Online Payments

We've decided on a set of Online Transaction vendors. This include an engine for embedding payments on our website, a vendor for handling credit card transactions, and a merchant account. Turns out there are so many options and combinations it's quite overwhelming, but also fun to figure out. Our solution should be pretty smooth, and allow recurring payments and international transactions. Just what we need, since customers are calling from Europe these days...

Jari's working on integration our choices, and the payment pages should be ready shortly. Exciting.

One Project, Multiple Managers = Dynamic change management

One of our customers has development centers in San Diego and India. They have a project where the top-level manager is located in San Diego, while sub-projects are delegated to teams both in San Diego and in India.

When they first started using LiveProject, the top-level manager uploaded one project file, and participants through the organization started filing changes. As a consequence, this manager had to approve (or reject) all of these, even changes he did not know anything about. The situation became worse as he had to follow-up with sub-managers to check that changes were correct.

After a bit of consulting, we were able to advise him of a better solution. He split his Project file into a main project, and added 4 sub-project files to that. He then uploaded all these 5 project files himself (thus effectively becoming the manager of them all). Subsequently he manually assigned each of the sub-projects to each of his 4 sub-managers.

Participants would still 'monitor' the main file (which contains the entire project), but changes that happened within a subproject are now routed to the correct sub-manager. LiveProject does this routing by default, so the resolution was quite simple.

Interesting article on SharePoint

I found this interesting article from WSJ, which describes the spread of Collaboration software from Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Adobe. The article highlights how installations of Microsoft often have SharePoint services 'built-in' but fails to mention the price for these, and the learning curve. For organizations with specific needs, and with limited funds, specialized tools can be a great alternative to these behemoths.

Customers....

After our launch in January, the first evaluations of LiveProject have started to come back favorably. We have gotten several orders, and customers are responding really well to the tool. Here's a comment we received recently:

[E-Mail]
I am a PM for a healthcare IT firm, managing 14 simultaneous implementations, plus countless other small projects. I have tried to get something rolling on Sharepoint, but found it cumbersome for PM, and MS Project Server too expensive and not worth the IT time to setup. [snip]. I think you guys have a tremendous opportunity to fill the niche between bare-bones sharepoint and MS Project Server. I have been looking for years for a product like this.

It is feedback like this makes it all worth while.

Some days..

When you're starting a new company, some days are better than others.

A major wireless broadband company in Del Mar is currently evaluating LiveProject. Their main manager has forgot her password, and tried to reset it, but she failed every time. So, I took a look, and sure enough, I quickly discovered we had a bug in the 'reset password' functionality. So, trying to help her, I call my IT support person,"John," to have him manually reset the password. At the time, I did not have access to our Administrator tool as I was OoO.

John looks at the Administrator, and realizes we have forgot to add that functionality. It simply never came up, since users can reset their passwords themselves (when it worked). Since the users passwords are encrypted in our database, there is no easy way to quickly reset the password, except to store a known, encrypted one in the users record.

John resets his password, and enters MySQL to perform the necessary update. Meanwhile, I'm trying to log in. As I try, my login fails. I try again, same result. A sense of despair fills me up, as I slowly type the password I know John was using to reset the users account. Sure enough, that works. I call John, and say "You know, my password was reset, did you just change all the users password?" There is a dead silence in the other end of the line, I can almost hear John's thought process. "Yes" is all he can get out, and that is with a deep, dark voice full of depair and disbelief.

It was just one of those days, and never again will the Database be updated free-hand, without rollback enabled.