Archive for August, 2006

New way to look at tBits

Posted on August 21, 2006. Filed under: Blogroll, geeks, personal, software, technical, Uncategorized, workflow management |

While we are busy preparing for next release, one customer called us for discussion.

Here is the transcript of our discussion:

Customer: We can see that your product is quite generic. What was the idea when you started designing it?

tBits Team: We started with a simple issue tracking system. Then people wanted it for bug tracking, ticketing, CRM and other workflow. So we had to rewrite it to make it generic. The idea behind it is to Keep the whole organization on same page.

C: Can it be used for workflow management?
t: Like what?

C: I want people to send mails to hr@xyz and it should be recieved by a person A who will route to concern department deciding upon the type of request.
t: Simple.

First define a department called HR and then define categories in it.
Define a rule like this:

“If it is first append, make person ‘A’ as assignee.”

Now, the mail will go to person ‘A’ who will then change the category depending on type of request.

C: Great! Do you provide an editor for editing these workflow rules?
t: No. Not at ths moment but will be there in future releases.
C: Not a problem.

C: Can I used it for the resume management? I can see that it has an efficient search which even searches within attachments.
t: Please elaborate on process details.

C: For example, a person will send resume which we will categorize. Then as an when requirement comes, we will make updates on resumes. We will need a powerful search.
t: Got the picture. Now I can say it can be efficiently used for resume management.

C: The search will not be slow?
t: No. We keep on indexing documents and request details that makes it faster. We use powerful search engine called Lucene for indexing.
C: How about 70,000 resume. Do you have any matrix?
t: I dont think that would be a problem but we will you give you matrix.

We are preparing a matrixdetailing the correlation between the number of request/appends/files/file sizes and time taken to search.

How was it started?

Posted on August 5, 2006. Filed under: Blogroll, geeks, personal, software, technical, Uncategorized, workflow management |

A year ago my friend who just joined a printing firm as a COO (Chief Operating Officer) asked me for a calender. He said, “I am unable to manage because the things are in chaos. No one knows who is doing what. I need something with which I can find out who is/will be/was doing what.”

Ah! you dont need a calender, you need a workflow management solution similar to what we have for bug tracking.

I started my research and realized most of the tools that exist in the market are either too naive or if they are mature, they are for software industry.

We tried our hands on various products like Bugjilla, Jira, scarab…list goes on.

Here are the needs that they all failed to achieve:

1. A simple and sweet user interface.

The interfaces should be sweet, simple and yet cater to advanced needs. Google is the superb example. There should not be too many things on my first screen. The asthetics should be taken seriously.

2. Flexibility to configure them for other kinds of industries.

The product should not be specific to one particular group. In an organization there are all types of departments like HR, Accounts, Facilities, Systems, QA, Developement. They all should be using a single system. Why there isnt a single system for all? Not because people dont want it a single system but because it is quite dificult to make such a system.

Every department has different set of roles. For example, In HR the role are Manager, Senior Manager, Super senior manager blah blah while in IT Department we have only two roles Developer and Boss.

Every department has a different workflow.

How do you cater such needs? It was really a tough part. And believe me the solution was simple.

3. Complete integration with email system

“I dont want to open a browser and type a url and then find where to to log a request. I just want to send a mail and reply to peoples request. I dont want to listen any excuses.”

— This is what one of my clients said.

4. Searching inside attachments.

Most of the people type the things in Microsoft Word and attach it. Some even put the excel file or pdf into the system. System has to support searching inside these. Trust me this is very importent for a non-technical person.

5. Is it programmer friendly?

Being user friendly is not enough. It should provide API using which not only people but computer too can talk to system.

After giving it a thought, I realized I can make a better system and I jumped into it.

Today I stand with a luxury of talk about its beauty.