Sabisu release 1240

Just a quick note for this release; it's something of an interim release while we work on new things.

Our current focus is security, usability and platform reliability.

Release 1240 adds:

- A new feature which allows a community admin to make amendments to the community profile.

- Various bug fixes

Sabisu gets chat, in-line notifications, load on-demand

Sabisu continues to get better; we've added some new features in the last couple of weeks.

1. Notifications
   Email might be the de facto notification method for most platforms on the internet and you can see why; it's a way to reach outside the platform and maintain contact. We'll keep on using it because we understand (most) people don't live in the platform 24/7.
   
   However, our customers expect a real-time experience; if the data being streamed to the cloud is real-time it would be strange for all elements of the platform not to be so. Therefore new notifications are not only emailed, they're flashed up at the bottom right of the screen with a quick link to take the user directly to the point of action in the platform.
   
   At the moment, it's community and widget related actions that are notified to the user. However we'll look at other events that should generate a notification; please feel free to suggest.
   
   
2. On-Demand Load
   Everyone on the development team is a heavy user; we have lots of workspace pages, each with lots of data based widgets. Until now, the platform would prioritise loading the current workspace, then would load background pages.
   
   Now the platform will load each workspace page as it is requested by the user. This makes the platform much faster. It also makes it impossible for a badly designed widget to cause a browser problem until that workspace page is requested.
   
   
3. Chat
   Clearly a collaboration platform needs some sort of real-time chat facility. Often it's the quickest way to get things done and users like multi-tasking many chat streams.
   
   We understand there are other chat facilities out there; both standalone and platform based. However we felt given our corporate focus we couldn't be reliant on another vendor; not only must we ensure reliability, we plan to develop chat in ways that might be denied to us had we chosen another route.
   
   

Books that inspired Team Sabisu in 2010

What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis: Readable and provoking analysis of Google's approach. A starting point from which to explore internet platforms, practices and models.

Free, Chris Anderson: Makes sense of the new default price in the digital world; zero. Useful analysis and guidance as to what makes a freemium business model work.


The Longer Long Tail, Chris Anderson: Looks at the power of digital retailing as it applies to inventory; how a mass of niches can be as profitable as sticking to a few big sellers.


Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger: Another easy business/culture read. Develops concepts well, clearly argued and implications are well examined.


Cluetrain Manifesto, Rick Levine et al: Essential reading for anyone involved with web 2.0; a manifesto for changing the world.


Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky: As told through anecdote and example, interesting ideas on rapid forming communities and how faster is different.


The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell: Classic from the NYU school of new thinking (cf Shirky). Makes a good attempt to do some impossible analysis on the nature of virality.


Creative Disruption, Simon Waldman: Interesting look at how established businesses react to disruptions great for both for those seeking to disrupt and those on the receiving end of disruption.

What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly: Meticulously researched work proposing that technology extends the natural process of evolution.

Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur: a fantastic handbook for visualising new and disruptive business models

Retrospective: One Year On, First Customers, What Next

If it's possible to put a precise date on an idea, then Sabisu was conceived a year ago on 22nd February, 2010, at a TIF forum event about cloud computing. Euan Semple (twitter: @euan) gave a keynote that made perfect sense. 


Although we had a decent manufacturing focused forms tool in production at the time we felt it was too limited; our customers were facing problems that a forms tool - however we imbued it with disruptive qualities - wouldn't fix. Particularly regarding MES layer (InfoPlus 21, PHD) collaboration, or the overheads in getting ERP data.


It wasn't just that we weren't the best in our chosen field, we weren't even in the right field.


So this time last year the seed was sown. Lots of thinking and book reading later, we starting cutting code in June 2010, aiming to build a platform that would ensure manufacturing management teams could make faster, better decisions without depending on IT experts to get data to the right people; that would put control of the data in the hands of the decision makers.


A couple of weeks ago we started to softly roll it out at our first customers. You'll be seeing the case studies soon and they're pretty compelling stuff - we're pretty enthusiastic as you can imagine, but even we're surprised how well users are taking to it.

Where next?

Well, like all start-ups we're convinced we have a world-changing horizontal application. However, our focus for now must be on building Sabisu into a true portal for collaborative decision making and our next job is to evolve the main site at http://www.sabisu.co to reflect that.

Beta 1.0.2 available

We're delighted to say that a new beta version is available.

Changes as follows:

• Theming has been introduced so communities can customise the appearance of the platform and corporates can carry some of their corporate branding through to the platform. We've kept it pretty limited for now.
• Welcome pages have been updated, not least to include a link to our demo company.
• When registering with Flow as a service user, you are now only asked to provide your company name. This is in preparation for a better situated form to get the relevant company data from a customer at a later point.
• All the emails sent from the platform have been rewritten so as to be clearer.
• Fixed a bug in the Community application which caused users to be added to multiple communities.
• Fixed a bug in the Community application which caused a user to not be joined to the top most community when joining a sub community
• Sign out button now signs you out properly and completely.

We’ve also reworked the http://www.flowtools.co.uk site so as to reflect the benefits of the platform more consistently.

A lot of time has been spent over the last week or so on our on-premise server but this will start to reflect on the cloud solution too. More to come soon.

Beta 1.0.1 released

We'll be moving to using build numbers rather than version numbers shortly. However, here are the notes for today's release: 

- Widgets are now correctly brought to the foreground when you click anywhere on or within the widget (only works in IE). On other browsers the user still has to select the widget title area to bring the widget to the foreground.

- New feature on the widget side menu tab which allows a user to view related widgets that are not currently in use on the page.

- Where a sub-tab function is dependent on a certain widget being present, that widget can no longer be removed by the user e.g. when editing a Form, the Form Editor can no longer be removed from a sub tab but all other widgets can still be removed. Otherwise, widget adding and removing is unchanged.

- Widgets now have a maximise option which maximises the widget as to the size of the viewable workspace. Minimising the widget will return the widget to its original size and position. (In IE the widget sidebar menu tab does not show when the widget is maximised).

- Fixed a bug that caused the sidebar content to not expand to the screen height in Chrome.

- Changed the Flow Charts to make them more efficient.

- Changed the sidebar content to get its content on demand rather than when the platform is first loaded

Beta 1 available

Today the first beta version was released at http://www.flowtools.co.uk.

Significant changes have been made to improve stability, hence we feel it meets our quality criteria for beta release. We expect to be in beta for some time now whilst we work on giving you what you need to exploit the service delivery capabilities of the platform in the simplest way possible.

The more visible changes made this time are:

• Sidebar updated to reflect the grouping of widgets into applications.
• New users to the platform will get some helpful introductory pages to get them started.
• All options in the top bar have been shifted into a drop down (we'll need the space later).

You'll notice that we've not sorted the SSL cert out yet. That's because we're considering a rebrand and a new URL. More on that soon.