Release Notes for Revision 1515

Revision 1515 went live on 13th May, with the following improvements including:

• Improved system ajax architecture
• Minor bug fixes including
• Widget recommendations now show in the sidebar
• Inviting multiple users to a community now invites all entered users
• Other minor bug fixes
• Overhaul of system security
• Introduced session based logins

Revision 1331 now live, improving security & CSS

We pushed revision 1331 to Sabisu.co today - lots of changes, even if most of them were 'below the water line'.

• Public cloud users are now invited to create a community page, publish it and invite users in a single seamless workflow.
• On-premise users can now set themselves up for access outside the corporate network through a new option on their User Profile (user menu, top right).
• There's a 'Hints' mode under the user menu (top right).
• Platform reskin, now with our new branding and colour scheme.
• CSS themes for communities have been expanded platform wide, now much more control over what you can change to add your own unique style.
• Sabisu Community Forums are now available as a widget; look under the "Sabisu" application in the side bar to add it to your page.
• The on-premise security model has been improved, as has the log-in security for cloud users.
• Various widget improvements have been made, including improvements to the way supply chain objects are drawn on maps.
• Chat has been made more efficient, shifting more activity server side.
• Minor CSS fixes have been made to the chat window.
• Improvements to widget editor - usability, security.
• The system will ensure that users will always have at least one page on their workspace.

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.