Leading The Evolution

The Web Is The New Desktop Over the past couple of years, it’s become commonplace to leave a browser and tabbed sites/apps running all day. As SaaS (Software as a Service) continues gaining acceptance, there will be a gradual shift in usage patterns until, perhaps a couple of years out, we all discover we’re spending more time working from the browser than installed apps running off a local hard drive. For Solve360 users, this shift has already begun: with reliable, abundant bandwidth available at low cost, faith that solid security models are in place, and the knowledge that their data is safer on our network drives than their LAN or local disk, they can work all day long in Solve360.

Solve360 erases the lingering interface artifacts of the last generation of Web apps, making the usage experience virtually indistinguishable from a best-of-breed installed application. We’ve accomplished this by AJAX-enabling the entire front end of the application and optimizing the back end databases and servers to dramatically increase overall speed and usability; functionally, it means instantaneous response to user inputs with no wait time for pages to refresh or data to be served up across the network.

Web Apps Must Be Able To Interact With Other Web Apps Solve360 is distinguished from other team productivity solutions in the way it shares data between functional areas of the application, effectively bringing together multiple tools within a single interface. When properly designed, and constructed in line with a set of robust standards, the model can extend to bring other Web functions and services under the Solve360 umbrella. For example, publishing a RSS feed of tasks to be done to Outlook users, embedding Google Docs / Maps into a plan, and adding contact and task entry forms to your website so information is posted directly your Solve360 database. While there's really no limit to the kinds of additional services that can be brought in the Solve360 environment, we'll be moving carefully to ensure that any service we offer enhances the value of our solution to our customers.

Your Apps Should Do Things Your Way Many users of the original version of Solve360 relied heavily on one or two areas of the application and worked with many of the same features in the same way day after day. Until recently, the nature of the Web forced us to force you to log into a Web service and navigate through multiple menus before you could tuck into the tasks you needed to complete. The next morning (or at home that night) you had to log back in again, make the same menu selections, etc. In Solve360, when you log in and set up the application to work the way you like it, we'll remember your preferences. The next time you log in, Solve360 will look exactly the way you left it, and you can pick up right where you left off in your previous session. We'll also allow you to have the multiple windows you use most often to be on your desktop simultaneously, and a change in one window that affects data in another window will be instantaneously updated. The above are just a couple of representative examples of how we're turning over control of the application interface to our users. The old model of forcing ever more complex nested functionality into never-ending menus, toolbars and icons, was born and will die with desktop applications. Going forward, well-written Web apps will employ a variety of techniques to ease the burden of use placed on customers. The idea of an "intuitive interface" will mean it makes sense to you, because you're able to set up your workspace to function your way. All the tools and functionality you use only occasionally (or perhaps never) are still available but no longer cluttering up your desktop or getting in the way of getting work done.

In engineering Solve360 to embrace the above three tenets, we've taken an evolutionary approach that builds on the features and platform we've have honed over the last two development cycles of our previous product. We're confident, and our users have confirmed, that we've got a lot of the functionality and tools right. Where Solve360 crosses over into revolutionary territory is how we're leaving behind the framework and interface constraints of the current Web that force users into one-dimensional, linear, hierarchical applications in favor of a mutli-layered, openly configurable environment.

Enough about us. How are you?