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 a hot Friday afternoon here at the TSS headquarters and work continues on the TSS Alpha. Today the development team needed a mockup of the Calendar Reminder system and we were all too happy to oblige. Once a reminder is set and the date/time passes the user is reminded with an attention grabbing fading popup that allows them to confirm or “snooze” the reminder (ensuring it will pop again before the event date).

Here’s a screenshot of the Calendar Reminder complete with an “alarming” graphic.

The Calendar is done, and development is working with Projects now.  Yesterday we revised the design mockups to integrate the “add project” functionality inline.  I think it came out rather slick, although development needs to make it fly before we pass final judgement.

We’re officially late now as it is August 01, but we’re still pleased with the overall progress and are looking forward to finalizing the Beta for a private go around.

Here’s a shot of the new Add Project interface and some more of the Projects screen.

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.

The excitement and buz from last week’s Alpha release has died down as work has continued on Alpha bug reporting and our march towards a private Beta release.   The development team is hard at work on finishing up the Calendar function with only a few remaining logic issues to be worked out.

Here’s a screenshot of the mockups we prepared for the Calendar:

Once again, we relied upon the old standby, the Press Release, and one of the new standby news carrier, the e-newsletter, to pass on the news that Team Solution Software is in Alpha Testing.  The traditional Press Release was sent to print media today, and the TSS e-newsletter announcing this was sent to every company, now over 20 in number, who has signed up on this site for notification.

At the moment, we’re testing the Message and Files features, along with the general Settings features, and our review is both on the functionality and on the user interface adequacy.  Now that functionality has been added to the screen mockups, we can see the process in action, and that is as crucial an evaluation process as the functionality.  Adjustments, tweaks and polishing are needed on the UIs, and we’re working at a feverish pace to get this down as we move toward public Beta testing.

We’ve sent the Alpha URL and login information to a few key external testers, people who have experience developing software, for first blush opinions, and some of the feedback has already been very helpful to us. That will continue for the rest of this week, and into next, and we still expect to have a public Beta in late July, or very early in August.

A little late but we have some pretty exciting news to report;  We’ve reached the Alpha stage!  Late Friday the development team gave out access to the team here at TSS and we got a sneak preview before the weekend of some working system modules.

The team is currently in the process of reviewing several modules of the system such as Messages, Settings, and Files and reporting bugs into our bug tracking software Mantis.

Here’s a screenshot of the upcoming Projects section;

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.

July has been a busy month around the Team Solution Software offices, as we’ve been rushing to both promote and complete the Beta version of TSS CRM. Development last week was centered around Messages, that being complete development has moved onto the Files section and it’s related functionality.

Here’s a peek at a portion of the File screen and some of the relevant navigation…