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Lane Nelson — Tue, 28 May 2013 16:10:08 GMT

[Highlights of CEO Keynote at HarrisData's 1013 User Conference.] Step away from the vendor hype wars over cloud computing and look at what the cloud means to users. Anything a user wants to do will be reached by a bookmark, ... Continue reading →

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Winner of 2013 SoftwareCEO Member Survey Gift Card Contest

Community Headlines — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:47:27 GMT

First of all, we want to thank everyone who participated in the 2013 SoftwareCEO Amazon.com $100 Gift Card Giveaway promotion. Your responses will be used to help continue to improve the community for all of you! Now, to announce the winner of the promotion: Jacob B, of Ephyra! Congratulations to Jacob--and make sure to keep an eye on the community for future promotions and offers. Cheers, Pete Community Admin

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The Technical Support Project: How to Create a Winning Team, Part 2

Curt Finch — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:28:33 GMT

This is part two of a three-part article series. You can see part one here. Staffing is the most critical part of creating a winning technical support team. If you make mistakes with the steps discussed in my first article but excel at hiring and managing your people, you will succeed in the end. If, however, you do well with the mechanics and make mistakes with staffing, you will certainly fail. Your Staff Today Even if your current staff is doing a good job, you will still have to bring new people in to help you rise from the ashes. I know you don’t want to fire the people you have today—that can be unpleasant—so give it some time and the problem will probably resolve itself for you. Your current staff will naturally turn over when they get tired of listening to complaining and blaming. Your task will then be to hire better than you have in the past. The Hiring Process Each employee comes with their own set of technical skills, personality quirks and attitudes, so give plenty of thought to what your hiring criteria will be before you even begin. The easiest way to approach this is to...

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Too Big to Succeed

Lane Nelson — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:10:10 GMT

Cyprus is in the news as the world wrestles with insolvent banks in that country. The challenge is that a failure of the Cypriot banks would lead to wider failures across the world. The underlying idea is that banks can ... Continue reading →

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Top 10 Pitfalls of Software Globalization And How to Avoid Them

Atul Tulshibagwale — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:35:04 GMT

Many enterprise applications do not provide all the languages that businesses require to support employees, partners and customers. Depending on the language and software application, localization can present formidable hurdles for software vendors. Here are the 10 biggest pitfalls associated with software application localization projects and how to deal with them. 1. Programming Hygiene Even companies with mature development teams and top-tier technical talent have difficulty delivering truly internationalized code. The most common stumbling block is not enforcing pre-established development principles (such as externalizing text strings, providing database columns for multilingual data storage, etc.) due to product release deadlines, lack of sufficient QA resources or both. This often leads to programming hygiene deterioration and developers checking in code that is not internationalized. 2. Legacy Code It’s rare for a software development team to build a new product from scratch. Even when completely new functionality is developed, companies often rely on legacy code to get a substantial leg up in terms of time-to-market. Very often this legacy code is not internationalized and prevents the entire product from supporting multiple languages 3. Data Storage Even when code is internationalized, some software products do not configure the data repository so that it can...

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The Technical Support Project: How to Create a Winning Team, Part 1

Curt Finch — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:25:59 GMT

You might compare technical support to a team of jugglers. It requires a lot of communication and teamwork to be able to handle flying bowling balls, knives, flaming batons and pianos. For instance, you will need to know when a baton or knife is heading your way, or who will be able to catch the piano. There are three big processes to put in place in order to facilitate the communication required to do this juggling. Decide on 3-5 levels of case severity and decide on service requirements for each (how quickly you intend to respond and fix). If you already have priorities defined in your maintenance contracts, try to use them. Discuss the plan with your team and make sure they understand that top priority cases must be addressed first, so someone must pay attention to incoming cases and prioritize them immediately. If you find that you don’t have the time to fix a problem so the customer never sees it, an alternative is to publish the solution in order to allow them to solve problems themselves. If you don’t have the time to provide all of the necessary technical details, you can write up a rough version and...

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Achieving Success In A Narrow Niche: How Bockyn Software's CEO Built a Business on Parks & Rec

Adam Stone — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:47:37 GMT

Mike Bocker spends his professional time on the ball field, at least metaphorically. As CEO of Bockyn Software he serves a highly specialized niche: The parks and recreations departments of various municipalities. Founded in 2005, Bockyn employs eight people and competes in its industry with companies such as Vermont Systems and Active Network. Bockyn's web based solution handles a broad range of functions including program and activity management, memberships, reservations and rentals, scheduling, childcare management, point of sale, and online registration. We spoke with Bocker about playing in a narrow arena, asking questions such as: How do marketing, product development, revenues streams and other essentials work in the government-directed niche of parks-and-rec activities? Here's what he had to say. What brought you to this niche? I had a business previous to this in IT services doing web development projects and software projects, and I didn't like the project-by-project work. So, when I started a second business, I decided to do something around an interest of mine -- as well as something that had a residual revenue structure to it. I have been an athlete for a long time. I am on the boards of different youth organizations like lacrosse and...

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Implementation Risk

Lane Nelson — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:11:11 GMT

Another day, another ERP vendor sued over an implementation failure. The customer did not achieve success implementing core ERP software and naturally blamed the vendor for inadequate support. You would think that by now someone somewhere would understand what it ... Continue reading →

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