psp rss and helpspot
The PSP game console now supports RSS so this means you can administer your help desk while playing on the PSP. Pretty cool. I might need to pick one of these up for testing.
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The PSP game console now supports RSS so this means you can administer your help desk while playing on the PSP. Pretty cool. I might need to pick one of these up for testing.
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It's been brought to my attention (thanks Mike) that my post HelpSpot 1.0 release postings have been .... um ...... pretty lame (xbox, Jessica Simpson, etc). So I'm turning over a new leaf right here, right now. Back to business on this blog.
In fact this blog has been in many ways a reflection of my life. After getting 1.0 out I just had to step back. No coding at all until about 2 weeks ago when I got things together for a 1.03 release that just went out last night. It's funny because even though there was some significant work in there along with testing and so on, it really felt like nothing. When you go from building every new feature from a blank page adding one more setting or fixing a small bug feels like nothing at all.
The post 1.0 world is very very different. Rather than focusing on getting features added and making changes as the ideas flow I've found myself being forced to hold back. Especially with a product like HelpSpot I simply can't be releasing updates once every 2 weeks. First because I don't want to set that precedent, but also because no IT department in the world is going to install a new upgrade every couple weeks. Instead I've got to hold back and release larger releases less often. They'll still be pretty often in the beginning, but I expect they'll slow down as the bugs get worked through over the next few months.
Working with customers has been fantastic. Overall I've been very happy with HelpSpots performance. Almost all support has been installation support, which is exactly what I had hoped. There's always trouble with installation, some due to HelpSpot other times just getting PHP setup, IIS, and so on. What I was really worried about though was alot of support because administrative pages aren't clear, don't work as expected, etc. Having not gotten many of those type of request gives at least some indication that pages work as the user expects, which is huge to me.
The biggest issues so far have been with Windows/IIS installations. Nothing huge, just little quirks. Some of this is my fault as well since my background is more Apache based so I'm not as familiar with the IIS environment, but I'm learning. I have to reiterate that it was a very good move to decide to support it since I now have many customers using it and I think very few of them would have had the option of switching to another web server.
In an effort to keep up the transparency I've tried to have with this blog I'm going to try and get some hard sales numbers up here in a future post. I think it will be useful to future b2b developers. I have to figure out how exactly I want to present things a bit, but I should have something together in a few weeks so stay tuned.
Dave points to TiVo's ad announcement, whereby they'll let viewers find ads they are interested in as well as skip over ads they aren't.
I have to say I was hoping TV ads would go in a different direction. I understand that you'll never get rid of ads on TV and I'm fine with that. What I really want is contextually relevant ads. The best example of this is Extreme Makeover Home Edition. While the trips to Sears on that show are a little over the top, the rest of the product placements are done pretty well. Show me those great Closet Maid shelves actually in a closet or how nice those new Pella windows are.
Make the product fit the show I'm watching rather than ads almost always being totally irrelevant to the show.
This blog post is #4 on Google for "xbox 360 availability" and hence I'm getting thousands of visitors on that term. Wish I had a few, heck wish I had one for me :-(
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"so heres what i propose. i propose that you move into my hollywood bachelor pad and be my girlfriend. if you wanna buy a dog you can buy a dog. if you wanna call tuna chicken you can call that shit chicken and you know what i'll do, i'll say baby i love you. thats what i'll say."
This dude cracks me up.
PHP 5.1 is out and I have to agree with John that it feels rushed. There's alot of new stuff in there and there seems to be alot of issues still, at least from what I hear. My major concern is that many HelpSpot trial users are PHP newbies installing it for the first time.* That's always a challenge to begin with and if 5.1 introduces unknown issues on top of it that will of course only make things harder.
I guess I know what I'll be doing on Sunday while I watch football. (test for HelpSpot capability of course!)
Version 2 of HelpSpot, is going to have many more features revolving around the management and automation of tasks involved in handling service level agreements. Many of these features will be generic in terms of being functional for both formal SLA's as well as simply automating escalation of requests and so on. I'm still trying to balance in my head the amount of information the system needs to know about a specific SLA vs leaving things tied more loosely. It's a bit tricky because non SLA HelpSpot customers will likely be confused if there's too much service level agreement stuff, while SLA users will want those extra touches.
This is all in pretty early planning. I don't plan on having version 2 out for at least 6-8 months, but I like to start getting these ideas down early so I can iterate over them.
If any of you out there use SLA's in your day job I'd love to hear about how you implement them and where you could see improvements in the process by better integration with your help desk solution (no matter what that is). I'm also looking for good links and books on the subject if you know of any.
The new SDO data object access functions are pretty cool stuff. If you're a PHP guru you should check it out. I must admit I'm intrigued, but I do have some reservations about abstracted abstractions and all that.
Anyone seen sites selling the 360? Amazon basically doesn't even have a way to preorder it which is pretty rare. All the local stores are sold out. I traded in my old xbox, which I rarely played, and got 2 games on the trade. So now I've got 2 games (Madden and Call of Duty 2) with no way to play :-(
My favorite new podcast is Travel Commons with Mark Peacock. My wife works in travel procurement for one of the big 4 accounting/consulting firms and can really relate to his road warrior stories. I've done a fair amount of travel myself in my past careers as well. I really can't imagine traveling as much as this guy does though, flying in for a few hours then back out over and over. Ugh.