Category Archives: Product reviews

I had a briefing recently from CentralDesktop CEO Isaac Garcia who was super-excited about their new product offering, Central Desktop for Office. The product is built on top of technology licensed from OffiSync and, quite simply, it gives Microsoft Office users online collaboration and a “SharePoint” experience” without Office 2010 and without SharePoint.

With the product, users of both Office 2003 and Office 2007 will see a new bar on the control ribbon, titles “CentralDesktop”. This bar will give them access to their CentralDesktop files which can be opened natively inside of the particular office application, and then collaboratively edited by anyone who has access to the files – it’s not a web app so all parties will need Office, but it introduces something that Office users simply could not do until now – and in doing so will, perhaps, replace a deluge of “reply to” emails with draft amendments.

CD for Office makes nice use of “meta panels” that drive further information to a document viewer – things like comments, documents within the same folder etc – expect to see more rich, contextual information available in these panels soon.

The product isn’t real time per se – the way it works is that the file owner receives a pop-up notification of an amendment whenever one is made, they can then chose to merge this amendment into the document. I questions Garcia about this, especially in the light of Google’s recent release of key-by-key real time co-authoring for Google Docs, his response?

True real time collaboration is awesome, what Google has done is amazing technically. The need for this degree of real-time however is pretty minimal, it’s generally only a few edge cases that need this and the flip-side of real time is that it often gets reduces to sheer chaos. We believe that our approach of giving the file owner notification of changes, will suit the marketplace just fine. That said there is potential to make the experience tighter in the future.

It should be noted that when using this product, full version control and tracking is retained within CentralDesktop so their is always a record of any changes made, regardless of whether the file owner chooses to accept them. I was a little disappointed that the product doesn’t make allowance for multiple changes. As an example, in a situation where three people make amendments to a document at the same time, the file owner is notified of one merged change to accept or delete – it’s easy to imagine a versioning nightmare when parts of the change are to be accepted and others not. CentralDesktop’s approach of expecting the owner to apply the merge and then selectively deselect the parts of the change they don’t want is less than ideal.

In terms of pricing, the bare bones product will be free to all CentralDesktop users, while some premium functions will be available for a charge. See below for a demo screencast:

Central Desktop for Office Video from Central Desktop on Vimeo.

PCI compliance is hard. Hard, expensive and time consuming. Third party subscription and billing vendors have attempted to remove as much of the burden of PCI compliance from their customers but one barrier remains – any business that wants to allow customers to enter their credit card details in their own site, and in familiar surroundings, still has a PCI burden because of the credit card details entered into their site. In an effort to remedy ulcers and late nights for vendors (or their PCI compliance people at least) Vindicia (see disclosure) has decided to do something about it.

They’ve today announced their Hosted Order Automation (HOA) capabilities. By using HOA, online merchants are able to completely offload PCI compliance to Vindicia while maintaining control over their customers’ buying experience. HOA allows merchants to accept credit cards on their own order pages without ever touching a credit card and subjecting themselves to PCI regulations.

What HOA does (beyond the press release hype) is to create a secure tunnel between a field within a vendors credit card form, and Vindicia’s own servers. In effect when a customer enters their credit card number, they are doing so within a Vindicia form field, but on the vendor’s own page. HOA requires only a code snippet within the page so existing customization and styling is retained and customers have a seamless on-site experience. The transactions progresses like this:

1. Consumers visit the vendor’s website and want to make a purchase or update their payment method.  As they request the page, a call is made to CashBox that contains the function being used and the IP address of the customer.
2. CashBox creates a secure session that allows customer payment information to be submitted directly.  The customer continues to enter their data into the form fields on the page as they would normally. For additional security, the session will time out after a pre-configurable amount of time.
3. Once the customer submits their information, it is sent directly to CashBox and bypasses the vendor’s servers altogether. CashBox validates the IP address as an additional security measure and stores the customer data and payment information with the requested action.
4. The customer is redirected to the results page by CashBox. As the redirect loads, the successful receipt of customer information is returned. Once the vendor’s servers receive this information, another call to CashBox is made requesting the actions be performed (e.g., fraud screening, authorization, tokenization, new account signup, payment capture or update).
5. The success or failure of the requested action is passed back to the vendor’s server upon completion, with all of the necessary information (results, tokenized payment method, etc…) to display a detailed confirmation message to the customer on the results page.

Or if you much prefer a purty picture, like this:

Hosted Order Automation is available immediately as part of the Vindicia CashBox solution. Wait and see how the competition reacts…

I spend a lot of time talking to organizations about moving to SaaS an often I hear their concerns around the apparent lack of flexibility that SaaS apps give them. In the broader context this argument speaks to the points raised by Dennis Howlett in his recent post about design thinking as it relates to enterprise software design. First a little background – in a former life I consulted as a design strategist, broadly speaking helping organizations in myriad sectors to rethink their products, processes and people to achieve what I always referred to as Design (capitalization intentional) something I articulated as the creation of a product or service that embodies design across all parts of it’s creation – a simplistic and much-used example would be the iPod that embodies many design aspects (hardware/product, software, service delivery, distribution and, essentially, the emotional design aspects).

Anyhow, what does this have to do with NetSuite’s latest release. Well NetSuite (see disclosure) is announcing this morning functionality that begins to move ERP software from an analytical and process driven experience to a design-led experience. What they’re beginning to create is the ability for software to mold to an individual user’s and organization’s personal paradigm. That’s a lofty ideal, and it’s early days, but looking deeply into the release gives me some confidence in taking this stance.

SuiteFlow is essentially a move to a flexible platform, in this case embodied in a graphical tool that allows for custom drag and drop customization for ERP. Users can create and alter custom workflows to support the way they and businesses need to work in real-time—whether the goal is to implement a more efficient automated collections process, create a rules-based lead nurturing process or overhaul receivables management. In a punch that sees NetSuite respond to the fears raised by on-premise vendors about lack of customization for SaaS apps, and to position themselves as a vendor enabling design-led thinking, NetSuite is taking the fight to the legacy players saying:

Businesses today face numerous challenges when trying to customize traditional on-premise applications to meet their specific process needs. Legacy software requires costly technical expertise and ongoing maintenance to design, implement and manage complex custom processes. The business users who know the most about the processes are frequently disconnected from the technical design phase and are powerless to make the real-world improvements necessary to accurately replicate workflow. The result work is often dated by the time of rollout because business dynamics have changed, and worse yet, the customizations can result in trapping the enterprise into a particular software version which cannot be upgraded. This old-world approach to business process management (BPM) is both costly and inefficient.

Which is a pretty strong argument – while on-premise software CAN be customized, if that customization is difficult and slow, and if it requires costly technical help to implement, it is, in-effect, useless. NetSuite and other SaaS vendors are bring simple customization to end users and in doing so driving quick and accessible gains in a rapidly changing business environment.

There’s more to this than meets the eye but first a look at what functionality SuiteFlow brings. Users can:

• Create workflows that automate business processes across finance, marketing, sales and service
• Adjust business processes based on the needs of the business or organizational change
• Deploy workflows that move an organization from manual paper and email-based collections processes to automated cash management
• Utilize workflows that improve conversion rates by intelligently and automatically nurturing leads
• Eliminate maverick activity such as rogue sales discounting by implementing auditable approval processes.
• Improve performance with dashboards that provide clear visibility into process performance, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities.

But what is even more exciting than the end user benefit that SuiteFlow can bring is what it can mean for specific verticals. I’ve written in the past about the need for SaaS vendors or the resellers that partner with them to provide customized applications that are tailored to distinct verticals. I recently wrote a post about Google’s moves to automate some of the services that the resellers provide and questioned whether or not this was a threat to those resellers. The general response was that it in fact provides an opportunity for resellers to provide added value services on top of the applications – so to does SuiteFlow, and the broader NetSuite SuiteCloud ecosystem provide opportunities for resellers to build highly customized and differentiated applications tailored to specific verticals – all the more so for NetSuite given the breadth of touch points within a business that they provide solutions for. As NetSuite say in their release:

In addition to providing enterprises with greater utilization of resources and shorter time-to-value, SuiteFlow also helps developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) get to market faster with their vertical applications built on the SuiteCloud platform.   ISVs already appreciate the point-and-click rapid prototyping available with NetSuite’s form and interface customization tools.  With SuiteFlow they can now apply this same advantage to business processes for their specific applications, greatly reducing development costs.

Of course one of the inherent benefits of SaaS customization, as opposed to on-premise customization, is that customizations do not create version lock amidst the fear that an upgrade will break the customization. Any process or workflow defined in SuiteFlow is automatically carried forward with application upgrades.

But stepping aside from the details here, I believe that SuiteFlow and related moves by other vendors (salesforce.com’s chatter for example) see software distancing itself from the ivory towers of IT and become truly a partner for change.