date, int start_duration, int total_duration)
{
    duration = thisapp.getWorkingHours(input.start_date);
    input.start_duration = (input.start_duration  +  duration);
    if (input.start_duration  <  input.total_duration)
    {
        new_start_date = input.start_date.addDay(1);
        input.start_date = thisapp.getEndDate(new_start_date, input.start_duration, input.total_duration);
    }
    return input.start_date;
}

Here is this function output:

A similar function may be added to calculate Duration (Test2):

int getTotalWorkingHrs(date start_date, date end_date, int duration)
{
    if (input.start_date  <=  input.end_date)
    {
        date_duration = thisapp.getWorkingHours(input.start_date);
        total_duration = (input.duration  +  date_duration);
        new_start_date = input.start_date.addDay(1);
        input.duration = thisapp.getTotalWorkingHrs(new_start_date, input.end_date, total_duration);
    }
    return input.duration;
}

Here is the second function output:

As you can see, both tests were implemented successfully; however some programming was required, and I am not sure that a business user would be capable to do that. Fortunately, there is Zoho Marketplace and Forum where novice Users can ask for help implementing such functionality.

Conclusions

Zoho Creator proofed to be able to calculate End Date and Duration, correctly accounting working days and hours. I had no doubts in this tool even before starting our tests since "Deluge Script", which Zoho is based on, is actually nothing less than a programming language.

The only question that remains is: Who is he, ideal Zoho Creator customer?

A real life could be more complicated than TrackVia could think

2009-09-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

In the ideal world all the people would speak the same language, use the same alphabet and work Monday through Friday 8 hrs a day with a lunch break. In such an ideal world TrackVia would be a good tool for a working time calculation.

First of all, a special thanks to Matt Strenz, TrackVia Customer Support Engineer who created a sample database for me.

"We’ve added a database in your account that is using a calculated field to determine the number of working hours a date range would contain taking into consideration a 5 day work week of 9 hours a day and all the holidays you had mentioned."

Here are Matt’s recommendations how to implement end date calculation (Test 1):

"The first test you mention about creating an end date from the hours entered would be a more difficult calculation to do as this would require looping through the days to determine if they are a weekday or holiday and then to ignore them if so. Because this is a more complex issue it would have to be handled with a full programming language to allow for loops and variables. We built a simplified version in a database called End Date Calculation that you can review to see that this is using a dateadd() formula we have created which allows adding years, months, days, hours, or even minutes to an existing date field."

Here is how the database looks from the setup mode:

Here are calculation results:

Matt also explained how to implement duration calculations (Test 2):

"This is done using a weekdays() formula TrackVia offers which calculates the number of weekdays between two dates and datedif() to determine if there is a holiday that falls between the two entered dates. This would allow for a person to enter a starting and ending date for a project but would not take into consideration the times of day. The formula used can easily be updated to reflect a shorter or longer working day as well as changing the dates that a holiday will fall on."

Here is how the database looks from the setup mode:

Here is a complete formula that was used for the Duration Days calculation for your review:

weekdays(Start Time, End Time) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-12-25")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-12-25")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-11-26")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-11-26")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-11-11")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-11-11")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-10-12")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-10-12")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-09-07")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-09-07")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-06-03")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-06-03")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-05-25")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-05-25")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-02-16")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-02-16")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-01-19")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-01-19")<=0),1,0) - if(and(datedif(Start Time, year(Start Time)&"-01-01")>=0,datedif(End Time, year(End Time)&"-01-01")<=0),1,0)

Here are calculation results:

Matt came to the following conclusions:

"Other date formulas available are datesub() which is the reverse of dateadd(), datetimedif() and datedif() which return the difference in either time or days, and weekday() which returns the day of the week a date falls on. Combining these formulas using if-then-else logic also available allows for all kinds of complex calculations to be made. We hope that from this you can see how complex calculations can be done in TrackVia and this will show how we have a wide range of prebuilt formulas to use for solutions to standard business problems."

My own conclusions:

Good news first: Looking at the "Duration Days" calculation formula, I think, nobody would say that TrackVia can’t perform complex calculations.

Bad news is that the system is still not able to calculate exactly what we needed. It looks like Test 1 had failed because the system is not able to calculate End Date while accounting working days (not even talking about hours). There are also some problems in the way durations were calculated for the Test 2. The main problem is that the function weekdays() is not designed for worldwide usage. If you are a TrackVia user from Israel, for example, the system would give you incorrect results because Sunday is a working day there.

As you can see, if you are going to add "working days and time support" functionality to your TrackVia application, you may need to research this system’s capabilities as well as its shortcomings to avoid surprises later on.

Caspio Bridge's way of working time calculation

2009-09-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

Caspio Bridge provides you with all the MS SQL database power when you need to implement working days and hours support in your application, but require you to become acquainted with SQL language in return.

Here is Frank Zamani comments on how it can be implemented in Caspio Bridge:

"This has been done before. The process is straight forward:
A web form is used to enter the starting date and the number of hours the project requires.
Upon submission, a database trigger (custom SQL code) uses the customer’s lookup tables of holidays and working hours, and comes up with the end date, storing it on the just-inserted record.
The web form from step 1 loads a "Search and Report Data Page" against the record that was just submitted and displays the calculated date.
The trigger in step 2 is created by the customer and provided to us or a Caspio engineer builds it for the customer for a small fee."

In case you do not have an idea on how SQL trigger looks like, here is rough draft of one:

-- ================================
-- Author: Caspio, Inc.
-- Create date: September 3, 2009
-- Description: Calculates end date based on start date and number of hours
--  for a project.
--  Replace <MyTable>, <FromDateField>, <ProjectHoursField>,
--  <EndDateField> with the appropriate field names from your table 
-- ================================
CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[ct_Ins_Upd_CalcDates] 
   ON  <MyTable>
   AFTER INSERT, UPDATE
AS 
BEGIN
 SET NOCOUNT ON;

 DECLARE @PKID int,
  @FromDate_local datetime,
  @projectHours_local decimal(18,2),
  @EndDate_local datetime

 SELECT @PKID = PK_ID, 
  @FromDate_local = ISNULL(<FromDateField>,'01/01/1900'), 
  @projectHours_local = ISNULL(<ProjectHoursField>,0)
 FROM inserted

 IF @FromDate_local <> '1/1/1900'
 BEGIN
  SELECT @EndDate_local = fn_GetEndDate(@FromDate_local, @projectHours_local)

  UPDATE <MyTable>
  SET <EndDateField> = @EndDate_local
  WHERE PK_ID = @PKID
 END
END

Following clarifications should help you better understand the process of building and using such a trigger.

Which name conversions are used to reference tables and columns from the app?

"In SQL actual field names are used. This can also be done in JavaScript. In JavaScript our standard prefix that is added to all field names should be considered. Users can look at the HTML source to see the naming pattern."

If some changes were done in the app we need to change this trigger too every time it happens?

"For SQL code, the table and app can change as long as the particular fields used in the calculation or storage of the value remain intact. JavaScript is more dependent on the app."

When this trigger is created by the customer is there any tools to test or debug it from customers’ side?

"Users can run their SQL code against their account via our API to test but we don’t provide a development environment."

Summary

Caspio Bridge’s capability of executing customer’s own code on server using SQL triggers opens wide horizons for implementing complex business logic in applications. The only problem is that you should be quite familiar with SQL in order to use it to the full extent. There also one more point that draws my attention: though I don’t know how data isolation is implemented in Caspio, but I think that possibility of running own code on server could present higher security risk of unauthorized data access.

I want to calculate working time! Good luck buddy..

2009-09-03T02:45:00.000-07:00

So many business tasks require calculating future date or time duration between two events but the majority of web based systems are not capable to calculate it right. The reason is nobody takes into account working days and hours. I am going to check if any system out there can handle this issue and how easy the implementation is.

This is initial data I am going to use to calculate working days and hours.

Working Time table

Day Of Week	Start Time	End Time
Monday	10:00 am	6:00 pm
Tuesday	10:00 am	6:00 pm
Wednesday	10:00 am	6:00 pm
Thursday	10:00 am	6:00 pm
Friday	10:00 am	6:00 pm
Saturday	0:00 am	0:00 am
Sunday	0:00 am	0:00 am

If Start Time = End Time this day is considered as a weekend.

Holiday’s table

Day	Description
12/25/2009	Christmas Day
11/26/2009	Thanksgiving Day
11/11/2009	Veterans Day
10/12/2009	Columbus Day
9/7/2009	Labor Day
6/3/2009	Independence Day
5/25/2009	Memorial Day
2/16/2009	Washington’s Birthday
1/19/2009	Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
1/1/2009	New Year’s Day

Test 1: End date calculation.

Field/Column	Description
Start Date	The beginning of any process. The date is set by user.
Working Duration (Hours)	The duration of the process in hours. Set by user.
End Date	The system calculates the End date taking into account holydays and working time.

On practice it can be used to manage projects or in planning. For example, you need to calculate the end date of anything (working days and hours included).

Test 2: Working time calculation.

Field/Column	Description
Start Date/Time	The beginning of any process. The date is set by user.
End Date/Time	The ending of the process. Set by user.
Working Duration (Hours)	The system calculates the duration taking into account holydays and work time.

For example, one can control SLA in CRM. Let’s take the case you commit yourself to handle the client request within N business hours.

Well, I understand it’s not such an easy task, that’s why I am asking vendors to tune it in their systems if possible. After that I’ll sum up the results so you could compare the implementation (if any at all) in different systems, how easy it is and what skills are required.

The Ideal Customer. Vendors define who he is.

2009-08-31T06:15:00.000-07:00

So many times I’ve reviewed web-based systems from common user’s perspective looking for solutions that correspond to their expectations. This time my aim is a bit different. The other thing which is not less important is the vision of IDEAL CUSTOMER vendors have.

I’d like to clear up which user type attracts them the most and whom they would like to deal with. Because all these hype "we can serve EVERYBODY and solve EVERYTHING" almost all vendors proclaim only puzzles users rather than shows what to expect from the service.

So, I asked main vendors to specify their IDEAL CUSTOMER picture and this is their description:

Chris Basham from TrackVia:

A business (not a consumer).

Rapidly solving a business-critical problem (not a minor issue, or simply building a list of items).

Needs a sophisticated workflow application where each item in the app is valuable to the business, and each item is frequently processed/updated, with event-based alerts sent to users.

Requires a highly secure platform, with 100% availability and fast response time (no downtime or slow page loads).

Values "astounding" customer support, including live phone support during business hours, and hands-on help.

5 to 5000 users, of different levels of technical sophistication, will be working in the account frequently, with differing access levels to features, records, fields, etc.

The app is used by users who’re logged-in to the account (not by website visitors.

Treff LaPlante from WorkXpress:

"WorkXpress is focused on providing programmatic-level functionality faster and more easily than if using traditional programming languages. Our ideal customer is either a non-developer who wants to produce superior software functionality or a developer who wants to greatly accelerate their software development timeframes. The ideal customer is typically creating software to automate one or two departments, or in smaller businesses they are automating the entire company."

Frank Zamani from Caspio Bridge:

"The right customer is one who has a relevant project and appropriate skills.

As far as required skills, Caspio is a feature-rich and capable platform that is intended for tech-savvy business users. Tech-savviness is a spectrum, and depending on the user’s knowledge, or skills gained by using Caspio and our free training, they can learn to utilize more complex features to create truly sophisticated web applications. With this philosophy, customers don’t grow out of Caspio. There is always something new and exciting to learn and add to their web apps.

As for the projects themselves, we strive to offer capabilities that most common internal and public facing applications require. In particular, we uniquely make it easy and affordable to build and maintain

mass-scale apps that go on to have thousands of named authenticated users, and
are deployed to customer’s own site in a seamless fashion.

For us customer size is of no consequence."

Kirill Bondar from TeamDesk:

"Our ideal customers are ones who set up an application themselves and get the most out of it. We've seen it many times: they start changing and tuning their application and can't stop because of opening possibilities to automate this and that and even more and improve it further, and quickly become addicted by the process. They enjoy the process of improvement because our customers are business people typically - not the developers - and the opportunity to do it themselves is like climbing the peak with ready application as the reward.

Such customers will have two major advantages over the rest:

A full control - they know how their application works and they do not afraid to change it.

A speed - noone knows their business process better than they are; they do not need to write the specifications and explain it to developers, they just do what they need. They can try to do it in different ways to see what works best for them or quickly adopt their application to the changes in business process."

Paula Selvidge from PerfectForms:

"PerfectForms is designed with the business user in mind as the target audience. Our goal is to empower the person closest to the problem to create the solution that meets their needs.

Now, with that said, I fully understand and agree that application development encompasses a wide range of unique skills. I think the complexity of the solution that the customer intends to build is a key factor for consideration. I feel business analysts tend to have the best broad skill set, in regards to identifying requirements, designing interfaces and understanding workflow which enables them to create, usable and effective, complex applications in tools like PerfectForms. Admittedly, it is possible to use any of these development tools to create some very poor applications. The inherent product challenge is offering the power and flexibility for more advanced users, while still providing an interface that supports less experienced or novice users. I believe PerfectForms is straddling the middle at this point but this is not where we strive to be. We will continue to enhance our product and find ways to effectively help those that don’t have the optimal skills for application development to build solutions that meet their needs.

In terms of our market focus, we target SMBs. We are at a price point that falls in the strike zone for smaller group budgets, which tend to be business focused, so they are empowered to quickly purchase a tool that meets their needs without the lengthy enterprise evaluations. For those groups, they tend to select PerfectForms as a solution because they lack access to IT resources or are prioritized lower for development since their deliverables may not be as ‘mission critical’ to the organization."

As you can see, the question is not that easy as it seems at first but some of them managed to shed some light on this point anyway.

Which type of database does your vendor rely on?

2009-08-26T03:16:00.001-07:00

In the majority of cases users have no direct access to database back-end that their system uses for data organization/storage. Usually you manipulate data with interface or API. One can say it doesn’t really matter from the end user standpoint.

But still the choice of the database back-end defines system possibilities and ideology in many respects. This is the reason why I questioned vendors of products I review in my blog which database they use (if any), the reason of their choice and what kind of advantages it offers.

Avi Bryant from Dabble DB:

"We use a custom, in-memory object database. This allowed us to more easily provide the flexible data migration, sophisticated data types, and fast interactive querying that we wanted to offer our users."

Frank Zamani from Caspio Bridge:

"Caspio utilizes Microsoft SQL Server for its database. From day one, back in 2000, we knew that employing a powerful and scalable database is of utmost importance to us. We initially chose Oracle but soon encountered issues operating Oracle on a Microsoft stack. As a result in, our next release we dropped Oracle and replaced it with SQL Server.

The criteria remain high reliability and high scalability within a Microsoft stack. The result of our choice is evident in our ability to power some of the most demanding web applications for our enterprise customers."

Jim Salem from QuickBase:

"QuickBase chose to build a proprietary database to store app data. There are three reasons:

1) Scalability
Traditional relational database platforms are targeted towards supporting a relatively small number of potentially very large databases. Because of this, they run into significant scalability challenges when trying to host millions of independent databases. QuickBase’s architecture avoids these traditional scalability issues entirely. It can continue to support more and more applications just by adding additional hardware. Our application density (number of active applications hosted per server) is significantly higher than other online databases.

2) Performance
We chose an "in memory database" architecture because it’s significantly faster (and simpler) than traditional database architectures for the size problems that QuickBase targets.

3) Native Support for Easy-to-Use Web Data Types
We wanted to avoid the complexity of traditional databases leaking through into QuickBase’s UI. Unlike traditional databases, QuickBase was built from the ground up with the web in mind. Primitive QuickBase data types include email addresses, URLs, and versioned file attachments. These all require special coding (and overhead) on traditional databases. In addition, we implemented an easy-to-use relationship model that our users find simpler than the SQL "join" operations and index configuration required on traditional databases."

Chris Basham from TrackVia:

"TrackVia is built on the LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / Perl).
The reason that we chose the LAMP stack is that TrackVia is differentiated from our competition by 1) Security, 2) Uptime, 3) Fast page loads.

Unlike many technology companies, we actually don’t want to have our service run on the newest technology that’s available. We only want our service to rely on mature, "battle tested" technologies that have been around for so long that all of the bugs have already been discovered and fixed. For example, we don’t run the most current version of MySQL. We run an older version that’s more stable and predictable.

As a result of this philosophy, we are able to truly deliver on the 3 items above – security, uptime and fast page loads."

Kirill Bondar from TeamDesk:

"We are using Microsoft SQL Server for TeamDesk.

In fact, we are using it for all our products for about 8 years. It proves itself reliable and scalable, delivers good performance in almost every case and provides tight integration with server platform, web environment and development tools.

Just one fact: rather than storing formula or summary column evaluation results and tracking the changes in dependend columns to know when the value needs recalculating, TeamDesk, thanks to Microsoft SQL Server performance, just calculates it on the fly. Even with large data sets and a lot of interconnected tables, this way rarely causes performance problems."

Yoge from Zoho Creator:

"We use our proprietary grid storage that is based on MySql. The reason for our choice is open source solution allow us to scale the performance to the desired level."

Treff LaPlante from WorkXpress:

"We use MySQL. We began our R&D in 2001 on MS SQL backend, and in 2003 switched to MySQL. We made the switch primarily because we knew we wanted to save our customers licensing costs, however, it's turned out to be a great decision on many levels. First, MySQL has a talented user community that we interact with to share knowledge and code. Second, MySQL has established itself in recent years with all manner of enterprise as an accepted and in some cases preferred database. Finally, the available packages and options for MySQL have greatly accelerated our time to market with new feature sets."

Aditya Tandon from Wolf Frameworks:

"We support Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL database. Currently for our OnDemand model, we offer the MySQL database which helps to lower cost for our customers. For us, database is storage and we plan to add support for other databases soon."

Paula Selvidge from PerfectForms:

"When we began development of PerfectForms in 2006, we primarily evaluated Oracle vs SQL and chose SQL due to the factors outlined below. We are also going to support SQL Express by year end, since it will further reduce costs for our customers who want to pursue an on-premise solution.

We chose SQL over Oracle due to:
Reliability and scalability
Lower cost for customers
Consistency with our MS stack
Our API is built on asp.net, so going with SQL offered better performance
Less costly from a support, maintenance and resource perspective for us internally."

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading all the answers as I did. Frankly, I don’t want to make any conclusions here. But I think this information can help you choose the system that is of better use for you.

So, you can check out the summary on back-end database vendors provided us with:

Dabble DB	Custom, in-memory object database
Caspio Bridge	Microsoft SQL Server
QuickBase	Custom proprietary database
TrackVia	MySQL
TeamDesk	Microsoft SQL Server
Zoho Creator	Custom storage based on MySQL
WorkXpress	MySQL
Wolf Frameworks	MySQL (for hosted service option)
PerfectForms	Microsoft SQL Server

Too many features with too many options

2009-08-19T03:11:00.000-07:00

I believe that most web-based data driven system today are overbuilt.

Too many features with too many options, it leaves users frustrated and lost.

One of the main reasons it happens: System feature death spiral. The thing is that vendors try to sell the product demonstrating its new functionality that must beat the functionality of competitors, but that only complicates the product and makes it quite cumbersome.

The second reason for that is vendors attempt to solve two opposite tasks within one product: enable users no-programming app creation pursuing to build a system that can build apps of any complexity at the same time, what results in a plethora of options. The truth is you really don’t have to code on PHP or .NET, but instead of that it requires knowledge how to build the app within their system with their specific elements (visual, for example) and you must know how to handle this huge quantity of options. As the matter of fact the difficulties you face learning how to operate can be fairly compared to efforts of mastering a programming language, but in options.

There is one more thing. Give any system a time and eventually it turns into Salesforce. When your client base grows day by day it’s pretty difficult to decline requests of big and important customers to add some feature or option they literally can’t live without. One can say what’s wrong with that? Everybody is happy! The client is satisfied and the product has one more "useful" feature. The problem is nobody needs it but only this particular customer.

What’s your opinion? I think the time has come to do more with less.

No programming myths need reality checks

2009-08-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Today many vendors of data driven web apps declare their systems allow literally anybody creating the app with no programming.

Let me explain and show you how easy you can generate your first book or article. No writing required.

Do you think this device will turn you into a true writer?

The same thing is with programming. Yes, you don’t have to write PHP or .NET code, but business app creation as well as writing a book requires certain skills that no device or system can replace.

Marketing bullshit or looking for a silver bullet

2009-08-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

Have you ever paid attention to vendors’ promo pages and how they promise you the moon? It’s been always interesting to observe how they manage to count your saved money and compose comparison charts the way competitors completely suck displaying such charateristics you can't come up with any idea why they exist at all if so.

I think these 2 examples I’ve stumbled upon recently illustrate this approach better than words can say.

Zoho Creator can count your saved time and money, see? They already know!

The full version can be checked here.

What especially amazes me in this table is 0 in "Data Modeling" row of Zoho Creator. Do system developers really believe there is no need to think how to organize data in the system? The truth is you have to think about it and this is an important moment that defines future functionality of the application.

My point is you’ll have to pay more attention to it in Zoho Creator (and in any other PaaS system), therefore spend more time on it than with Traditional Model. All these platforms have their own peculiarities and limitations and there is a huge probability you will go non standard way organizing the data to build needed reports or get an acceptable app performance and work efficiently within the app.

There is one more peculiarity this table of "saved time" doesn’t mention. Each PaaS (unlike Traditional Model that uses only well known proven methods and instruments) has its own unique approach you’ll have to learn. Take Zoho Creator Deluge Script, for example. Believe me it takes some time before you know how to deal with that.

I’d say even more. It seems to me that in general time spent on PaaS solution can even exceed time Traditional Model requires. The same situation with money. The thing is it’s not that obvious for the cycle is extended. It means you get the app that works really quickly and you have to invest your time until you see its good enough.

This is one more example how vendors compare their products with competitors. Let’s take a closer look at WorkXpress:

Full version of this you can find here.

Laugh all you want, but vendors really believe there is no system that can compete with WorkXpress. We can simply shut our eyes to this for parents always believe their children are the best in the world with no flaws at all. I can’t say exactly how far this "Anyone can use" axis goes and where the vendor places his own product, but I couldn’t jump start with it at once without reading a tutorial. And that wasn’t necessary while testing other products. Maybe this is just me or I am simply too dumb to handle these new 5GL system?

Who knows? I decided to check if things were different with my old friend, software developer for many years by the way. Just asked him to create a table with 2 columns to input two numbers where the 3 column displays the result of its division without any tutorial or help. And guess what.. It was quite a surprise he didn’t manage to handle it and just gave up. Is something wrong with us?

So, I want to say that marketing people seem to create these pages with no knowledge of product actual advantages and what really distinguishes it from the rest of competitors. But they know its limitations very well. The funny thing is somehow they manage to present it as product advantages. That’s why I’d strongly recommend you to check these pages so you know what can cause issues in the future.

And don’t forget there is no better way to get a complete picture than try and check yourself.

Do you really need these images and child records in TrackVia printed docs?

2009-07-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

I’ve already tried to generate documents with several systems, but what if there is a better way of doing that? Well, TrackVia also gets a chance to show what can be done within the system. So, let’s check and see if it’s a good solution to create slick docs.

For this invoice I want to build a nice document:

Let’s just try standard print TrackVia uses for record printing:

As you can see the system doesn’t display child record content.

And now I’ll try to do it with a help of TrackVia Mail Merge feature that can be used to print one record or a set of records (any view) with a template that you create using Microsoft Word or a similar word processor.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t support child records as well, that’s why we’ll try to accomplish our task through Items table:

This is the look of mail merge template I created in word following instructions of TrackVia Help:

And that’s how it looks as I applied it to the above shown record:

You can see images are not displayed.

The good news is you can apply your template not only to one record, but to any view:

And that’s how the result looks like:

Conclusions:

Even though TrackVia doesn’t support child records and images by mail merge the whole approach is not bad. Besides, the system uses templates in RTF format what means you won’t have any problem generating the document with the look you want. So, if child records and record images don’t really matter TrackVia is a pretty good choice in this case.

What's the use of free?!

2009-07-21T03:23:00.000-07:00

It’s already been a lot of debate on the concept of free and whether it exists at all since the eventual goal is to make people pay.

The truth is that requests to advice free online database that rocks in twitter search appear more often. Are users really expecting to get an outstanding product paying nothing?

The funny thing is when they hope so vendors think how to turn them into paying cutomers as fast as possible at the same time. But if the user didn’t have to pay at the very beginning why should he after all? I think that’s a fair question. If Gmail starts charging users as they reach any threshold you'll see what happens.

When you pay for something you agree it has the value the money its paid for. But when you get it for free it means the product has no value. Isn't it a fact that anything of real worth and quality costs money, from the very start? Let alone the expectations of the service of paid and non paid products. The issue can't not be fixed? That's ok.. I pay nothing anyway. The system downtime is longer and longer? We'll wait a bit.. And try to picture the same situation with the service where money is involved.

And the last thing. What about time spent on all that? Doesn't it has its cost?

So, I'd think twice before saying our product that you get for absolutely free will rock your world..

SalesForce platform. A steam hammer to crack nuts.

2009-07-17T00:39:00.000-07:00

I don't even doubt SalesForce can handle 20 000 records.

But I want to show you that SalesForce.com platform is developed for Enterprise and is not a good choice for Individual/Small Business.

Having created their free edition SalesForce guys didn’t bother much and with tweaking or adaptation and just granted access to Enterprise Edition. And this is how the implementation of such a simple thing as converting excel file into a web-database looks like.

First of all you need to create Custom Object (table):

As one can see on screenshots below through one checkbox Custom Objects are integrated with such standard SalesForce objects as Activities (Tasks and Events) and Notes & Attachment:

This is the look of the object we’ve just created:

Note that SalesForce doesn’t create anything through import, so we should create all fields first. There are 4 steps to take for each field.

Choose field type first:

Then put the name and additional parameters depending on its type:

Our next step is to grant access to the field:

And finally we can add the field to page layout:

I repeated this operation for each field and at last all columns were created:

Now we can proceed to import. The screenshot shows it won’t be that easy:

Let’s start importing data, choose Custom Data Object first:

I have no idea why, but somehow it turned out 3 steps are not enough to import data and 7 steps are to take now. You must decide what to do with duplicates next:

Now select the record owner:

And finally we can allow the system to check the file:

SalesForce correctly recognized the file and mapped all field by names:

My first try to import data failed. The system requires data for built-in Record Name column:

I decided to insert into Record Name the field First for I couldn’t do that within my data. But it didn’t help much… SalesForce couldn’t parse date fields and other 19 records:

My decision was to simply ignore these errors and continued importing:

You can see that SalesForce imports data asynchronously and sends a notification as import process is over and you can always check progress:

So, the data is almost ready for reviewing, there is one more thing though. First one should create Custom Object Tab to display it:

Lets input tab details:

Set access rights next:

The third step is to set in which apps (and its despite the fact in Free Edition you seem to have just one app):

Wow! Now we can check our data!

And this is how the form for editing looks like:

Conclusions:

Mission completed. SalesForce imported and handled 20000 records with no problem. But I’d say the very set up process of such a simple thing was a bit cumbersome. The system is overloaded with detailed set up peculiarities which don’t allow you to quickly create a prototype and fine tune it after that.

If I was asked now if there was a reason for other vendors to be afraid of SalesForce platform free edition, I’d rather say NO. On this stage it’s too overloaded with functionality and details. I think regular user is not ready to make decisions each next simple step the system wants him to.

Does QuickBase care about document generation?

2009-07-14T06:04:00.000-07:00

If you still believe in QuickBase Exact Forms and want to create nice documents with its help forget it. It's pretty useless as the practice shows.

I want to test if there is an opportunity to generate documents in QuickBase and I want to check it using very simple invoice.

So this is how it looks like:

QuickBase uses Exact Form to generate documents. It’s a template that is used to put database data into documents like letters and invoices.

You can find it here: Help -> Application Site Map and within the Forms section click the Exact Forms:

It’s a MS Word file with macros for downloading/uploading this template to/from QuickBase:

Unfortunately, QuickBase template doesn’t help in document generation. It means you must erase its content and create the document with MS Word by marking spots for QuickBase to place actual data using field name enclosed by tildes.

Check out the template that I’ve created:

As you can see the control over the look of related detail records is pretty restricted.

After you save the template to QuickBase using "Save to QuickBase" link from Add-Ins tab, in Invoice appears "Print Invoice" link:

To generate your document click the link and here it is:

Well, nothing special… It doesn’t look slick. First of all there is no image on top, second, there is no opportunity to set the look of related detail records and that’s why it looks so poor: the appearance of the document doesn’t correspond to what we’ve created in Word at all.

The reason is while saving your template QuickBase converted it into HTML and this is how it looks as you upload it in Word again for editing:

It has nothing in common with what I’ve created first, doesn’t it?

Summary

If you pursue the aim to generate a nice document in QuickBase don’t waste your time on Exact Form, it’s a hopeless case. To my opinion for getting a nice document as you need it in QuickBase its better to code it using QuickBase API, HTML and JavaScript. The question is if you are capable of accomplishing this by yourself and if you want to. Everybody decides for himself.

Zoho Creator wins or failures?

2009-07-10T02:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday it’s been a lot of hype about the opportunity to Create Zoho Creator Web Apps from Microsoft Access Database.

I also thought these guys rock! But it never hurts to check out yourself. And guess what! I think it will disappoint you too...

This is what I am talking about:

Northwind.mdb and Xtreme.mdb failed to migrate with the same error:

I really wonder if developers always test their products on just one database or does it ever occur to them to try it somewhere else?!

Update

Zoho representative Yoge informed me the issue was fixed:

"We have fixed the issue with migration of DBs containing OLE objects and able to create the application. There is another issue in uploading huge data. This is causing timeout error for the xtreme.mdb. We will fix this issue also and update it."

If so, lets check this out and see how it works now. What I've managed to accomplish is to open Northwind.mdb in Zoho migration plug-in:

And thats it with good news this time. Here is another error message while uploading the database to Zoho Creator:

How many tries do Zoho developers need to fix the problem? What are the stakes?

The System Feature Death Spiral

2009-07-08T05:31:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to create a system with the whole lot of features but easy to use and reliable at the same time?

Don’t want to disappoint you, but my answer is pretty pessimistic.

I’d rather say NO.

The thing is that for achieving marketing goals developers strive for more and more functions that only complicate the product and make it quite cumbersome. The reason for this is because vendors try to sell the product demonstrating its new functionality that must beat the functionality of competitors.

The reality is common user daily needs are much simpler and these magic features are not used oftentimes. On the one hand that’s great the system is capable of doing this, this and also that… But I must say that provided functionality is simply redundant in the vast majority of cases.

All that means that as such redundant functions are being created there is no room to properly test it. The end user audience is quite small or simply absent.Thus it really hurts usability and reliability of the product.

The illusion of a rock solution makes sense only for closing a deal. What do you think is the point then?

By-pass route of Zoho Creator to generate docs

2009-07-07T07:39:00.000-07:00

Zoho Creator doesn’t offer any special tools to generate documents, but as I suspected in case there is no simple way to accomplish the task Deluge Script and HTML are there.

This is Yoges’ answer how it can be done:

"All Zoho Creator views (including HTML View) has in built print support. HTML view can be used to generate nicely formatted document.

We have a sample application that showcase how HTML view can be used to print a HTML formatted report."

Unfortunately my knowledge of HTML is not enough to generate a good report, that’s why let me simply show you screenshots of the example Yoge provided me with:

Click the button "More Info" to display contact details.

The "Print" button present in the top right corner is mapped to the url pattern that triggers the print action for a view.

This is the part of Deluge Script that generates this report:

As one can see it consists mostly of HTML tags. I’ve marked with yellow color spots where we have to insert pieces of Deluge Script.

So, you should decide for yourself if you are capable of mastering this way of document generation and if it satisfies your needs.

Tries to get through generating docs in Dabble DB

2009-07-02T05:12:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to create custom documents from data stored in Dabble DB application. The best possible way of doing that is printing individual entries to PDF.

Here is the full answer from Ben Matasar (Dabble DB developer) about capability of Dabble DB to create an nice document:

"The closest thing we have to what you want is our PDF generation, which you can get at by clicking "Print" from most nonchart/map views. You wrote in the comments that you're mostly looking for a way to get nice printed documents, so I'm answering the question with that in mind. We don't have specific support for invoicing. Our printing of individual entries is also not particularly strong at this point: Dabble's PDF generation really shines with paginated and/or grouped list reports."

Trust but verify. This is the principle I hang on to, so I tried to create a simple product catalogue and get its content as PDF file. This is how my catalogue looks like in DabbleDB:

Unfortunately, all my attempts to print it as PDF file failed.

The system couldn’t accomplish printing no matter how long I tried to wait.. Well, I hope Dabble DB support will shed some light on this.

Update:

As long as yesterday there was the problem with the server and it’s resolved now I can give it another try.

As you can see DabbleDB offers some ways to manage PDF generation:

I will check 2 formats of DabbleDB offers: Table View and Individual Entries. This is how generated PDF for Table View looks like:

The system displays correctly all table data on pages and generates the row with title names for each new page:

So, let’s get down to generating in Individual Entries mode:

You can see for some reason this DabbleDB format doesn’t display images.

Conclusion:

There is no simple way to generate a printed document as you want it in DabbleDB. But if what you see on the screen satisfies you must say PDF generation is working pretty good, especially in Table View format and when the server is working, of course.

Pushing the envelope to generate documents. The way of TeamDesk.

2009-07-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

If you are already tired of creating documents in MS Word through copy/paste try a different way of doing this. You want to generate nice documents automatically with just one click? TeamDesk shows how to, so there is a point to find out the way.

In all tests I am going to use a simplified Invoice app with just 2 tables Invoice (master) and Item (details). Invoice items will contain product images. This is how the particular invoice looks like:

TeamDesk allows to generate documents through templates that are represented as MS Word files.

Let’s generate document template for invoice first. This is how it looks like:

Well, one can see all fields are already displayed and even details table of our invoice items are there.

So, let’s eliminate everything we don’t need there and add some amenities:

Let’s save this template in TeamDesk as a new document:

While viewing a specific Invoice the system shows the button to generate a document of this record:

Press the button and the system will generate a document in MS Word using the template we created:

It’s just the matter of your choice what to do next. You can use it as it is, make changes, send it via email, print or convert to PDF.

Conclusion:

My point is TeamDesk proved the system satisfies users need to generate nice and slick documents. And it is safe to say there won’t be any problem with creation and editing a template in MS Word or its use as you generate a document. There are few moments though I’d like to point out, for there is no such a thing as an "ideal solution":

1. The document was generated on a client. So the MS Word is a must if you want to do it.

2. To generate a document the system uses Word Automation and ActiveX and it means this can be done only in Internet Explorer.

In case these 2 points of the system are ok with you TeamDesk is a pretty good choice if you want to create fine documents which you can create all by yourself.

Wanna perfect printed invoice? Let's find the system that can!

2009-06-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

You’ve put all information into your system and it’s time to generate documents like letters and invoices. So, how do you get your data out of system and put it into a slick and readable document?

In upcoming series of posts I am going to compare methods different systems use to create such type of documents.

I will check if any business user has an opportunity to create such a document all by himself and make any changes in it in the future if needed.

While testing I’ll focus my attention on 2 peculiarities:

How the document is generated for master-detail bind (for example the invoice with variable number of line items in it)
The possibility to insert images stored in the database into the document (for example images of product)

These are key issues that need to be investigated and I am going to shed some light how web based services offer to do this. We will find out shortly.

Force.com Free Edition is quite challenging, isn’t it?

2009-06-18T02:53:00.000-07:00

Recently a big player of SaaS market has challenged the rest of competitors. The offer is really tempting.

From now on there is an option to create an account on Force.com, that can be deployed by 100 users for free.

Force.com Platform offers a whole lot of things such as a database, integration, business logic, reporting, user interface, API, configurable UI and more. I think Force.com is still a platform more oriented on developers, then business users.

So, the Terms & Conditions attached to the Free Force.com account:

100 Users
10 Custom Objects per user
10MB storage per user (so 1GB in total)
Various restrictions are Sites and processing time

I guess Salesforce won’t enforce these limits, making it customer’s responsibility to check if the particular user can access more than 10 custom objects, etc. I suppose Salesforce will audit those accounts and in case the limits are violated pushing them purchase a full-version license.

Frankly, I think that current pricing 50$/user/month is too expensive for a simple app. So, Salesforce decision to offer a free version is really a good idea.

Besides, it must influence the policy of other vendors somehow. They must be pretty concerned. What are they thinking about this?

WHAT?! You didn't divide by zero, did you?

2009-06-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Recently in TeamDesk blog I’ve stumbled on post about divide by zero and couldn’t help but check if there is a stark contrast handling it in different web-based systems. My aim is to find out what tactic each vendor uses through a quick test.

So, in each system I will use the same example. Let’s input 2 numbers A and B, divide one by another and see what happens when divide by zero.

I am kicking off with TeamDesk, the instigator of the test:

The system correctly displays the result division by zero happened.

What about Dabble DB?

One can see a blank as result. We have the same situation with QuickBase:

In Zoho Creator Divide by Zero results in 0:

In TrackVia we have blank as the result, and the system explaines in the field history that divide by zero occurs:

And, finally, WorkXpress. The system recognized divide by zero happened, but couldn’t handle it well:

Conclusion:

In general systems are capable of managing the issue somehow. I don’t think it’s a good idea to deliver 0 as a result of division by zero as Zoho Creator does. Not everything is clear with WorkXpress in this case. I wonder if it’s normal reaction of the system to any error or just to division by zero.

Choosing data driven app? Jump start from the right foot.

2009-06-10T03:31:00.000-07:00

I've been asked oftentimes what system is better to choose for solving particular task and what system will serve best for each specific need.

So, I’ve tried to summarize the experience personally I had exploring functionality of below listed web-based apps. This is a brief description in alphabetical order:

Your front-end must be completely integrated into your web site? Are you a newspaper? A lot of your competitors are already using Caspio Bridge. You can be the next. If you are curious how MS Access would look if it was completely made on web-browser check out Caspio Bridge.

In case you need easy to use tool for data analysis over the web Dabble DB is your choice. This is not some useless web-based Excel clone, but a system with its own approach and philosophy. I think you’ll like it.

Are you searching for not that expensive solution as Salesforce? Check out LongJump. The system may even surprise with more powerful functionality than Salesforce in some areas. But I guess its complexity makes the system not so good for small business.

Looking for a solution from a mature vendor? Your budget isn’t strictly limited? Want a system with a time tested functionality and opportunity to create a full-fledged app? Try QuickBase. Besides, no developing skills needed.

Want to build a complete application, but QuickBase is too much for your budget? Check out TeamDesk. Salesforce styled interface and robust functionality is there for building a complete solution. If you can write few formulas in Excel, than you'll handle TeamDesk easily.

Looking for something simple to manage a couple of tables? Try TrackVia. Easy to use and learn, but in case you’ll need something more complex in the future, no way to do this within the system. I think the system is a bit costly for such a limited functionality.

Can’t reckon it up: tested not that much. It takes some effort to master a non standard interface though. From the first sight I can tell the WorkXpress is robust enough~~, but is no Salesforce killer and won’t blow your mind as developers promise~~.

If you are a programmer or pursue it, but PHP or ASPX scare you try Zoho Creator. Mastering Deluge Script is not easier, but you can do a lot with scripting.

Of course, this is my personal opinion and vendors can disagree at some points. Anyway, it never hurts to take it into consideration in case remarks are really reasonable. Well, we'll see if any...

Updated

Due to Treff LaPlante (WorkXpress President & CEO) concern:

"Further, when compared with the other reviews, it places us quite falsely in a negative light. If your intent is to print an incorrect review, then please let it stand; time will reveal the truth. If you acknowledge that maybe others who have spent more time with the platform overcoming the "non standard interface" are seeing some potential here then I encourage you to amend your review to focus on the lack of time you’ve spent with it."

Corrected. We’ll see what time reveals.

Want to use Dabble DB globally? Go!

2009-06-03T01:33:00.000-07:00

Like it or not but one of the most important criteria of any web-based evaluation is its capability to go worldwide. This time I am about to find out how Dabble DB solves the issue of globalization and localization.

Without further ado let’s get down to actual testing. So, the way Dabble DB treats dates, numbers and money is controlled by Locale Setting tab from Admin menu:

These settings are valid for all your apps. In addition you can specify currency type for a given field:

Dabble DB has no problem with data input in different languages and displays its correctly as well:

This is what I eventually got. The data is correctly recognized and there are no issues I should warn you about in case you need to deploy your app globally. With Dabble DB you won’t need any assistance in this.

Conclusion:

So, DabbleDB is really ready to go worldwide. There is just one thing the user should remember: all you apps share same locale setting. In general DabbleDB proved its capability of global use.

Another SaaS vendor is out of the game.

2009-05-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to build a profitable business around just one client? Well, don’t jump to conclusions right away. What would you say having US goverment as a client?

Blist is now Socrata.

This is the official position of the company stated by Jon Byrum, Senior Product Marketing Manager, on Get Satisfaction site:

"Socrata will continue to support access to your blists. We will not, however, continue to build features with a focus on CRM, Project Management, and online database solutions. We are dedicated to delivering the best social data discovery solution for governments and have prioritized our resources on that goal."

You can also find out more about it on the official blog of the company.

The first sign of what can happen could have been noticed in January 2009.

I think in such difficult times blist investors pondered it for a while and decided they’d rather stake on money of the government. Cause the chances to make some with the government are a way higher than trying to do the same thing hoping to build a profitable business model on online database solution.

What current blist users will do now? This is what they are offered:

The thing is the service will not focus on online database solution development and current users can’t count on growth in this direction anymore. Anyway, in case they decide to migrate to another system I think the situation will be much the same Coghead users had to deal with.

There is one more interesting thing with Adobe Flex blist was built on. Actually, I wasn’t a fan of Adobe Flex use, and the fact that developers decided to limit the use of it in Socrata is very interesting. It really makes me wonder why?

Well, things are changing and I really wish Kevin Merritt and Socrata best of luck achieving their goals.

Is there a way to calculate running total in WorkXpress?

2009-05-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

There are some key features in any service the help in driving success. To my opinion Running total really add to this. This is the reason I pay attention to how it works in any web based system.

To calculate running total in WorkXpress let’s get back to our standard example with Date and Amount:

At first I tried to calculate running total myself. But after few steps were taken I reached a deadlock, so had to ask Workxpress guys to help me out. Treff LaPlante (WorkXpress President & CEO) was there to assist me and answered my question:

"…running totals is a feature that we’ve supported in WorkXpress in previous generations of the platform; however, we’ve just released the support for this current generation of the platform."

This is how it is tuned. I’ve added the second field Amount on the list through Reuse tab on the Block Creator:

It allows you while editing this field to set up an alternative name using "Use Local Field Label" property:

To calculate running total on "Currency and Number Settings" tab set up "Alternative value to show" property into "Running Total".

After saving the data we’ve got needed result:

In case you need more detailed instructions you may check out the info here.

Conclusions:

Actually, I think the user won’t have any problem configuring how to calculate Running Total in WorkXpress. If talk about systems I’ve tested the implementation of this function in WorkXpress is one of the easiest regarding set up from business user standpoint.

There is one more interesting thing to learn from this case, the same situation happened while trying to find out how to import data into Zoho Creator. This can be a moot point, but as the matter of fact it shows the system immaturity. Some developers rush to add features to the product in case of missing functionality. On the other hand this can be considered as the "Reality Check" of the product.

Any chance to use TrackVia globally?

2009-05-25T02:49:00.000-07:00

Taking into account the transparency of boundaries in business world today one should really know if web-based system is capable of serving globally.

Sometimes it takes a while to find out what can be done in each particular system in this respect. But with TrackVia things are pretty obvious at once.

Just starting with TrackVia pay attention one can select from a limited set of symbols for currency and there is no way you can control Date/Time display:

The good news is all timestamps will be converted to time zone preseted in your personal information:

In case its ok with you, be ready for another surprise. Even though the system allows to input the data in different languages:

It’s not capable of displaying it correctly:

Instead of sorted data I’ve got encoded character codes.

Conclusions:

Despite all my tries and efforts to go globally with TrackVia all I can say is the system is not ready for such use right now.

Who the heck can really keep it simple?

2009-05-22T03:22:00.000-07:00

The value of any product can be estimated right away you start using it. I mean if there is no need to beat up your head with how to get it off the ground and make it work for you this won’t even come into question.

This is exactly the case.

The moment I had Flip MinoHD camera in my hand was one of those when you just take off your hat to the developers that really took a good care of the simplicity, as well as quality of the product. Well done guys!

What do we have with web-based solutions? The more I am trying to delve deeply into the structure of these systems, the clearer it gets so few at least try to make and keep it really simple for users. When it’s about solving real life issues I’d hardly name at least any vendor that would have any reason to say come on, we can really do that for you, keeping it SIMPLE!

Nope…

What if use QuickBase worldwide?

2009-05-13T07:27:00.000-07:00

Let’s get back to trying out how web based systems handle the issue of worldwide app use. This time I am about to check if QuickBase is good at it.

I start off from scratch by importing the data in different languages in order to clear up the systems works smoothly.

As the matter of fact QuickBase turned my data into such scribbles.

So, I decided to create necessary fields and tried to input the same info through form for record editing:

Unfortunately, I’ve got the same result.

The thing that QuickBase is not capable of recognizing the data in different languages really surprised me, so I decided to check my settings to make sure everything was ok.

I found out my IE7 default encoding is different from unicode . Just for experiment as the page was displayed I managed to set up unicode and after doing so the text in different languages was correctly recognized.

Let’s see how QuickBase handles globalization issue. In QuickBase time zone is set up for the whole account. You may check out how to change the Account time Zone here.

As I changed the time zone all Data/Time fields were correctly recognized for a new time zone.

It turned out this was the last good thing what can be done in QuickBase in case you want your app to go global. I didn’t manage to find any settings that allow changing Date/Number format according to the country.

Conclusion:

Even though it’s possible at a stretch to create the app for a workgroup outside of the US that will use different language and Time Zone as well, there is a limitation. One can use just one time zone and language, but date and numbers can be edited only in the US format.

In case your team members are in different time zones, let alone the data input in different languages, QuickBase can’t help you here.

This is the end. The end of Coghead.

2009-04-30T01:37:00.000-07:00

The time has come. Today Coghead closed its doors for everybody who worked within the platform. Must say this case has taught us some lessons. In different ways.

It was definitely not that easy for users to get through all this mess while migrating their applications and choosing among various offers of different vendors.

It really makes me wonder which of all services out there were the most effective helping former Coghead users, what were the difficulties of migration process and how all things got actually solved. I think shared experience will show a bit what really systems are capable of. The time is right to find out who really helped Coghead users to go through all this with sufficient care and attention.

What is your system key feature?

2009-04-23T02:25:00.000-07:00

To the outward eye it seems that all web-based systems out there are the same with just a couple of differences. But I’d say the situation is quite the opposite. Each product has its peculiar key benefit that makes the service a stand-alone solution in this exact area.

The thing is its really difficult for the potential user to define this core feature at once.

And, unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases business users try out the system at random, hoping to finally get needed functionality.

I think "guessing" is definitely not the way here in all respects. This is exactly why I came up with an idea to ask vendors to name the key feature of the product that differentiates the system from the rest of competitors. There are many good things any service can do, but I really wanted them to name the ONE.

So, check out what each of them is especially proud of:

Vendor	Key Feature
Caspio Bridge	"Embedded deployment – Caspio-powered apps are all meant for deployment on customers’ websites, both internal and external facing sites." Frank Zamani
Zoho Creator	"Data Manipulation - Ability to create custom workflows using Deluge Script." Raffic Aslam
QuickBase	"One of the five core functions of QuickBase is its Role functionality. You can create as many roles as you like and make them as unique and customizable as you like." Kirk Trachy
LongJump	"The most unique aspect of LongJump is the ability to build applications in one platform instance and package them to another instance. This gives businesses the flexibility to run on our PaaS or internally on theirs." Janhavi Wagle
TeamDesk	"Advanced calculations with no need to use programming. While formula language handles most of the cases, you can also perform calculations over the set of related records and use it in further computations." Kirill Bondar
DabbleDB	"If I had to give one distinguishing quality of dabbledb over other systems I would say it's our attention to details." Andrew Catton

As long as vendors have named these features themselves, I think that could be a crucial factor while choosing the service to stick with.

WorkXpress twists and turns of editing one record simultaneously

2009-04-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

I really like to test the capability (or incapability) of the system to edit records simultaneously.

It’s always fascinating to find the developers took a good care of users in this respect. Just picture the situation when from time to time your data get into a mess the moment somebody decides to edit it right away it occurs to you.

How is this issue handled in WorkXpress? Let’s check it through a standard test when one and the same record is opened in 2 browsers.

So, let’s open the record in IE and change Last and Hiredate Columns:

And open the record in Firefrox and change Last and First Columns:

And save the record in IE first:

Do the same in Firefox:

What we’ve got here? First thing: the system doesn’t really care about simultaneous editing. It means there is no warning you corrupt somebody’s data.

But the good news is the system tracks only fields the user modifies and doesn't overwrite them.. One can see on the screenshots hire date is not overwritten.

And one more thing: you can add audit for field modification.

It’s time to edit Last field in 2 different browsers and check out how the system acts.

This is the report about modifications in the Last column:

Conclusion:

WorkXpress doesn’t support simultaneous record editing so the user could know he overwrites somebody’s data. But field track history really helps here. At least you can always find the person who corrupted yours. Better than nothing.

What if use Zoho Creator globally?

2009-04-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

If you have no experience with Zoho Creator yet, but you’re thinking about it and plan to check the system, make sure there is no problem using it in your locale. The most powerful services are used globally and can satisfy local requirements with no problem as well. So, let’s try out Zoho Creator now.

Zoho Creator time/data format and time zone settings are valid for the whole app:

It means all app users will see all time/date data in one format, transferred into the time zone you’ve set.

One can see Zoho Creator has no problem with data input in different languages:

For Currency the system allows to select Currency Type:

It was a bit of a puzzle for me how it‘s used within the system, for it is displayed only while editing the record.

At least I didn’t manage to find where esle this feature is used.

Conclusions:

Zoho Creator application can be used worldwide with no problem. But you should take into account it’s necessary to administratively select one common data format and time zone for all app users.

TeamDesk is going worldwide

2009-04-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying how important it is to quickly share the data all over the world as globalization requires. Tools that can be applied where you need it are invaluable for the business.

Only really versatile systems are capable of serving globally. I am really wondering how many vendors out there can satisfy this need. Blist didn’t manage to handle this, let’s see what TeamDesk can do.

So, TeamDesk formats date, time and numbers depending on "Language and Locale" property of the user working with the system:

All timestamps are also converted to each user Time Zone and displayed corresponding to your local time.

This is the example of the record for English (US) locale and Central Time:

As you can see the system has no problem with data input in different languages.

To make sure it’s really so I've changed my locale to Japanese locale and time zone to Tokyo:

You also have an opportunity to set units for currency and their position:

Decimal separator and digit grouping characters are defined by user locale. Data and time format are set by user locale so you can only control general options:

But not everything is that perfect. For example, the use of "Text – Multiline" column with "Data Entry" option set in "Append Only" or "Prepend Only" mode can mislead you regarding comments sequence in case your users are in different time zones:

You can also have some questions while converting date, time or numeric into text using formula expressions:

As you see the system uses neutral language format for such convertions.

Conclusions:

Well done. I’d say TeamDesk is ready for global use. Your global team will appreciate the possibility to look at app common data from their specific time zone and locale. But I think you’ve noticed everything is not that prefect here as well, at least you are aware of possible problems you may come across.

Get ready to import large volumes into WorkXpress

2009-04-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

As I promised we get down to WorkXpress testing in order to figure out how it handles large data volume.

Usually this is my first test of any new system and it doesn’t take much time and energy. Everything I do is just file import of 20 000 records to check out what happens. It used to be so till now. And you’d better get ready to take a look at the longest post on this.

I create a new app to kick off:

An unpleasant surprise expected me at the very beginning of testing, despite the fact WorkXpress Project Management Portal was working pretty well over secure connection, my specific app showed Certificate Error:

This is how my just created app looks:

As WorkXpress can’t create tables or columns during import, you have to create everything by yourself first, and after this import the data. So, let’s create a new table for data importing, in WorkXpress it’s called Item:

WorkXpress peculiarity lies in its "contextuality" regarding everything. It means in order to create or change something you navigate to it as if you were the user of the application. So the easiest way to add a field in the table is through adding records screen and then drag & drop necessary field:

Get ready to drag & drop pretty often, and I can promise you that moving "Create Blocks" toolbar elsewhere will be your favorite thing to do.

This is the look of the form for adding as all fields are created:

Now we are ready to import data using "Import Items" link form Tools section of "Create Blocks" toolbar.

The first step to import data is to select and download CSV file. As we can see WorkXpress correctly recognized all data:

Unfortunately, that’s it. After this I couldn’t do a thing through Internet Explorer. As I’ve selected the table the system didn’t allow me to map the fields:

So, I’ve switched to Firefox and tried to import the data. By the way, Firefox had no problem with the certificate as well.

As I’ve created new records for each row I could proceed to field mapping:

Each field should be mapped separately. This is how the mapping interface looks:

I also had problems while mapping Address field, in my file Street, City, Zip, House there were separate fields and I didn’t manage to find a simple way to import it in one field Address. Probably before importing one should prepare data in advance.

At any rate after Field Map we are ready for importing data so let’s begin.
In WorkXpress import of 20 000 records lasted for 30 minutes:

While importing the system keeps on showing the progress, so the user is always aware of the stage of this process.

We are ready to check out results, but slow down. At first one should drag & drop List Layout from "Create Blocks" toolbar.

Let’s select necessary table:

So, we get an empty List. We almost reached the goal now, using "Reuse" tab from "Create Blocks" toolbar we can drag & drop needed fields in it:

This is how it looks now:

And the look of the specific record:

In general WorkXpress handles such data volume pretty well and personally I didn’t see any pitfalls. Navigation by page in List grid makes you feel it works a bit slower than expected, but to my opinion it’s ok.

Conclusions:

I can’t stand drag & drop. Yes, it was fun to create first field by drag it and drop into form the first time, but as I did it I can’t say exactly how many times, I had such a feeling the systems made me do something really stupid and not right.

Even though WorkXpress proved its capability to handle 20 000 records and apparently the user won’t have any problems while importing, the system didn’t facilitate my work. I’d even say quite the contrary. It made me do one-type drag & drop actions, couldn’t automatically suggest columns for data import and to review results I had to take some pains as well.

The system doesn’t look that smart as you start working with it, it can do anything you want, but it takes a lot to explain the system what exactly. Maybe I just used a sledge-hammer to crack nuts. Well, we’ll check this out in other tests.

Global use of blist. If only ...

2009-04-14T03:27:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for the service that can function worldwide web-based systems are really powerful tools for this and their value can’t be underestimated.

The system that delivers data at once anywhere you need it to makes you realize what can be done in the digital era in times of global economy.

All boundaries are being extended and the whole world is connected through the Internet, it still amazes me some products out there are designed to be used just by particular culture group/in one country/in one language/etc. But apparently there are some and Blist is one of them.

First of all it’s about data input. For some reason the system doesn't support typing in any other language but English, even though I managed to copy/paste some text in other language without any problem:

And it’s not just me who wants to input the info in other languages, you can check it out here and here.

You have not so many options to choose from to display data and time:

It seems developers don’t suspect there are other currencies in the world apart from USD, I think this is why blist uses only $ symbol for all of them and there is no way to change it.

Conclusions:

On this stage blist is not ready for worldwide use. If you don’t live in the US or just want to use it to organize the list of non-English text data you’d better take a look at other product.

Is WorkXpress really the killerest app?

2009-04-13T03:50:00.000-07:00

Lately in twitter I keep on stumbling upon WorkXpress posts claiming that the system is simply the treasure to work with and the next silver bullet.

That's quite a statement, isn't it?

Frankly, I kinda like to see how young companies are trying to strike out for themselves, even if they do it aggressively. And even the attempts to humble SalesForce, chasing SalesForce customers are pretty moving:

If WorkXpress was offered CRM solution like SalesForce, it wasn’t such an extraordinary thing. But the truth is it offers to create a CRM, and the difference is huge here.

I managed to find on WorkXpress site the system has a long history:

"After 6 years of R&D and over 4 years of customer testing, a 2nd generation of WorkXpress was released in 2008. Based on years of customer experience, WorkXpress holds the power to significantly raise the bar against which the marketplace evaluates software solutions."

So, I decided to take a closer look and check out the killer-CRM of WorkXpress and the way 5GL tools will blow my mind, what is that all actually about. Well, we’ll see.

Tricks of many-to-many relation in DabbleDB

2009-04-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

I continue to test many-to-many relation functionality on the same examples of Students and Courses and just can't pass over Dabble DB. Hope this showcase will shed some light on the feature and calear up how to tune it.

So, lets start with table Student:

This is the look of table Courses:

Check out the look of "Student Courses" table, where we can store the year of participation and grade data.

The table "Student Course" is connected with tables Student and Courses through one-to-many relation, called "Link" in Dabble DB:

In Dabble DB you can view/edit data related through many-to-many relation directly in the table "Student Course" or on student’s /on course’s side:

The Dabble DB allows building various types of reports using the data stored in related tables:

To sum up:

As long as many-to-many relation represent 2 one-to-many relations, the existing Dabble DB master-detail limitations restrict the user here as well.

If this doesn’t bother you then Dabble DB allows many-to-many relation, as well as it handles master-detail.

Globalization and localization: its all about versatility.

2009-04-08T03:44:00.000-07:00

Speaking of web-based system versatility I’d like to take a look at a broader issue here. Specifically at the possibility to apply the app worldwide and what are the odds of services I am reviewing in my blog. Which systems are really capable of pushing the envelope and can be applied literally everywhere. This is yet another chance to figure out who is who and which solution possesses the killerest features.

This is what I am going to check out:

The possibility to input and process the data in different languages

Date/time format, including use of different calendars

Time zones

Formatting of numbers (decimal points, positioning of separators, character used as separator)

Currency (symbols, positions of currency markers)

Multilingual user interface

So, in upcoming posts you’ll get a chance to find out which system helps to get results that count.

QuickBase extensive approach to Many-to-many relation

2009-04-07T05:51:00.000-07:00

Having already tested how some web-based systems organize many-to-many relation I’d like to give QuickBase a chance. As it turned out QuickBase help contains specific chapter on many-to-many relationship and how one should create it the right way.

Check out the look of student table:

And this is the look of table Courses:

To create 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.

After that one should create 2 many-to many relations:

Here are the details of one relation:

QuickBase offers various ways to view/edit data related through many-to-many relation. You can edit data related to "Student Course" table directly:

As well as on student’s or course’s side:

Using built-in report you can check out which courses are the most popular among the students form different countries:

Conclusions:

In general QuickBase is good handling many-to-many relation. And I’d like to mention that in contrast to Zoho Creator here, as in TeamDesk, I managed to tune everything without writing a single line of code or any variant of algorithm to get such a result.

Are you into scripting? Zoho Creator many-to-many realtions.

2009-04-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to make it clear which system offers the most efficient way to manage many-to-many relation I am going to check Zoho Creator. The examples for testing are the same: Students and Courses.

Check out the look of table Courses:

And this is the table Students:

This is the table with info on courses the student attended and the marks he got.

This is how the data is added into the table:

That’s it. There is not that much you can do in Zoho Creator without a use of deluge script. Thats why I sent a request to Zoho Creator Support and asked them to give me a hand to setup edit/view attende data from student's or course's side. I also asked for help and explaination how to create a report that shows the info on the most popular (most attended) courses among students from different countries.

Mr. Hariharan, Zoho Creator specialist was very helpful and cleared up how to solve these tasks. Here are the details how everything works and how to customize it.

Check out the look of view/edit data on courses on student’s side:

And this is the piece of deluge script that allowed tuning this screen:

The report on course preferences of the student looks even more impressive:

But the user must be aware of the code they should to code to create this report:

Besides, it was necessary to write an auxiliary function to create this chart:

Conclusion:

Everybody must decide for himself if he is ready to turn into deluge scripting guru or not. Who got interested and wants to specify in-depth peculiarities of this set up you can check it here.

I must say deluge script is very powerful and flexible tool. And will be of a great help to tune a whole lot of things in your Zoho Creator application. It’s quite a question if you can master it. You should know at least the basics of html and how algorithms are composed. This is where an important question arises: Do business users know all that? Don’t think so.

My point is if one way or another you picked Zoho Creator as a service to stick with and you are a business user with the exact know WHAT YOU NEED to do, be ready you’ll need at least one assistant (developer) that KNOWS HOW TO.

Getting a clue to TrackVia many-to-many relation

2009-04-02T03:17:00.000-07:00

As it turned out it’s really quite a task for vendors to handle many-to-many relation properly. Here comes the turn of TrackVia to show what it’s capable of. So, I am going to use the same example with students and courses, like in TeamDesk testing.

This is the table for students I created:

And another one for the list of all courses:

It’s also necessary to create the table to register courses the student attended:

I’d like to test few features of the product. Specifically, how is organized view/edit data. Secondly, to check how to build a report based on the info stored in 3 different tables.

It won’t be out of place to mention in TrackVia the user can edit/view only through "Student Course" table and this is how edit looks:

Apart from that there is no way to build a report on information from different tables.

Having played with it enough I asked TrackVia support team to clear up things. This is what Matt Strenz, TrackVia Customer Support Engineer said about ways to edit/view data:

"The set up you have in your account is one way to do this if you wanted to have no limit on the number of students in a course or the number of courses a student takes. If you do have a set limit, like 8 courses per student, then you could just have 8 different "link to parent" records that all go to the courses database in the Student record. This would allow you to add a course directly from the student record but you would need additional fields for each course in the student record to store their grade."

There are also following options to build a report:

"We set up a view in your Student Course database that returns all the USA student records and displays this in statistics mode to show you the most popular course. Currently this would have to be done for each country…"

This is the look of the report:

Even though things are not that good with many-to-many function in TrackVia right now, there are some plans for the future:

"The enhancements we have planned for the nearest future are "group-by/subtotals" feature and the ability to show all child records from a parent and add a child record from a parent which will make your many-to-many Student Course database basically hidden from view as the users would be able to add a Student record from the Course database and vice-versa. We hope to have both of these enhancements live within the next couple months."

Well, I am always ready to give TrackVia another chance to demonstrate the implementation of the enhancements.

Unfortunately, on this stage TrackVia capability to handle many-to-many relation is very limited. Especially if you are going to build reports on linked data from different tables.

Ups and downs migrating from Coghead

2009-04-01T02:44:00.000-07:00

The time to migrate from Coghead somewhere else is running out. Coghead customers have already tried out different systems and Jonathan Sapir even managed to sum up user experiences.

But I think the thing is former Coghead customers just try to recreate their application "AS IS", with no desire to adopt it to the specifics of the platform they are going to use.

Let’s call things by their proper names. Coghead action builder was just the tool for program writing, even though it was presented as visual tool. Take into account Coghead offered to use actions along the way all the time and for everything.

This is one of good examples how it worked: running total calculation. Check out what it took just to calculate a simple thing in Coghead. Let alone the complexity to support of data integrity of calculated values.

To see the difference you may take a look how it’s done in QuickBase or TeamDesk.

One shouldn't forget cases where the user can’t go without custom actions, of course. But I think Coghead users will be pleasantly surprised what they can do within other systems without actions or scripting.

Open Cloud Manifesto: hard to believe

2009-03-31T03:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-25T04:18:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-03-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

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:

Great back-up services
Test all features
Challenge the Service Department
Read the Manual
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

2009-03-05T03:01:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-03-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

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.

TeamDesk automation tool for Coghead users. Make it easier.

2009-02-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

I just got an e-mail from Kirill Bondar with TeamDesk support team. And this is what he’s saying:

"While helping Coghead customers to migrate to TeamDesk, we thought of exporting their data from Coghead to CSV files and importing them to TeamDesk. However, since Coghead stores data hierarchically, this approach did not let us make complete data migration. After two days of hard work we are proud to announce the migration tool that restores the structure and the data from the Coghead backup file into TeamDesk application. Details are listed here and here."

Well, this is pretty exciting, but, as usually, I prefer to give it a try.

I decided to make sure that this migration tool really works as expected. This is my try to migrate Basic Project Manager Application, let’s see what happens:

The first thing you need to do is to Export Application to your computer. All details how it can be done in Coghead the user can find here.

Now we can click Coghead Migration Tool link from TeamDesk Offer for Coghead customers page:

In case you don’t have TeamDesk login the system offers to create your own account first. As I already have TeamDesk account, the system redirects me on needed page at once, where one can download Coghead application backup:

This is how the result looks:

And this is the look of the specific Project:

As one can see with the help of this migration tool all relations between tables were successfully restored.

Conclusion:

I think this tool can really be of a great help for those who decides to migrate to TeamDesk. It can really save a lot of time while migrating the data and allows to jump start within the system not from scratch, but from the base that can be developed afterwards.

It should be noted, the generated app requires some finalization, but in general this is not that complicated task, if compare it with creating the app from scratch. Good job TeamDesk.

QuickBase and Conditional dropdown: The Second Shot

2009-02-24T04:59:00.000-08:00

In February release QuickBase announced about the support of conditional dropdown. I have already tested how QuickBase handles Dependent Dropdown, and made up my mind to give it another try and check how it works now.

I am going to use the same application with States and Cities I used before in previous test.

To setup conditional dropdown you need to process two steps: for the start you need to specify the field you want the user to pick a value from first (in our case State dropdown). Second, you need to specify depended dropdown filter field (in our case its State reference column from City table):

The set up is not that complicated, so let’s get down to business and check how it works.

For the start let’s try to choose the city before the state selection and you will get follwing message:

And now we select the State first. Now City dropdown contains only cities of the selected state:

Conclusion:

So, the picture with QuickBase Conditional Dropdown is a way better, if compare my second try to the first one with Dependent Dropdown. It works pretty well. Hope my previous review made its contribution the functionality got better.

Helping Coghead customers

2009-02-20T02:25:00.000-08:00

It’s high time to take care of people that are affected with the consequences of Coghead downfall the most: Coghead customers.

They should quickly decide where to move their data, starting from the ground up. I think this time users will think twice before making a choice. So, in order to simplify their task at least somehow I listed below services which are ready to help and have even developed special offers to support former Coghead customers.

Company	Offer
QuickBase	Free 6 month of service Free 2 Hours with Expert Consultant Free Unlimited Support Free Daily Webinars
TeamDesk	Free migration of your Coghead application to TeamDesk Free Technical Support Free Trial
Caspio Bridge	Two month free use Free unlimited support Expert consultation services Free instructor-led training
TrackVia	Free Trial 20% discount
Zoho Creator	Free consulting for Coghead customers

These vendors offer their help too, can’t say anything about their functionality though:

Company	Offer
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
Delivered Innovation	Migration service to the Force.com platform
OutSystems	Scope & size your existing applications and provide a complete migration plan for free Free 30 day trial
PerfectForms	Free multi-user account for 3 months
Cordys	Free subscription Free support 30% discount for additional services
Iceberg	Free migration
WorkXpress	Less than 10 users per month - 3 months free service More than 10 users per month - complete build of your current applications

Hope it will help to get over the Coghead collapse faster and not so painfully.

What Coghead customers are supposed to do?

2009-02-19T03:47:00.000-08:00

I don’t know how many users Coghead had and what kind of apps they’ve developed, but what I can say for sure, is that the migration to other systems won’t be an easy affair, especially for those who have sophisticated business process and workflow logic. The specifics of each business, reflected in the app structure, should be taken into account.

Coghead customers with really complicated applications should consider QuickBase or TeamDesk. As these services satisfy the most sophisticated requirements and don't require any coding or scripting.

In case javascript or deluge script programming doesn't scare you, Caspio Bridge or Zoho Creator are there for you.

If you had relatively simple single table application, apart from the above mentioned solutions, one can take a look at Dabble DB or TrackVia.

Did you like Coghead because of Adobe Flex? Then Blist can be considered as Coghead substitution here. If you have a single table app - it should work well.

Well, Coghead users will be able to access and download their data through April 30, 2009.

So, who else is going to give Coghead customers a hand and help them with their app migration?

Coghead heads to the deadpool. Who is next?

2009-02-19T01:45:00.000-08:00

In such difficult times for the world economy a lot of companies reach a deadlock and close their doors.

Coghead went down. Customers are thunderstruck. Just yesterday I received the letter from Ralph Noble what was going to happen:

"Not sure if you know this but Coghead is pretty much gone -- supposedly to be swallowed up (and probably never heard from again). Rollbase is gone, Longjump is doing primarily consulting from what I can tell, and the other small players are having a rough time. Caspio has probably been around the longest, so maybe it isn't affecting them as much."

The times a tough and its difficult to predict the outcomes, but how vendors are going to hold the line?

And who is the next?

Update:

SAP has aquired intellectual base of Coghead. But it doesn't change the situation all users are in right now. Just Coghead technology is moved. The users are still on their own.

Challenging Caspio in data modifying

2009-02-18T06:46:00.000-08:00

Painless data changes within the app contribute immensely to any business. For this feature is really mission-critical and does the heavy lifting within any app. So, it’s better to focus on this more carefully, giving Caspio Bridge a go this time.

To change the column type in Caspio Bridge in the Tables view you should select necessary table and click "Design" on the toolbar.

After this the table structure is opened in the Table Design window.

So, let’s get down to the data modification and see what happens, how the system handles it. For field data type changes I selected the field I wanted to modify and picked the new data type from the data type list.

Everything is pretty clear from the message that pops up on the screen. Caspio Bridge solves the issue with incompatible data in a simple manner – it will be lost.

The system also deletes this column from dependent objects such as Views and DataPages, so you as the user should pay attention when modifying a table and read all on-screen warnings carefully, because your modification can simply make dependent objects unusable. And thats not what you are looking for, I guess.

Conclusion:

I think in this case more contorol is required concerning incompatible data changes, and better diagnostics, what specifically will happen with dependent objects.

Why Blist isn’t a killer app for business needs?

2009-02-13T03:44:00.000-08:00

If one person is running the business there is no better method for all processes automation and tracking as Microsoft Excel.

But in case the need to secure simultaneous information processing by multiple users arises the user faces 2 major problems: how to organize info sharing and access permission and Excel can’t help here, but just holds you back. What blist can offer to fix these issues?

The system resolves only one task – sharing, but what about access permissions? There is no way to handle it.

It means you can’t set user permission to secure different people personal access levels to the data records. For example, you can't configure blist so, that each user can modify only own records, he has created, or which are applied to his personal responsibility.

Besides, you also can't set permission on column level. It means you can't hide any particular column or restrain the possibility to edit it for the particular group of users.

There is only one option you have. Any person you share your blist with can see all data you have in your app.

This is the reason why blist is useless for business needs on this level of functionality. Yes, you can share the list of your favorite movies or receipts, and embed it in your blog or website, using blist. But that's it and it’s definitely not enough.

Your service! What a godsend!

2009-02-12T03:00:00.000-08:00

Being web 2.0 junkie I couldn’t help but notice one interesting trend. If take into account the latest Obama craze, who wouldn’t join the hype, just passing the chance to be on the crest of the wave? Nonsense! Of course, nobody would.

Blist wasn’t an exception here. Well, blist is chosen by the very Obama Team, guys! It’s not something to be brushed aside!

I think, so few people have already forgotten the name Bill Clinton. Have you? If so, that’s ok. You’ll get your reminder, for without fail the vendor will inform you Dabble DB databased Clinton Foundation donor list.

But that’s not it! If we are through with alive American presidents worth mentioning along with the service (that can really add value to the product) there is no problem. Santa Clause has also a lot of stuff to do, try to imagine the volume of records of presents Santa handles with QuickBase! So there is no wonder why the service gets PC Magazine award.

Wait a minute! Has the Pope already chosen web-based system to track donations? Not yet? Guys, you’d better hurry up. Just think of it, invaluable contribution into the Right Cause.

Whose turn is next? It won’t be that hard to get in touch with Dalai Lama, a bit harder with Gautama Buddha.

Tricks of data changes within QuickBase

2009-02-10T03:26:00.000-08:00

It’s vital to be aware of what to expect from the web-based system if talk about further data modifying.

And testing different systems functionality, such service as QuickBase can’t be ignored. So, let’s kick off with it and try to change the field type in QuickBase.

One should click “Change Type” link above the Properties tab of the specific column.

Then from the Select a field type drop-down list, choose the new field type, and then click Convert Data.

By this data modifications QuickBase shows a message what is going to happen: If the data cannot be converted, it is lost.

It should be noted that aside from the simple change field type QuickBase offers also advanced feature of data restricting, such as Convert a Field into a Table.

To simplify the process of data modification a dialog box appears on the screen, which shows you the unique values that QuickBase found in the field. So you can see that each value listed will be a record in the new table:

By pressing Next button such dialog box is displayed, so you can type in a name for the new table and click OK:

You will be informed that the system has created a new table by such massage.

How is it done within the system? Your new table is automatically related to the existing table as the master table. You can find out more about this feature here.

To sum up:

Despite the fact regular field change type of QuickBase has nothing special and the system handles the data that can’t be converted in a quite primitive way, QuickBase stands out against the background of competitors because of the possibility to Convert a Field into a Table.

Starting working within the app you can’t foresee all the future data modifications and all tricks you’ll face, but in case there is a need to change the data structure, QuickBase won’t let you down.

The service clearly shows how to handle it.

Viability of Zoho Creator modifying data

2009-02-06T03:54:00.000-08:00

It has been always tricky to test Zoho Creator. What the system has prepared this time in point of data modification functionality?

You'll never know until you try.

To change the field type in Zoho Creator the user should enter table edit mode and select “Edit this field” option form popup menu:

After that you must choose the new type and save changes. Converting the field into “Choices”, Zoho Creator functions unassisted building up the list of database values.

This is how Zoho Creator resolves the issue, when the field value of the record can't be converted into the new type:

Conclusions:

Zoho Creator offers good methods for data modification and it functions pretty well. But what would be also of a help for common users is gaining more control over mismatch between the old and new field type, just field with blank values is definately not enough.

Data restructuring? Then TeamDesk.

2009-02-05T02:58:00.000-08:00

Trying different services its better not to rush to conclusions, no matter what. For I had cases when robust and wide-spread systems failed in resolving tasks smaller vendors cracked as nuts. Simply give it a go. The results are always very conspicuous. So, how everything is arranged in TeamDesk?

To change existing column’s type in TeamDesk you need to enter Setup mode and select column type you want to modify and press "Change Type" button.

Within TeamDesk you can easily convert Data column to another type of Data column and "formula" column to the different type of Formula column or to Data column as well.

The system will notify you in case when selected conversion is not supported or when it is not possible to convert column values to the specified type. Your data will not be modified in this case.

Skimming through TeamDesk blog site I stumbled upon one post worth mentioning: how one can use formula column and change type for data alerting you can check here.

Conclusion:

In general, TeamDesk offers robust methods for data modification. But there is stuff to work on. The developers should pay attention to usability issue for cases it’s impossible to convert specific value(s): The system displays only the first error and one can’t figure out which record/row in the table is not correct. The system has no means for users to filter and correct values in invalid records.

Going Dabble DB ways of data restructuring

2009-02-04T02:50:00.000-08:00

Figuring out specific ways of particular problem solving each vendor offers, the user can evaluate which functional concept fits practical business requirements more neatly. To give a better perspective on data restructuring within already created app this time I am going to test Dabble DB implementation methods.

So, I want to change the column type. In Dabble DB one should click on column title and select "Configure…" option from displayed menu to do this:

Changing field type to choice Dabble DB builds the list of choices based on your data:

At first sight everything works pretty good, but just until you accidentally do something silly. For example, I tried to convert Street into Choice (what makes no sense, of course) and my test 20 000 records Dabble DB example freezes with such a nice message from IE:

There is one more Dabble DB peculiarity that becomes apparent with the data which can’t be converted into new data type. I mean as I tried to convert Street into number the column type was modified, but previous data was still there just marked as invalid entries:

Conclusion:

Actually, it didn’t take much time and pains to convert data from one type to another. There won’t be any problems or difficulties, especially if you work with not that large data volumes. Some peculiarities exist though. Just pay attention.

Restructure data with TrackVia

2009-02-03T06:09:00.000-08:00

Even dealing with the most robust web-based services my functionality tests are smooth not that often, and the methods of how everything is done are rarely clear-cut at once. But with TrackVia this is the case.

Aiming not to pick on services, but to define the best way of particular issue solving, the showcase I experienced testing TrackVia this time can be cited as an example of how the data structure should be modified within the system and how the program should function.

What I especially liked is that system notifies the user in Notes what will happen with the data in the column in case I decide to change the field type.

Convert function works as good as it looks, so there was no problem changing the type.