Front Office Box looks, feels, works differently to all the others.
Here’s brief explanation as to why we’ve done it differently, followed by an overview of the enhancements we’ve included in the soon to be released FOB3. Our next effort will be embracing Google Wave as a means to helping users work together. If you like the idea of on line collaboration in a small business context let us know. We’d love to work with you.
The Social Web has proved beyond question that people prefer to engage with services rather than software.
All of the grunt work needs to be done by the designers and developers so people can just use it, without the software getting in their way.
The business community has yet to learn this particular lesson. After all there are too many people making money out of helping users get some value out of software.
Go into any company and you’ll find armies of them providing support for their particular desk top and corporate systems architecture.
But my favorite examples are the books. Whenever you can find a “for Dummies” book about software you know the guys who built it didn’t understand.
Windows for Dummies and Office for Dummies point to easy targets. Microsoft’s success has been built on an ecosystem of “experts” navigating a path through the complexity for users.
SAP is in some ways worse. I know of one global, but still relatively small, company that employs 80 “experts” who fly the world making sure people who do real things for a living use the software properly.
But a special place in my thinking is reserved for salesforce.com.
I haven’t looked lately, but this company is, or at least was, so frightened by its reputation for unfathomable software it advertised “Salesforce for Dummies” on it’s home page.
That illustrates an arrogance beyond belief. It’s not our fault you can’t understand our software – Dummy.
So our mission is offering the world something different. Not just another CRM, or Contact Manager, or Project Manager but something that works the way they do, with some value add thrown in.
It’s meant to!
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It’s here, well, on the staging server at least, and working just great.
Before we release there are some page layout issues we need to sort out, and we need to do a thorough test (it’s already been tested several times but another run before deploy can’t hurt). That little lot is maybe a weeks work, so we might even be good to go with it next weekend – just right for Jackie’s birthday, a double celebration maybe.
So, what’s in FOB3, and what will it do for you?
- We’ve rebuilt the bits you can’t see, to make if faster, although ultimately is depends on the line speed of course.
- Great new Pipeline Management with auto calculation of %probabilities, weighted forecasts and color coded deals list. This is the ultimate in sales management tools for smaller businesses.
- Milestones have been added to Plans. Now you can organize your sales, service or project plans with milestones including due dates, then add appropriate actions within those milestones whenever you decide on them. The really good news is you don’t have to use them. It’s easy to just use actions the way the current app works.
- Plans now have “owners” just like actions.
- Both Plans and Actions now can have Tags. With Tags for Companies, People, Plans and Actions, and Plans and Actions assigned to people this is the ultimate in flexibility for you to define how your information is organized, without getting horrible complex.
- User specific Dashboards with timelines selectable by person, and user specified Links to other sites. This is like a central workdesk and window on the Internet.
- Social CRM. We’ve added the option to display an individual’s Twitter feed in the sidebar of the People View. (We’ll add more when we see how users get on with this).
- New Calendar for selecting dates, just like the airlines only much better.
- Calendar notifications. – iCal publishing to Google Calendar, Apple iCalendar or Outlook keeps your calendar up to date with your FOB3 timeline. With Google Calendar you can set up Notifications to your email and or SMS on your phone. (My favourite is Today’s Agenda).
- Management Tools – now you won’t have to come to us to add/remove users to your account. You can do it yourself with these tools.
With these enhancements we’re delivering our promise to provide users with management best practice, built in to the app so they don’t even notice it. Admittedly there are now more choices and that always adds to complexity. But we’ve worked hard at making these advanced tools which are options rather than requirements.
Anybody who wants to use FOB3 in the way they’ve used FOB2 will be able to do just that.
Here’s a few screen grabs to give you a feel for how it’ll work.
FOB3 Dashboard with Timeline, Twitterfeed and Links
Plans List with Weighted Forecast and Probability/Risk in Color
Plan View with Milestones, Actions, Correspondence, Documents and Notes
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