Document Management Talk

One of challenges faced by anyone working in the mysterious world of software development is trying to keeping yourself aware of and motivated by the bigger picture. Stopping yourself from seeing only whichever little technical problem you are focused on at the time is very difficult. You sometimes forget what it’s all for. We sit here month after month with our noses deep in the code and we often totally miss the big picture – which is the huge value that our creativity, vision, expertise and hard work deliver to our customers.

But every so often a big ray of light finds its way into the development team that lights the place up and re-energises everyone. This is usually when a massive milestone or achievement is reached by the team – and today was such a day. This week the Dev team deployed the new Infonic Andromeda (aka Silverlight aka .Net) product for the first time into a live customer document management environment. Fingers have been crossed all round all week. We thought we knew it was a very good product. The best we have ever produced, but there was a lot of cutting edge user interface that remained totally unproven.

So it was with massive excitement today that we received the first email of feedback from the Beta user after a week of intensive use across multiple sites. The excellent feedback from this first customer has been so rewarding for everyone here. For the first time we can all breathe a huge collective sigh of relief. Our baby is a success – so far. The customer’s diverse team of users love the product!                Wooo!!! hoooo!!!

With comments coming back to us like: “So far I have to say the experience has been excellent” and “Performance for users in Nottingham  on the LAN is excellent” and “at our EMEA HQ in Watford the performance is nothing short of superb” and “from my initial tests I think everyone over there will be amazed by the performance”  this is the first time we can all be fairly confident that we have got it right. We’ve designed and built a very robust and high performance next generation document management system that end users love using.

There will of course be teething problems with the new product. But (this is going to feel like I’m just bragging now) the customer even covered this off in his email with the following “as for teething problems;  they are of no concern to me because you turn the fixes around lightning fast, your agile approach is comforting to me”

The client went on to finish with “Great work…you should be very proud of your Silverlight baby, from what I’ve seen I can honestly say it’s a winner and you should be commended for your efforts with a hefty pay rise (yes, I am being serious).” Now this is the kind of constructive feedback we like!! 

So thanks to our customer for that excellent feedback and thanks to everyone here in the team who has worked so hard to produce such a high quality software solution. We are certainly not done with Andromeda yet, but feedback like this doesn’t come every day. So let’s all enjoy it!

Tim

Microsoft have announced the Beta release of Silverlight 4. How dare they, we haven’t got our Silverlight 3 release out of the door yet, although we’re doing our first install into a client environment this week. Silverlight 4 addresses some of the frustrations our developers have had with Silverlight 3, although the workarounds have pretty much been developed already, version 4 offers some nice enhancements and gives us some good roadmap opportunities for a future release. Don’t worry, we’re not going jump into version 4 until we’ve actually shipped the version 3 product !

 So what are these nice enhancements?

 One of the biggest is the ability to run ‘out of browser’ in a trusted mode. Version 3 allowed out of Browser running ( the application doesn’t run within the web browser ) but it had all the same restrictions on interaction with the host machine as the ‘in browser’ mode. The new Trusted mode allows the Silverlight app to access the local file store, interact with other applications using .COM and other standard features taken for granted by normal applications. For document manager this opens the door to richer integration capabilities and less user interaction requirements to confirm simple things like file saves (normally considered a threat for Web applications).

 Users can now open and save documents on the local machine using a file open / save dialog. Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but try writing a document manager without this capability!

 The Silverlight application can now access the local machine printers so we can print documents. Again it sounds obvious but quite a challenge for the developers without it.

 Files can now be dragged onto the Silverlight application from the windows desktop. Another feature taken for granted by non web app users, but highly desirable for something like Document Manager.

 Right Click. This was one of my biggest bug-bears with Silverlight 3, the fact that we could not present a context sensitive right click menu and that right click always provided the default Silverlight menu. Well with v4 we now can, so the familiarity of the rich client users can now be reproduced in the Silverlight version. Hooray.

 For the non technical of you reading this it probably sounds like I’m getting over excited about what appears to be relatively minor features, but they will make a big difference to the functionality and usability of the Silverlight Document Manager, and re-enforces our decision to adopt Silverlight as a platform for the product.

 For more details on Silverlight 4 Beta take a look at http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/

Tim

One of the drawbacks of any client server software product is the overhead of maintaining the client side installed components when changes are made, particularly in environments where the client workstations have restrictive security policies in place. Too often we have heard the cries of pain when an upgrade needs deploying to 100+ workstations. 

So the good news is that our 2.6 release now includes an update service which will automatically upgrade the client components whenever newer versions are available, and this will happen invisibly to the user.

Of course for a really hassle free deployment the new Web based Document Manager 2010 is the answer, but I feel client server apps will be with us for some time to come.

Tim