Category: WMS

Much as I think “the cloud” is just another annoying buzz word that doesn’t really represent much; there are now a plethora of online services that can provide a much better, more cost effective solution to problems that traditionally required something physical in the office.

Being a software as a service company ourselves we have always been fully aware of the huge advantages of these solutions and over the last year we have started to use them even more.

So here is a quick summary of what we currently use and why:

Google Apps (www.google.com/apps)
Email for our own domains, using the excellent gmail web interface, that is very cost effective. Tie that in with calendars, Google docs and all the other Google offerings and it really is an excellent solution. Why wouldn’t you? A heavy investment in something like MS Exchange just does not make sense here, IMHO.

Freshbooks (www.freshbooks.com)
An excellent invoice and time tracking solution. Although the time tracking & reporting is not as fully featured as some other solutions, the fact that it is linked directly to invoice generation and the outstanding estimate/invoice/expense management features have been really great for us. Freshbooks also has excellent integration with many other apps (including Highrise & Basecamp) and a good API that we use for the WMS.

Highrise (www.highrisehq.com)
Very straightforward CRM. The wonderful 37signals mantra of simplicity here is one of the main advantages for us. It fits easily into our everyday work process; which means we actually use it! This is important as a CRM is only useful if the data is up to date and it is part of your day to day and minute to minute work.

Also has a handy API which allows us to keep contacts in sync with the WMS.

Dropbox (www.dropbox.com)
File sharing that is easy and reliable. We use this to make sure that everyone and every PC (for example laptops and desktops) have access to the most up to date documents. This also significantly reduces the need for an office file server and all the admin that comes with that (backups, power & connectivity, VPN’s for remote access etc); it is great when a load of problems just go away!

Dropbox also has good version control of all documents which helps avoid data loss and multiple copies of old documents. I’m also finding the Andriod app very good.

Tender Support (www.tenderapp.com)
An excellent, very straightforward helpdesk application. We use this both with our main product (The WMS) but also for specific client support. Good email integration and a simple web interface with single sign on support make this app an important part of our service.

Once again this is complemented by an API which we use to full effect.

Tender’s integrates closely with a partner product (Lighthouse) for development and issue tracking; which we also use.

Beanstalk (beanstalkapp.com)
This is the newest one for us; hosted source control which includes good collaboration (code review) features. Moving from SVN based on a server in the office was a big decision; but so far it has been great. We got rid of yet another admin task (not that managing SVN & backups is a biggie, still its nice to have one less thing to think about) and gained some productivity by integration with Lighthouse.

Beanstalk was incredibly simple to set up and (once I had tweaked the CruiseControl configs) fitted incredibly smoothly into our development process.

The WMS (www.thewms.co.uk)
And finally, we use our own application, of course! Simple, powerful, web based content management for our every web need. It’s the best there is 😉

Tonight’s WMS update included a couple of cool little new features to the WMSElement definitions used in our template system:

1. The ability to set a default component value that is preselected for all new pages. This should prevent needless editing when new pages are created.

2. The ability to set a menu element definition to start from a specific “level” in the tree. This is useful for site designs where the navigation menus are separated into different places on the page.

See the updated template reference PDF (under Help in the WMS) for details. Of course this is only useful for Template Editors!

We have also included a small update to the Project Timeline page, all the project update message are now visible on one page (no need to click on each separate milestone).

This was the last WMS update for which Mira was lead developer; sadly (for us) he has now moved on to his next exciting challenge. Mira was an outstanding member of the team for many years and we wish him all the best (and, as he’s still in Edinburgh we expect to see him in the pub from time to time 🙂

The WMS – our content management software now offers integration into social networks !! You can now post updates or share your published pages with your audience twitter or facebook. And best of all, it is all free for you as part of our continuous upgrades to the system.

Sharing a WMS page on Twitter or Facebook could not be more simple. You just click on a new “Share” option in the main menu, fill in a message and send it all off. The WMS will look after the communication and posting and will remember your settings. That means you never have to leave the WMS to tweet about a new page that you have just published.

Why is it a big deal
Since 2009 when the internet experienced an apparent boom in Social Networks thanks to Twitter and Facebook (http://mashable.com/2009/04/17/web-in-numbers-social-media/), social networks have played an important part in every day life. Studies suggest that people use social networks more than email and over 60% time on mobile devices is actually spend on social media. In other words, there is a lot of buzz on the internet nowadays 🙂

Here at Ezone we use Twitter to see what our clients and partners are up to and share articles and news that may be relevant to them. If you want to hear from us, follow us on @ezonesoftware !

Over the last few months Ezone as a company has been going through some very significant changes; some good and some considerably less so. It is surprising just how much we have learned and as we near the end of this process of change we are now looking forward with some excitement again.

I thought it would be fun to do a post about this process of change and talk about some of the lessons learned and how we are planning to apply those lessons.

So let’s start with the bad: in early 2010 we came to the inescapable conclusion that we needed to reduce the size of the team here at Ezone. Because we have such a great team, that was a really tough decision and a hard process to go through. Of course, everyone involved proved how amazing they were by the level of professionalism they treated the process with and by how quickly they spotted benefits for themselves. Personally I was constantly humbled and inspired by everyone.

Of course, without this happening we would not have made the other, really positive, changes to Ezone over the last few months.

So now lets look at the first of these: after a very in depth analysis of the process of implementing sites on the WMS (or redesigning or making other very large changes to a WMS managed site) we came up with a number of areas were we need to improve. Almost invariably these revolved around managing the process and communication with everyone involved.

Who knows what’s going on?
The first area we identified as needing improvement was clear and up to date information on the status of the project and all its constituent parts. This needed to be available to everyone involved in an easy accessible way, and we needed a clear record of who said what when and what the agreed implications were.

We all do!
Internally, we solved this by switching to an excellent, simple and straightforward CRM (Highrise, from 37signals). This has had an amazingly positive effect on internal communication within the team.

To further improve on this we are working on our new “Project Dashboard” within the WMS which will allow our clients to view the status of ongoing projects, a summary of agreed changes and other important items. All this along side a clear time line so that everyone can see how the project is progressing and when each milestone will be completed!

The little things…
One of the next most significant areas that we needed to get much better at was managing all the little changes and additions that are a vital part of getting the best WMS managed sites up and running. Obviously we work hard with the client, designers, SEO specialists and other stake holders at the start of the project to make sure that we understand all the ins and outs of the site; and we have plenty of experience and expertise in the best way to technically implement a solution (on time and on budget). However, it is impossible to get 100% of the details right before you start work; and this should be an advantage rather than a problem of using the WMS.

With a system as powerful and flexible as the WMS we can can really add value to the final published site by implementing improvements and fixing issues as we go. The problem was that, especially in the final stages of a site build, we were finding that too many little things would affect the time-scales and costs of going live and create confusing communications with all the stake holders.

Of course, the answer was simple really; improve communication in the early stages of the project and give more opportunities for everyone to feedback earlier, when making changes has less impact. Combine that with some technical tweaks to the way WMS templates are implemented and a clear path to allow design or template changes after the initial launch and everything starts to flow much, much smoother!

Is that all?
These on their own would be a huge enough impact, but really they are just part of the changes that we have been putting in place. Some of the others include a new invoicing system (Freshbooks) that incorporates our time tracking and reporting, changes to our support & ticketing systems and integrating many of the different systems we use via their APIs.

WOW!
Yeah, I know, you are totally blown away… Seriously though, this has been a pretty dramatic time for Ezone and we hope that all our customers and partners will see benefits as much as we do internally.

The truly exciting thing for us now is how much more we want to do and the potential to learn more and further improve both the WMS & our service.

You may have noticed that as part of our continuous effort to improve our process and service to our customers, we have recently changed the entire invoicing system. We can already see all the benefits and time-savings only three months after using the system.

We believe it is only right that our customers should also benefit from the new invoicing system. Therefore we decided to integrate the invoicing with the WMS!

Every account has now a “AccountFinance” role. Every user who is assigned to that particular role will have access to view all invoices in that account. The invoices appear as an additional box on the dashboard.

If you click on “View Invoices”, you will be able to see recent paid invoices and invoices that may be still due.

While doing some maintenance work on the WMS database recently, I could not resist to check out few interesting details about the usage of the application. Since I’m the sort of person who sits around the table and loves to dish out random fun facts, I decided to share few of them with you.

Joking aside, the data we retrieve from the WMS is important – we use it to spot usage patterns and find out how the system is used. Ultimately, the goal is to improve the end user experience.

So here it goes:
Wednesday is the busiest day, closely followed by Monday.
Busiest time is between 11-12am GMT. However, almost 25% of the system activity happens outside the UK office hours.

There were 15 free upgrades in the last 4 months, yes that is almost one every week !

Hope you enjoyed them, we might be back with some more.

Forgetting to renew a domain name is one of the most common reason web sites have outages. Perhaps you have experienced this first hand, or have heard about other sites having this problem (for example in March foursquare.com).

However avoiding those problems is so simple; if you have the right information to hand!

Although the WMS does not manage and is in no way responsible for your domain name registration; we do exist to make your web management as easy as possible. So have now introduced an exciting new feature, for Professional level accounts, that will monitor your main domain in order to help you ensure that no problems occur.

See “View Domain Info” in your “Site Properties” for more details.

In addition, if your domain is nearing expiry you will see a friendly reminder in the WMS 🙂

We hope you find this little addition to the WMS useful.