Hi, I'm Rob, the latest addition to the team here at hedgehog lab. I started here last Monday, and I've been given a rather large task with a equally large and looming deadline.
I am the Product Manager for solomon, and I will be leading all aspects of this project, including all of the development. I am eager to launch a beta release in early May, so I will be spending April solely working on Solomon. You can sign up for beta preview to help us squish any bugs and get an early look at what we are doing. I am looking forward to running this project, and if you have any queries or feature requests you can get in touch with me on our Get Satisfaction forums and I'll be more than happy to help.
I've been spending my first week analysing the requirements and design for Solomon and familiarising myself with the environment and the technologies that it uses. The atmosphere here at "the lab" is great, it's a fairly small office with five of us working in close proximity. The discussions we have about projects or problems usually involves scooting a chair over to desk-share or drawing everything up on the whiteboard, which give us a very flexible and productive environment.
I joined the lab straight from University, where I attained a MSc in Computer Security and Resilience. Being given this much responsibility immediately is a welcome challenge, It should give me plenty of project management experience, and I must admit I enjoy being given the snazzy title of "Product Manager" at the age of 22!
Outside of work and education, I spend a lot of time exploring new technologies; I recently learned Flex and Adobe AIR, and I have a feeling there might be some fancy new applications in the pipeline using the Fixx and Solomon APIs.
My life isn't all computers and coffee though: I am heavily involved in the South Shields volunteer lifeguard club; I teach lifesaving, give safety talks in schools and during the summer I spend as many days lifeguarding on the beach as possible.
For those of you interested in what Solomon will look like, here is a preview of the contacts feature:
I intend to follow Damian's trend of blogging snippets of product insights periodically, so as soon as the beta of Solomon is out you can expect to be hearing a lot more from me. Goodbye for now, there's code calling...
Hi everyone, I'm Damian - the newest recruit to join hedgehog lab. My official title is Product Manager (manager at only 22 years of age!), which means it's my role to manage and run development of fixx, solomon and Product X (the mystery will soon be unveiled) so we can all get plush new Audis.
I like the fact that straight away, I have been put in a position with a fair bit of responsibility, which is great as it means I get to experience all areas of business and I'm able to directly shape the future of our products. So if you have any queries or features you want for upcoming versions, I'm your go-to guy to make this happen - damian@hedgehoglab.com or alternatively add suggestions to our forums.
On this note, we are getting ready to release a new version of fixx early next year (1.6), with a 2.0 release being planned for summer 2009 which I'll be heavily involved in...get ready for some big changes!
I also want to take this opportunity to quickly talk about solomon - our CRM and web-based contact manager, which is looking mighty fine...don't worry you won't have to wait much longer! It'll be worth the wait as you will soon be able to see the thought and experience design that has went into the interface and the performance should be lightning fast with lots of JavaScript (or AJAX for your 2 point ohs) magic binding the entire thing together.
A bit more about myself. My background is in Computer Security and I have joined the lab pretty much straight from Uni. I am one of the cool kids in the lab who work on a Mac, not a PC (hello Mark!), and in my spare time I dabble with Ruby and Java, which is handy as it means I can hit the ground running with both fixx and solomon, which are both developed in Java.
In the short time that I've been here, the things that I really like about working in a start-up are transparency and team discussions. The former is self-explanatory, as it means that no business related subject is taboo. The daily team meetings and discussions are great because I'm able to voice my opinions in a group of very intelligent people. This also means the turn-around on ideas is pretty darn fast too!
I'll leave it here for now, but I suggest you watch this space for some exciting product releases and announcements over the next year.
From this month on, we have decided to do a frequent (at least monthly) summary post highlighting key updates for our products
fixx
The big news for fixx this month is the 1.4 release, which comes with a new iPhone interface and updated permissions for projects.
The fixx documentation has been updated to include guidance on using MySQL as a database backend to your fixx installation. We will be adding more databases to the official documentation soon.
solomon
solomon development has been coming along great and we are almost ready to close out our alpha stage to prepare for a closed private beta. Ensure you sign-up for the beta if you want to get your hands on solomon early. Meanwhile, below are a few screenshots of solomon as it is currently.
As we rapidly approach the release of fixx, our bug tracking solution (I have heard hushed voices in the Labplex that this might be as soon as Monday), I wanted to take the opportunity to announce the development of our next product.
solomon is a web-based contact manager and simplified CRM solution for small and medium businesses, who want to break free of Neolithic desktop solutions that don't play well with information sharing. It will be a web application you can run on your own hardware, like fixx.
solomon is still brewing at this stage but you are welcome to take a peek and sign-up to be notified when the beta goes out.
Before someone starts the "clone wars", solomon is indeed inspired by Highrise from 37Signals. However, we plan to bring our own unique take to interaction, functionality and purpose to the small business CRM space and fill a gap many existing, over-priced and non-user friendly enterprise web/desktop products have left.
Firstly, apologies if you have arrived here through your feed reader which has suddenly been flooded with every blog post made by hedgehog lab. We just deployed a massive re-design and re-code of our main website, which meant that a few things were bound to go awry. This should be fixed now, so please feel free to "Mark all as read" and move on.
Moving onto the good news, as you can see, we have taken on-board nearly a year's worth of feedback all our loyal customers have provided and spent some long sleepless nights to build and deploy our brand spanking new website. It's also a great opportunity for me to provide an update on our products and summarise our new website.
Website re-design and re-write
Most software companies are guilty of spending far too much time re-designing (lesser crime) and re-writing (greater crime) their website and internal tools every so often instead of focusing on, err, writing software for customers.
Lest you think we fell into this trap, our site re-design and re-write is actually in response to overwhelming customer feedback. Our previous site had a good enough design and a basic set of tools but there were constant complaints about both small details like font size, and big important details like issues with license generation and account management tools. We listened patiently for over a year and decided now was the right time to introduce an update. Here are some key points about this update,
One of the biggest overhaul has been in the visual/brand side of things. We have ditched our "far-too-corporate" look and adopted a visual style that we feel reflects our personality and ethics.
The product pages and content have been completely overhauled, giving a better experience when looking for information and making it easier to evaluate your options.
There is more information about hedgehog lab now, and more importantly, the much requested Team page and team information.
The license and account management section has been completely re-designed and re-written. It is now even quicker to buy and manage your product licenses from hedgehog lab.
We have a lot more exciting support-related changes and more content coming in the next few months, so make sure you keep an eye on the website.
fixx
This has been months in the making but fixx 1.9 is finally here and it brings with it a wealth of new features and updates which have been requested for a long while. Check out the Release Notes for more info and grab your copy. Here are a few big highlights from 1.9,
You can now delete projects you don't need completely from fixx.
The free user limit has been increased to 3 from 1. You can now have 3 valid users in the system without paying a penny!
fixx can now speak Spanish & German.
You can perform a 1-click migration from Unfuddle.
solomon
The past 2 months have been full steam ahead with solomon development. We have made massive progress with functionality (which included 2 re-writes of the contacts screen) but we are finally happy with the experience and UI. The beta is very close and although I don't want to give away a lot, expect a blog post and a sneak peek into both the solomon web and iPhone app soon.
We've been working hard at the lab on this for the past four months, so I'm extremely proud and excited to announce the launch of our latest product, solomon. solomon is a Small Business CRM and web-based contact management app designed with small businesses and freelancers in mind.
We were hoping to launch solomon in late 2009 and I know a lot of people have been waiting impatiently. We had to hold its release back for a few months to ensure the user experience was just right.
So what's in this version of solomon?
We've really focused our efforts on making solomon ultra-fast and productive. By taking full advantage of today's browser technologies, we've made sure that solomon keeps you productive by focusing on performance, ease of use and collaboration.
Our focus in version 1.0 was productivity and response time in these four main areas:
Search
We've made search super fast, so you can find your contacts quickly and effortlessly. As well as allowing you to search for your contacts by name, solomon will also allow you to search with more complex search patterns much like a lot of today's web based search engines.
Contact Management
Our main focus in this initial release has been about allowing you to manage your contacts in solomon with as little effort as possible. solomon allows you to import your contacts from industry standard Outlook CSV files and exports to both vCard and Outlook CSV. The goal here was to provide a unified address book that you can use from anywhere.
Tasks and Notes
When working with a contact in solomon, you can immediately get an overview of all of the information for that contact as well as the tasks and notes associated with them. Adding notes and tasks is a snap using a single screen interface that behaves more like a desktop application than a web app.
Mobility
We love our smart phones, and one of our goals from the outset was to make solomon truly mobile. Building on top of the solomon API, we've built an iPhone application which will allow you to take your contacts with you anywhere. The iPhone app is currently in review by Apple and should be on the App Store within days. Our native iPhone application allows you to take advantage of many of the features of the phone like calling your contact directly, sending them an email or finding their location on Google Maps. With the iPhone app, you can also keep track of the tasks you have and add notes while your'e on the move.
Where is solomon going?
We've been using solomon internally for about 2 months now and we are really happy with the experience but thats not to say we haven't got bigger plans. Far from it! Our roadmap is bursting at the seams with features we think are really going to improve solomon and we really think your'e going to like them too.
We aren't going to commit to any one feature or specific milestones at the moment until we've given our customers a chance to have their say about what they would like to see in the next version of solomon but to give you a taste of what's to come, here's a few of the features we're really excited about getting out in a coming iterations of solomon:
Track Cases, Leads and Deals We will be introducing more Sales Force Automation (SFA) functionality in 1.1 and 1.2, which will enable you to track leads and deals you make, keep on top of relationships using cases, and track new business.
Mobile apps We are working on concepts for native apps for BlackBerry and Android versions of our mobile app. We are absolutely committed to supporting multiple mobile platforms and these apps are high on our list.
Outlook Plug-in We know that a vast majority of small businesses use Outlook as their preferred e-mail client and we have a very exciting Outlook plug-in planned that will allow you to tie your e-mail and solomon data together.
E-mail Integration We will be working on advanced e-mail integration, allowing you to write and forward e-mails directly into solomon.
3rd Party Integration A wider integration of your contact data with other web and desktop applications like Google Contacts and real time 2-way sync capabilities. Whether you want to view contact information in Gmail or access your tasks in Google Calendar, our planned OpenSocial integration will support this. We will also be supporting import and export from 3rd party systems and popular file formats.
Its been about a month now since we released version 1.0 of solomon our small business CRM & contact management software and we've been working harder than ever to get some of the features in that you asked for and we promised.
From 1.1 onwards we are giving you the ability to track your deals. With deals, you and your team can effortlessly track those lucrative deals you've been pitching for. As always we've focused on productivity keeping the user interface tightly focused on your contacts, how you work with them and the information you track against them.
With deals comes better integration with your notes and tasks. Tasks can be created, associated and tracked right there within your deals. Notes too.. ..In fact you can now associate any number of contacts, companies and users with a deal and coordinate your efforts to securing that big contract.
We've also added webCal support Thats right! Now all of your tasks seamlessly integrate with your calendar via the webCal format.
Finally we've had our resident design guru making some awesome design tweaks here and there to generally make the user interface look and feel that little bit slicker and for you techies, we've had our technical boffins, improving on the underlying REST API meaning you have more control over how you get to and work with your solomon data.
We've still got a few more features that we're aching to get in before we make the 1.1 release official but rest assured we'll be working even harder for another week or so to get this update out to you. In the meantime why not tell us what you think about what we're working on or tell us what you'd like to see in up and coming versions of solomon?
We are pretty excited about this so I cannot wait any longer to announce that after a lot of whiteboard work, arguments and development, solomon 1.1 is finally here.
What's notable in this version of solomon?
Deals and Sales Management
solomon 1.1 introduces one of our most requested features and something we had in planning for a long time, Deals. Deals allows you to manage your your sales process and opportunities by tracking the progress of all your leads. They give you clear visibility into your sales pipeline and are a great way to organise your sales effort centered around a "project" approach.
Have a look at our earlier earlier sneak peek for more details on interesting features in 1.1.
Other than this major feature, 1.1 includes 84 other bug fixes, improvements and features that were requested by our customers.
We launched our hosted bug tracking service 5 months ago hoping to give customers an on-demand choice for our most popular product. We did not anticipate the great positive response to this from Enterprise customers and 5 months later, we will be counting multi-national organisations like AXA and Starbucks within our customers.
Since then, we have successfully launched solomon, our web-based CRM tool to generally positive reception, and we are working hard to implement features our community has requested. However, as with fixx, the single most requested feature is to have a hosted, on-demand version of solomon.
With this in view, we are excited to announce hosted plans for solomon.
Hosted solomon is a great and flexible way to get started with your own web-based CRM without having to set-up your own server and configure it. Despite how painless and easy it is to run your own instance of solomon, we know that many organisations love the ease of having someone else manage their software using a software as a service (SaaS) model. It is also a great way for organisations without IT staff to get started with solomon.
Unlike traditional on-demand/SaaS models, we have gone all out to give you the power of having your own dedicated hosted version of solomon that you have absolute control over. This means, you control when your software is upgraded and which features you want to turn on. We handle all the boring work like configuration, back-ups and upgrades.
solomon Hosted comes with absolutely no restrictions on functionality. You get every feature of the installable version, including unlimited contacts and deals. Which other hosted CRM tool offers that?
Starter plans
Although fixx has seen great adoption in the Enterprise, we heard feedback from a lot of our smaller customers stating the existing plans we offered were geared towards larger businesses and there was little choice for small businesses/start-ups.
We are changing that from today by announcing Starter plans for both fixx and solomon, which means you can get all the on-demand goodness and benefits for the a low starting price of $49 per month.
We have more exciting roadmap features and plans to announce in the coming few weeks but we once again welcome feedback from our passionate community of users.
