Business On Software

You know how it is, you can get a little bit jaded and take your work for granted a lot of the time.  But sometimes, you get a response from a client that just makes your day and makes everything worthwhile.  Take this response I received back this morning from a client whom I assisted by doing a very very simple data extraction (the sort of thing I usually do several times a day without thinking)…[click on image to zoom in]

So often you are ‘heads down’ and busy doing your thing that you forget how much a few little things can mean to someone.  Later in the day, I performed another small data export for the same client and got this [click on image to zoom in] :

She sure knows how to get results doesn’t she?  It made MY day too!

Today I realised that the days of installable accounting software is definitely over. Conclusively. Let me tell you the story in all it’s angst and frustrating detail.

I was recently engaged by a client to do some data conversion work on their Quickbooks Premier system. Sounded easy enough, so we took on the assignment thinking it would be a simple job taking up a day or so of our time. Basic research on the internet showed that we could download a trial edition of the QODBC driver in order to get that job done without any cost to us in terms of software licensing.

With most other database systems, just downloading the ODBC driver is normally enough to get you access to the data files without having to install the entire application package. Not so with Quickbooks.

Our client dutifully did a backup within Quickbooks and sent us the QBB file to look at. This is when we first realised that the QBB backup file is not like a standard ZIP or any other backup file. There is no way to get to the data without restoring it, and the only way we could restore this data was to have a working copy of Quickbooks Premier.

So off we went to the Quickbooks site to download a copy. This is where I was staggered to see the many many different versions of Reckon software, and even when we narrowed it down to Quickbooks Premier, there were 5 editions of Quickbooks Premier to choose from! A phone call to our client elicited the correct version, so I downloaded a 400MB installation file and installed it. Another hour or so wasted.

Ok, now I fired up Quickbooks Premier, and chose to restore my clients file. It started off looking promising, but then it asked us for a username and password to complete converting the file. Not really a bad thing – after all, this sort of information should be secured. We called our client again and got an operator level password (they didn’t want to give out their Admin password – understandably).

Success? No! It gets to the end of the conversion process and then throws us a message saying that the version of Quickbooks is newer than the version I have installed. This was the install I just downloaded from their website this morning. Today. And it is out of date according to them. The dialog box says I have to install SP2 of Quickbooks Premier.

I click on the link to download the patch, and I am shown a web page with the available patches for Quickbooks Premier. There is no SP2 on the list, however there is a ‘Service Pack 1′ shown which is dated June last year. I go to select that, but do you think I am shown a download link? No, I have to sign in with a Reckon Customer ID and PIN code. Nothing is simple with Reckon, is it?

Another phone call to my client, and I get this information as well. So I log in, and download the 15MB patch and install it. It turns out that this is the correct SP2 patch they spoke about, despite everything on the download site calling this ‘Service Pack 1′. Get your terminology right Reckon!

I go to install the patch. Bomb! Quickbooks tells me that the software must be registered before I can install a patch on it. Luckily, all I need is the same Customer ID and PIN to register so I do so. Second time around, it lets me install the patch.

Hooray, now the data conversion works OK and I can open the data file in Quickbooks Premier SP2.

Now for the ODBC part. I set up a DSN pointing to the data I need in QODBC, but when I try to test the connection, another error message saying that I cannot get access to their data files. Some research time on Google shows me that I need to be logged into Quickbooks as an Admin user the first time I run the ODBC driver in order to get access. No other user login will work, it has to be Admin.

A third phone call to the client yields this information reluctantly. I sign in as Admin, then hook up the ODBC, and we are away. Finally.

Did I mention that all the above steps wasted practically a whole day? In amongst the rounds of downloading and installing software and patches, I reflected that there must be a better, easier way of doing this.

By the way, my own company now uses Xero for our accounting. This is a totally web based system. We started using this system in Jun 2009, and to date there have been at least 2 major updates to the system that I know of. Do you know what I had to do to install the updates? Nothing. It all happened whilst I was asleep. No downloading. No patching. No registering. No Googling for answers on esoteric error messages. Just pure bliss.

Goodbye installed software – I knew thee well…

Regular readers and colleagues would know that I have been secretly lusting after an Apple iPhone for quite a while now.  For many years, I was a stickler for the Palm range of products – way back from when they were using the dying PalmOS system, to the more recent Windows Mobile operating system.

Well, I have finally laid my Palm Treo 750 down to rest.  There was nothing really wrong with it – the device itself works perfectly, as been robust as anything.  However, I got a call from my carrier rep the other day saying that my monthly repayments on the phone had finished, and would I be interested in upgrading to another device…and that got me thinking.

I bought an iPhone 3G for my wife last year, and it has converted her from a technophobe, to someone who embraces this device with wild abandon!  She finally loves using email and messaging – and uses her phone to nearly maximum potential.  I, meanwhile, have been sulking in the shadows and secretly coveting her phone.

So, when the call from my carrier came at the same time that the iPhone 3GS was released – I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

I have now had my new device for a week.  And….I love it.  There is no doubting that the iPhone interface is streets ahead of anything else at the moment (although I have not played with Android or WebOS as yet).  The 3GS boasts a better camera, plus the ability to capture video.  It also has a voice recorder (I had to purchase iTalk separately for my wife’s old iPhone – hah).

The whole concept of the AppStore is also intriguing to me.  I used to spend a lot of time searching across various sites on the internet of varying reliability and trustworthiness to find applications for my Windows Mobile devices – but now I can browse one site with the knowledge that the apps have been vetted by Apple.  Whether this is really a good thing or not is debatable, but I am leaning towards the positive at this stage.

I am also enthusiastic about my experience with Apple support so far.  When my wife’s iPhone battery started to fail (i.e. only lasting a couple of hours), the device was still under warranty, so I rang Apple, and they sent out a replacement phone in advance, complete with all the shipping labels to send the old one back – after I had received the new one and set it up and ensured it was working.  That is the first time I have ever heard of a manufacturer sending a replacement out prior to getting the old one back! Kudos to Apple support.

The main reason for me getting this phone, though, is to try and run my business on it as much as I can.  For example:-

• ANZ Bank has released an iPhone friendly web link which enables me to keep track of my business and personal bank accounts.
• I am using Wesabe to better control my expenditure and personal expenses
• We are switching to an online Saas based accounting system for my business, which I can drive using my iPhone
• I have installed an RDP client on my iPhone so I can still use my Windows Servers while out in the field
• I am using Fuelly to track my fuel usage and milage on my business vehicle

I am hoping to keep you updated on here as I move more and more of my business online.  The iPhone is going to be a big part of that.

Photo by Anna_Greece via Flickr

Joel Spolsky mentions that developers who try and fill a hole in a particular vendors offering risk having their products being made obsolete by the vendor themselves.  He cites 15 iPhone apps that have been made obsolete by Apple with the latest release of the iPhone 3Gs.

As a developer who has been creating products that ‘piggy back’ onto another vendors major software offering, we have had first hand experience of this situation.  On a regular basis, we see the major vendor release software updates or features that either:

a) is exactly the same as a feature in our add on

b) breaks a particular feature in our add on

c) prevents us from proceeding with out own product roadmap for future enhancements

To be honest, I don’t believe that any of it is done be our vendor out of mean spiritness, or an intention to directly hurt us.  Because they are a large, lumbering company, they just plod along on their merry path, following their own product roadmap with scant regard for what us ‘little guys’ are doing.  Such is life, for a Remora software company such as ours.

Joel says that developers such as us are effectively trying to snatch pennies from the path of an oncoming steamroller, and he says that add-on developers would be lucky to get 1% of the total vendors market.  True, to a certain extent, but I think there are still ways that we can get a good outcome from such a situation.

I think that if we can differentiate our product offerings enough, people will still spend the money to buy ours because it is either easier to use, or has better features.  Note: I don’t say more features, just better features.

To go back to the iPhone for a while – I purchased the iTalk application by Griffin Software for my wife’s iPhone so she could record conversations with her mum for later possible publication in a book.  iTalk is a great tool, with easy syncing to her PC (without having to use iTunes) plus the ability to change the recording quality (and thus file sizes).  I don’t think that the built in voice recorder in the iPhone 3Gs can do this (please correct me if I am wrong).

To me, the two features that I highlighted above will still mean that I would be willing to pay for iTalk over the built in software.  Differentiation is still the key.  The vendor will always have to try and build their software according to their grand plan, i.e. in this case, Apple can only make their voice recorder sync using iTunes.  To do otherwise would be to risk a major cashcow of theirs.  Third party vendors like iTalk who can break this stranglehold can still win the battle.

Photo by RavenHawk via Flickr

What is with the sales team at the Australian Taxation Reporter magazine?  Over the years, they keep repeatedly calling me, and when we try and tell them we are not interested in their product, they start getting really, really pushy and downright rude.

For the first time in my life yesterday, I slammed down the phone on one of their sales reps when she absolutely refused to take ‘No’ for an answer.  I tried to be polite and to explain my reasons, but these guys must have the mother of all script sheets in front of them to try and work around every known objection to their newsletter.

Now, I don’t have a problem as such with their product – we actually used to subscribe to it many years ago, but like everything else, it was just one more thing to suck up our limited attention and time during the day, and we just did not see the justification in carrying on with it.  Our accountant does a really good job to ensure that we maximise our tax breaks, and being accounting software developers, we actually have all the latest feeds on rules and regulations directly from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) anyway.

But try telling that to these guys.  I know they have been rude to other staff members in my company over the years.  So, my message to the Australian Tax Reporter – Please leave us alone now.  We will not buy your product, and we suggest that you tone down your sales techniques somewhat to not be so confrontational and pushy.

A link back to an article I wrote for CloudAve describing the irony of my thought processes of web applications versus Win32 applications.

It has been a bit quiet on this blog for a while now, and I must apologise.  This site is NOT becoming dormant by any means – I have simply been extremely tied up  with other work projects.  I have been fairly active on my personal blog lately at Posterous, as well as on Twitter, where you can follow me @dsabar.

I have also had another guest post up at CloudAve, relating to the communications outage we had here in Northern Australia last week.  In future, I will be linking more to my other guest postings etc. from here.

I still have a ton of articles on the back burner, and hope to refocus more on small businesses and software solutions in the coming months.

See you soon!

Image from schimilblick via Flickr

Many of my friends, colleagues and readers of this blog will know that I am a true gadget freak, and am totally enamored of technology, and will try and use it in all aspects of my life.

Which is why many of them are totally surprised when they find out that March 2009 will mark one year that we have not had TV at our household!  I mean, we have a TV set – an ancient 17 inch cathode ray that was given to me by a former employee about 10 years ago.  People walk into my house – see this in the lounge and laugh, saying “Where is the 50 inch plasma display?”.  They are incredulous when I tell them this is all I have, and No, we don’t have any other TV’s in the house.  Not even in our, or the kids bedrooms.

When we moved into our house last year, we noticed that there was no ‘free to air’ aerial on the roof.  There was a satellite dish for Austar, but we never had an account, and my wife put her foot down and declared that from now on, we were not going to be a TV household.

To be fair, my sons and I had a lot of problems about this in the early days, but now, 12 months down the track…I don’t even miss it.

We do have a collection of DVD’s that we watch from time to time, but what do we do after dinner and on those long Sunday afternoons I hear you ask (as many of our friends have).

Well, we have reverted back to the ‘old fashioned’ ways of entertaining ourselves.  We play cards – Uno and Skip-Bo being some favourites.  We play Monopoly, and leave the board set up for days while we continue a game.  We talk, we play guitar, we read to the kids, we make up stories.  Sounds quaint I know, but it is FUN…seriously.

Same for game consoles.  People think I am mad when I say we have NO Playstations or XBoxes or Wii’s in our household.  Oh, all right, I bought myself a Sony PSP a couple of years back, but I haven’t seen it for months.  I have no idea where it is now, nor the charger to get it up and running again.

Both my wife and I cannot stand it when we go out for family dinners with friends, and their kids have their noses buried in their Nintendo DS all through the meal.  We try and teach our kids to enjoy conversation and interact with their friends and adults.

It has been challenging at times, especially with the peer pressure that the kids get at school.  But overall, Sam (my wife) and I are happy with the results so far, and we look forward to being a TV and game console free family for a while yet.

Image from ANDI2 via Flickr

This post is a bit off topic from software and programming etc., but it is an event that forced me to rethink things about the way the world works, and my place in it…

I was out on site at a client of mine yesterday morning, who is an egg wholesaler.  Normaly I go out there at the end of the week, when their deliveries have been completed and they need assistance with end of month etc., but this time I was out there early in the week, before they had made their deliveries and I was amazed to see their warehouse piled high with boxes and boxes of eggs.

I casually asked the manager how many eggs they move each week.  “Oh, about 40,000 dozen or so”.  What?? Forty thousand dozen eggs??  That is 480,000 eggs.  Each week.  This is in a small town of about 120,000 people.  That equates to about 4 eggs per week for every man, woman and child living here.  I would hate to think of the numbers that a wholesaler would ship in a bigger city elsewhere in Australia or the world.

It is just that I never ever thought about the number of eggs that would be consumed by our little town.  And if you are reading this, you probably cannot comprehend or visualise such a large number of eggs.  I know I couldn’t – until I saw for myself a whole warehouse packing shed piled high with boxes upon boxes of eggs.  It is mind blowing.

I even started thinking about the sheer number of chickens that would be needed to produce that quantity of eggs each week, and then the land and other resources to support that number of chickens…and on…and on.

Personally, I am not a big egg eater at all, and neither is our family.  We used to do a regular bacon and eggs fry up every Sunday breakfast, but not for many years now.  My wife in fact only purchases free range eggs nowadays on the occasional basis, however reading the definition of ‘free range’ these days doesn’t really make me feel better for the poor chickens.  Apparently as long as a caged, confined chicken can ’see’ a patch of grass it can be considered ‘free range’, which I don’t think is a fair call.

This experience has shaken my beliefs a little bit, and has made me less keen to consume eggs in the future.  If not the enormity of the numbers, then the memory of the smell there certainly will.  Have you ever smelt thousands of eggs in one room?

So apologies again for the off topic post, but I think that in this day and age, we need to take a step back and look at the rate at which we are consuming, and the resources, and animals which go into satisfying those needs.  Perhaps we need to go back to the old days when we have to hunt for our food again?

Image by Valentinian via Flickr

I was cleaning out my car on the weekend, and I found an old PDC phone directory underneath the passenger seat, which prompted me to reflect and post about it.

You see, at one stage we used to request extra phone books from the providers just so that myself, and the rest of the team here at work, could carry a book in our vehicles in order to facilitate us finding customer addresses or phone numbers whilst on the road.  This phone book also contained a handy street map in the middle.

I smiled when I noticed that this directory was dated 2006.  I had completely forgotten about it, and it had laid unused under that seat for three years.  What had turned somthing that was a useful tool into a dormant relic?

The short answer is my Smartphone.  I just take it for granted now that I can access our CRM database from the road to get customer information (or White Pages for that fact).  I can also get Google Maps to find directions, or, if I remember to charge up my bluetooth GPS dongle, I can even get voice directions in real time via my Co-Pilot software on the device.

The book seems really quaint now, and I cannot actually remember the day when I decided to actually stop using it.  It seems that my Treo 750 (and 650 before that) slowly, and ubiquitously seeped into my everyday mode of doing things, and before long it just became second nature so that I took it for granted.

Anyhow, the book is in the bin now, and I am still looking for an excuse to get an iPhone so that I can do everything, with more style…