System is nearing completion.  Honestly, we ran out of development money for Team Solution Software, and so completion of the Public BETA has been seriously delayed.  However, we’ve chipped away at the Private Alpha testing, and we’re hoping for the Public Beta within the next 60-75 days.

There’s been some discussion, too, about altering our pricing plans, at least for that Public BETA, and at least for the first 50 accounts opened.  Our intention is to make the pricing so attractive that it makes the sign-up a very easy decision to make for an SMB.

Team Solution Software is the ultimate CRM solution for any small business needing to: Allow team members to easily and securely communicate with each other, access and share all client information, store and share files, manage appointments and events on a shared calendar, and in all ways work within a Team-Oriented Environment. It’s one of the most powerful web-based business management tools available today, affordably priced for the small business market.

News, now, will be weekly, until the Public BETA is ready for market.

A recent report from the IT analysis firm Gartner suggests that enterprise spending on SaaS (software-as-a-service) will grow to $14.6 billion by 2012. The reasons are fairly obvious today:  the world economy has tightened enterprise spending’s belt considerably, and SaaS offers one way of reducing spending (no IT staff needed to manage web-based desktop solutions; no servers to manage or software to update); and, the rapid growth of telecommuting.

The latter is something about which we know a great deal. We’re a mixed staff of in-house and telecommuting staff, and have been for years. Team Solution Software was designed and inteded specifically for small companies like ours as a means of keeping everyone, no matter where, on the same page all the time. All that is needed for that is a computer and an Internet connection, and otherwise, we can work together from anywhere.

Many companies have downsized or are about to, and TSS, when released in commercial version, will enable those companies to stay together.  The rise in telecommuting positions, and the number of web sites devoted to the telecommuter (like http://telesaur.com), tells us there is a growing market for SaaS models just like TSS.

We’re getting close, and we continue to use TSS daily in our business. Check back for the next progress report, and before the summer is out, you’ll find Team Solutions Software ready for business.

For those of you who don’t already know, a Wiki is basically a collaborative website set up so that users can change the information contained on it freely. We thought it might be a nice addition to the TSS site, apart from the blog it will be used to describe the system, it’s features and how to use it.

Wikipedia.org is a free online encyclopedia, and the world’s most popular Wiki. All of the content on Wikipedia.org is submitted, maintained, and checked for accuracy by the global internet community. I decided to research a personal Wiki using Wikipedia, I first came across the Wiki software page which then led me to the List of wiki software page.

I decided on using a PHP based Wiki solution, and found TigerWiki on the List of wiki software page. The time between the initial download, installation and customization of TigerWiki was less than 25 minutes. I was floored at how easy it was to get it up and running. Although the english documentation for TigerWiki wasn’t that great, it proved to be extremely easy to use.

The customization of TigerWiki was the easiest I have ever seen. TigerWiki uses variables encapsulated with an open squiggly bracket “{” and a closing squiggly bracket “}”. Taking the variables from the existing TigerWiki template and putting them into a new TSS template took no more than 2 minutes.

Pre-Customization This is TigerWiki prior to customization, I had added some test content just to see what it looked like.

Post-Customization This is TigerWiki two minutes after adding the test content. Fully customized with the TSS theme.

Feel free to check out the Wiki, we’re adding lots of new content so keep checking back.

Well, the week has been event-filled with Team Solution Software.  We’ve been using the system here for more than a week now, and our notes are filled with thoughts on both functionality and interface. Mostly interface, though – - let’s move this over there, let’s make this feature a little more prominent on the page, that sort of stuff.  We’ve had a couple of locales, and staffs of up to 10, using it along with us, and the lists have been entered in Mantis, our tracking system for WRTBD (work remaining to be done), with the appropriate tasks sent to the right desks.

We’re going back to programming work now to attack the functionality task list; and, we’re going back to the production desk for the interface adjustments.  If we are diligent and earnest in our work, we should have a public Beta just after Labor Day.  We’ve had a few more companies sign up for public Beta testing, too, so there will be more than two and half dozen companies involved in that process.

We’ve also been mapping out the schemes for an invoicing component to integrate with the time tracking features in TSS, and have decided that will be one of the top additions to the system in its next iteration.  There are some interesting possibilities with a couple of open source invoicing systems we’ve reviewed, as well as the possibility we will  develop one of our own.  One of the partners in the management of TSS is a CPA, after all, so we have a very valuable in-house resource on that score.

Getting closer.

We’ve been using our Team Solution Software account for daily messaging and shared calendar this week, and so far we like what we see.  We’ve entered a few new projects, and assigned tasks, including the continued private beta testing of the system.  We’ve been logging in and logging out each day, using the “Take a Break” and “Lunch Break” features that automatically log a user in and out, and time tracking tasks to completion.  We’ve also been using the shared calendar for appointments all week.

In short, we’ve been using it as though it were already our Team and Project Management system, and it has been performing well.  Our account has nine users, and everyone has taken turns with their own task assignments.  Next week, our programmers will take the list we’ve been developing all week and attack the tasks assigned, and move this system along to public beta in the very near future.

The Team Solution Software system has been moved, we’re pleased to say.  We chose PostgreSQL as the most appropriate data base for TSS, and installed that on the permanent server Tuesday.  PostgreSQL is an enterprise class,  powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness.  As such, we deemed it the DB of choice for our system.

Following its installation, we moved Team Solution Software from the development platform to the permanent server, and have been verifying file validity since.  While there remains some loose ends on the Clients and Contacts section of the system, all other components are in place.  We’ll resume our testing once we’re certain of file integrity following the move, and will begin on interface modifications next week based upon our initial review and testing reported on earlier.

While technically we remain at Alpha, it’s sort of post-Alpha, pre-private Beta at the moment.  While we had hoped to be at private Beta by August 15, we’re going to miss that internal milestone by probably 10 days, maybe 14, and we’ve actually caused that delay ourselves by adding in some features not part of the original system design.

It’s getting even more exciting now around here.  We’ve a little ways to go, still, but we’re on the steep downside of software development now, and come September, we’ll be out in the sunshine with our public Beta.

We’ve been playing with Team Solution Software this week, passing messages back and forth among our team members, adding appointments and meetings to our shared calendar, uploading and sharing files, documents and images, time tracking our activities, and generally taking the system out for a test drive.  It’s getting excellent mileage, and our testing as been uneventful.

In the development of a web-based management system like Team Solution Software, there’s something of a time disconnect between the interface design and the functionality.  The design comes first, and is, therefore, very virtual – - it’s all in the abstract because the screens are purely images with just a little bit of HTML and simple navigation.  There’s no functionality behind it. At the Alpha stage in software development, the interfaces come alive as they are joined by the functionality.

Thus, review and testing at the Alpha is both of the functionality (programming) and the interface (design).  We’re finding the functionality to be pretty solid so far; the revisions and tweaks we’re making are in the design and the interface.  We’ll be at Private Beta before the week is out, and we’ll be reaching out to those who signed up to play with the system pre-Public Beta in a few days.

It’s an exciting time in our office, and we’re having fun.

It’s been an active week for Team Solution Software, although much of the action has been behind the curtain.  As reported earlier, the Calendar feature was getting a lot of programming attention; that attention has moved on now to the Clients and Contacts features.  The rest of the team has been testing the Settings, Messaging and File Sharing components, and we like what we’re finding.  Functionality is smooth and accurate, and we’ve been tweaking the User Interfaces a wee bit now to better present all of the detailed functionality that goes with each.

We’ve had some new companies sign up as beta testers, this time all in the States, including a medium sized business in Boston.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed that account will require a personal consultation, preferably when the Red Sox are playing at Fenway Park.  Hey, I wonder what the Home Town Team uses for their CRM needs, now that I think of it.

We recently discussed a Team Solution Software version for municipalities, a system we have referred to here as CRMunicipal, with the CRM representing “constituent relations management.” This version is being developed concurrently with TSS, as most of the features will be identical for both.

The main difference between the two will be the tracking of and accountability for resolution of citizen compaints. Let’s say a complaint about a pothole in the road, or a broken street light, or a drainage issue on a clogged catch basin, comes into the Town Manager’s office, either by phone or by letter. The phone call would be logged into TSS, or the letter would be scanned and uploaded to TSS’s shared document storage feature, and the Town Manager’s office assigns the Task to the appropriate Department Head, along with the phone call log or the scanned document. The system would begin monitoring that Task, the Department Head would record the action steps taken to resolve the complaint, including the Department Staff Member to whom that resolution task was assigned. The Staff Member does his thing, enters the steps taken in the Task Manager, and passes it back up to his or her Department Head. The Department Head, in turn, passes it back to the Town Manager’s Office, reports it as completed, and the record is archived (as opposed to purged).

Each TSS account will have an Administrative Control Panel, overseen in the municipal version, most likely, by the Town Manager. Permission levels can be assigned throughout the list of users of the account in the form of Read Only, Read and Write, and Delete. This would ensure that as a Task was passed down the chain of command, each level on the way down would have ever more restrictive permissions. A Staff Member, for instance, would be able to read a task passed down, but perhaps not be permitted to Edit (Write Permission) it, and could only pass it back up the chain without having the ability to Delete it. These System Protections would enhance accountability for Task Completions, and make Process Auditing that much easier for municipalities.

This is only one aspect of the TSS system for municipalities, and the commercial version will have a similar but slightly different Task Management Flow, equally effective for the private sector. Screen shots will come as each component of the system is completed, so check back in the near future as we start adding those shots to the Tour section of the web site.

We’ve had a month to watch the launch of the Team Solution Software web site and took the opportunity to review the site statistics gathered by our Google Analytics account. Based upon that review, we edited the Title Tag in the source code, added a few new keywords to the meta tags, adjusted the meta Description, added a couple of new keywords to the home page copy, and submitted the URL to the major search engines again. These steps all represent Internet Best Practices for search engine optimization efforts: monitor, analyze, adjust; repeat in another month. We’re adding posts to this blog almost daily, too, so the content continues to grow. Search engine robots will discern that content growth rate, and eventually they will schedule themselves to come take a new look at about that same frequency, thus obviating the necessity of search engine submissions in the future.

We also posted the site on Blue Dot, and “dotted” it. This site is a network allowing users to find, share and send web content to family and friends, and is led by experienced developers from the Seattle, WA area. It’s been mentioned on Tech Crunch, CNET and other important industry blogs, and is just about one year old. We “dotted” it yesterday morning, and noticed in this morning’s traffic stats that visitors found us through it.

We’re continuing to reach out through networking sites, and with each step taken, traffic has resulted. We’re not surprised – - we just want to share all of our results with you as we move toward the beta release later this month, and eventually V1.0 in August.