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…

On Monday, June 25, we added a sign up window for anyone interested in helping us test the beta version of Team Solution Software.  We’ll be using TSS ourselves, of course, in the management of our team at KISS Computing, Inc., but we hoped others would want to play along with us - - quicker feedback, and likely to be more comprehensive than if it were just us geeks.  After all, it would not be new to us, and we wanted fresh and untainted observation and use.

In the two full work weeks since the sign up window appeared, we’ve had 14 companies volunteer, including a private, non-profit organization with 9 users; a CPA firm of 15 at three different locations within Massachusetts; a company with offices in Germany, the UK and the US; an Internet marketing company with offices in the US (Texas) and Canada (Calgary); and other smaller companies like ours.

We thank them all, and look forward to working with them shortly when the beta becomes available for testing.  There’s always room for more, though, so if you are interested, we’d love to have you join us.  There will be special introductory benefits for those who beta test with us, so signing up helps you, too.

As we’ve reported here, this Team Solution Software web site was launched on Friday, June 8. Our blogging and promotional efforts, however, did not begin in earnest until the week of June 18, as you’ll see from previous posts. Today, we want to share with you the saturation results from just those first two weeks of search engine optimization work.

We submitted the URL to the major search engines beginning that week, June 18. We did so for five consecutive days, and then backed off to weekly thereafter. We’ve added content to the site each day since then, also, in the form of blog postings. We’ve maintained that frequency of content growth, making sure the appropriate keywords were included in the copy, and we’ve watched for the search engine robots to visit the site and index its content.

According to www.pagerank.net, one of the online research resources we use for our SEO work, Team Solution Software has 31 pages indexed in Google’s data base; 10 pages indexed in Yahoo!’s; and a few each in MSN, Alta Vista and AOL. We’re very encouraged that it took only two weeks for this web site to make it to the search engine DBs, and we’ll begin refining our efforts now for keyword density and rank positions for the keywords that will result in increased visitorship.

We will not be expecting such quick results there, as the competition is very keen for rank position no matter the keywords. This site is young, also, and search engines do favor maturity. Our networking promotional efforts will fill in the gap here, as it has over the last two weeks, and we’re happy to report, also, our traffic continues to grow. Our pages viewed per visit over the last 10 days is approaching 5, suggesting visitors are finding something of interest here.

Efforts continue, and we’ll be reporting results again in another week.

Although we’ve concentrated so far on discussing the commercial version of Team Solution Software for the small business market, we do have a second version being developed concurrently - - for municipalities. We’ve been calling it CRMunicipal, and in this instance the CRM stands for, among other things, “constituent relations management.”

Some of a Town Manager’s or Town Administrator’s time is spent each day assigning citizen complaints to various department heads for resolution, and the municipal version of Team Solution Software will include a tracking mechanism for those tasks as they make their way down the chain of command for resolution, and then back up again to be marked as resolved.

Not all town agencies and departments work out of the same building, and many of a town’s agencies are part-time or volunteer. It’s not dissimilar to a small business composition of in-house and telecommuting staff members. Team Solution Software’s municipal version will enable everyone to stay in touch and remain current on projects and tasks.

The file/document storage and sharing component is perfect for budget development as it is passed from department to department for everyone’s contribution. Project and task management becomes that much easier with the centralized and shared features of TSS, along with the shared Calendar feature. It’s just as important for all town agencies and departments to be on the same page as it is for small businesses, and Team Solution Software is that perfect tool for inter-departmental communication and accountability.

When completed, the municipal version of TSS will be the first of its kind, designed specifically for towns in any state. We’ll continue reporting on progress and features of this version as it moves to release shortly after the small business version.