The folks over at Bitsmith Software were nice enough to include HelpSpot in their list of small business resources, *[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]* so I figured the least I could do is post a link to their Personal Knowbase software. Personal Knowbase is basically a knowledge base for yourself. Keep track of notes, messages, files, etc all searchable. I haven't used it (it's Windows only) but it does look interesting.
Thanks Bitsmith!
Mike did a nice job going through the list of items he needed to setup for a trade show:
http://recdesk.blogspot.com/2005/12/tradeshows-what-to-buy-and-what-to.html
"OK.....So now I've got two tradeshows under my belt. That makes me a grizzly old veteran compared to where I was a month ago :-) I know for me anyway, as the first tradeshow date approached, I sort of obsessed over the details of what to bring and was pretty sure I was forgetting something important. Well, the shows came and went and I'm glad to report that I pretty much covered all the bases from a logistics and gear point of view. I'd like to share my Tradeshow List with others so they can avoid this needless worry and focus on the important stuff."
I'm procrastinating a bit this morning so I thought I'd amuse you all with a little video of the first HelpSpot feature to use AJAX. You'll also see the yellow fade technique used in the response, not sure if I like that yet. Will it get annoying over the long term?
Here's the setup. In HelpSpot the main area is called the "workspace". This is where you find all the requests assigned to you as well as any custom filters you've built along with some predefined fitlers like subscriptions, reminders, and SPAM. By default when you click the Workspace navigation item at the top of the screen it takes you to "My Queue" which is where items assigned to you go. However, sometimes this is not desirable. Often you may in fact want to make your default page one of your custom filters. This new feature is a tiny little feature which lets you switch the default page.
Grab some popcorn and enjoy!
Exciting AJAX Video (14 seconds)
Over the past 5 minutes or so I hacked some AJAX support into HelpSpot just to get a feel for the UI. Man does this make the queue's fly. The Prototype library makes it really easy, plus the way I constructed HelpSpot means I had to change almost no code. However, I'm really running up against the back button issue. I just can't use it the way I want unless I'm able to give users use of the back button. The way HelpSpot works, I really probably only need to let them go back one or two pages since they'll mostly want to use it when going from a request back to the queue they started in. Anyone seen any good techniques for working around this issue?
Dennis Forbes with a most excellent rant. Part pro-bloggin, part anti-blogging, part anti-Scoble filled with good stuff like:
"If you look at his adoring community, and follow some of the backlinks, you discover a large, incestuous network of bloggers that are blogging about blogging, and linking to each others blog entries about blog entries about blog entries that talk about blogging about blogging on blogging with blogging."
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/categories/softwareDevelopment/2005/11/30.html#a203
BTW, he also covers a bunch of great software dev stuff in his other posts so at the risk of being incestuous I'd recommend you subscribe ;-)
One of the HelpSpot trial users is trying to do some reporting directly from the database and running into a problem with HelpSpot's date storage. For simplicity HelpSpot stores all dates as UNIX timestamps. This makes it easy to keep things cross platform on the DB front, because it's simply stored as an integer. It's also ideal since PHP basically requires this format to use the date functions.
The issue is that Microsoft SQL Server doesn't understand timestamps in this format so I thought I'd post the solution here in case anyone needs this. It's really simple, all you need to do is use SQL Servers dateadd() function to add the number of seconds to the UNIX timestamp starting point of January 1st, 1970. So simply:
SELECT dateadd(ss, {UNIX_timestamp}, '19700101')
or in a query:
SELECT xRequest, dtGMTOpened, dateadd(ss,dtGMTOpened,'19700101') AS opendate FROM HS_Request
Ben Richardson from Switch I.T. the creators of CampaignMonitor wrote up a great testimonial for HelpSpot. They were the 1st official customer, a huge help during the beta, and an important part of the pre-launch marketing for HelpSpot so it really means a lot to me that they think so highly of the product.
You can check it out over on the site: HelpSpot help desk software
For those who are interested Tiobe Software has released their list of the most popular programming languages. Note, that I have no idea who these people are but the list is interesting never the less.
Java and C have a commanding lead followed by C++ and PHP just barely below C++. VB is 5 followed by Perl then a big drop. Ruby is 21.
I think the PHP number is very interesting. I've had the sense just from my experience since releasing HelpSpot that PHP was really on the rise in the corporate world. I've been amazed at how many companies have been willing to install it to try HelpSpot. This seems to lend some factually backbone to my observations.
More good stuff by Jensen Harris:
"How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.
Yet, in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help."
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/comments/497861.aspx
This is a big reason why I didn't build "integrated" help into HelpSpot. It's basically a waste of time. You're much better of focusing on making your app simpler to use and have an online manual for the power users, administrators, etc.
It's also why HelpSpot has several somewhat hidden features. There's things in there which are hidden in plain sight like reminders. It's a cool feature to be able to setup reminders about a request, but making it too prominent would distract from the learning of the base functionality. It's OK if users discover that feature 6 months into using HelpSpot, in fact it will be better because they'll grasp the power of it more than if it was something they tried to fiddle with on day one.
Jeff Nolan has an interesting post about Salesforce and perhaps Google offering ad supported business apps for small business. This would seem to be more in Googles court than Salesforces, but it's an interesting idea. I suppose if you could ensure security and that the content the companies are searching in order to find relevant ads isn't used in a bad way then this could be a good thing.