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Power To The People
Today’s a big day! Not just because we’re announcing a major overhaul of our product. It’s a big day because with this announcement, we’re emancipating business users from the shackles of IT. We’re allowing business users to build applications in the cloud without needing programmers.
Here’s how it happened. When TrackVia came online nearly five years ago, it was presented and purchased as an online database. The core differentiators were meant to appeal to IT types: security, performance, data integrity. Though TrackVia was different than most of today’s cloud databases, for example by having a user interface instead of requiring web service calls to get data in and out, it was still mostly just another way to store data in the cloud.
As we grew toward 1,000 customers, however, we noticed two things we hadn’t anticipated. First, non-technical business users, not just database administrators, were using TrackVia and loving it. Second, they were building real applications, meaning TrackVia was enabling dynamic workflows and business processes, and displacing existing packaged software products. This was not just an alternative to Microsoft Access on the web; this was something different in who was using it and how they conceived of it.
We decided that helping business users build cloud applications was the perfect extension and transformation of our core cloud database offering. So we’ve spent the last nine months working to reinforce this trend: studying what business users were trying to do with TrackVia, what they liked and didn’t like, and redesigning our platform to let them do it more easily. The result is being unveiled today: the first cloud application platform design for business users, but (and here’s our dirty little secret) still secure and robust enough for IT to champion.
What did we add to TrackVia to enable this transformation? Glad you asked.
· A new, streamlined user interface based around our “data canvas” concept. Users can now use all of TrackVia’s tools – search, batch update, document generation, data alerts, and much more – without losing sight of their data. The “canvas” of data is always front and center, with supporting tools and options arranged around the data and in context with it.
· Rich analysis and visualization tools, including dashboards. Users can create a pivot table, chart, graph, map, or calendar view with a single click. They can combine these onto a dashboard page, dragging them into place, and then go to that dashboard with a single click from anywhere inside TrackVia. Of course all dashboards are live, interactive, and have drill-down capability, automatically.
· A new built-in access control application that lets customer organizations define roles and groups, with associated record, field, or feature permissions across database tables. All of the features of a custom TrackVia application are also present in this built-in permission management application, including audit trails, change alerts, and custom views. This brings unmatched clarity, transparency, and ease of use to these all-important settings.
· Our Enterprise API. Our larger customers were using TrackVia to solve real business problems, and that meant TrackVia data needed to relate to existing data in in-house systems. Our new Enterprise API allows easy, powerful two-way data synchronization with existing business systems.
· Partner and channel programs. To serve the needs of business users, we need partners that play in the business solution ecosystem. We’re teaming up with VARs, system integrators, consultancies, and hosting providers to create new opportunities for our partners and new services for our customers. More details about these initiatives will be announced in coming months.
Taken together, these changes add up to a major new offering in the cloud computing world. We think it’s important, and we can’t wait to tell the world about it!
If you’d like to learn more, please come to next week’s webinar, Harnessing the Cloud Promise: Business Apps of the Users, by the Users, for the Users, featuring noted cloud computing analyst David Linthicum.
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Comments
new functionality feedback
I like what you have done and will keep checking back for progress. The new interface and features are good improvements but are still not what I was hoping for given the great potential of TrackVia. My fundamental issue is with the lack of control with respect to layout. I can see the development simplicity of the default layouts, but I believe the audience for such interfaces is very limited and it is not appropriate for my needs. TrackVia has the potential to support a cleaner UI model that approaches today’s standards for interaction.
The default UI is overly complex and difficult to navigate. As way of example, there is no simple order/order-detail display construct. To get this kind of functionality in the Order Management demo app, one has to go to the Product-Order Join table and filter (or browse) by ‘Order Number’ – presuming one knows the order number. Would be useful to be able to click on a ‘Customer Company’ to see the related list of Customer Orders, then for each Customer Order be able to click to display the Customer Order detail and the associated Customer Orders. If I look at the Cisco customer record I cannot directly see the list of orders from Cisco because of the Company→Contact→Order hierarchy. Dropping the Customer Contact indirection only partially solves this problem in that you could then ‘see’ the ‘child’ records, but the way of seeing those records (view children) is precisely what I mean by a limited audience interface. 'Child' is developer/DB terminology and not what one finds on a UI.
I should be able to define entities and their relationships. Then from that be able to create web and mobile interfaces that default a design from entity attributes. This allows for a more powerful UIs with audience designed purposes and specific platform targets.
The data model is also missing
- ‘known-by’ capability to define a multi-part key or reference
- ability for a table to refer to itself… i.e. person refers to person for spouse
- can not program default values for attributes
- no 'time' field for apps that do recurring calendar functions
Display editing missing
- select from referential key display using alternate field(s)– example is if Person (student) refers to Person for Mother where Person is KnownBy PersonID but what you want to see in the reference ‘select’ is a concatenation of FirstName + LastName. Perhaps I can do this by creating a view with a calculated field for First+Last and then do selection by the calculated field. However, this breaks down when PersonID is unique but First+Last is not unique.
- phone number as numeric filed type
- conditionally required fields (if field1 not blank then field 2 is required).
- On a list view I can select fields from referenced parent records but I can not select referenced fields on the detail record view.
- On a referencing parent record (drop down select) I cannot subset the selectable records by filtering on another parent record attribute (unless I create a view with appropriate filter?). i.e. select an order record from the subset of orders that belongs to a specific customer
Why the pricing model? Seems like you would better served to let people build their apps for free and then charge for usage. Why place any barriers on developing apps if you can cap access?
Do you have an open model for creating new components like Map, Chart, etc? With a simple interface model one could leverage logic and display components to enrich the application service.
Looking forward to future releases. TrackVia has great potential.
Thanks for the great, and
Thanks for the great, and detailed, feedback. You're correct that we need to provide much greater flexibility to customize UI elements to allow a tailored fit to a specific app. This is actually our highest product development priority now that we've released the first phase of our redesign.
A large part of our UI redesign was driven by our maturation from a database to an app platform. As we've moved in this direction we've bridged some of the functional gaps you point out by opening up some "unpublished" features such as the ability for a customer to upload a custom HTML/javascript file to replace our off-the-shelf forms. Any Trackvia customers who'd like access to this should let us know - just call us at 800.673.3302 or email us at support@trackvia.com.
We'll be publishing this ability as an easy-to-use do it yourself functionality as soon as possible.