Online Database, CRM and PaaS – The LongJump Blog

Want to access your LongJump account through a native app on your iPhone/iPad or Android smartphone or tablet? Download the free apps from the iTunes App Store or the Android Market! There’s nothing to configure or administer. Just log in with your current user name and password.

These apps give you secure access to your LongJump data while you’re on the go including the ability to actuate workflow, track your tasks, or use the Relay social interface. Tell us what you think by writing a short review or providing a star rating. Click on one of the badges below to download the free app.

Technorati Tags: android, app store, ios, itunes, mobile computing, mobile crm, mobile paas

One deeply set feature in LongJump is the ability to find out what the value of a previous field was. It’s immensely helpful, however, when you’re building data policies to be notified of changes to records, but only specific changes. To accomplish this, you’d use the PRIORVALUE() boolean function in LongJump’s formula expression engine.

To demonstrate, I’ll actually use a real world example: ours.

When users sign up for a free trial on LongJump, a record is added in the backend, and we store the information about them as if they were a paying customer account. That record also has a TRUE/FALSE field called trial_account. Our payment system automatically flips that switch from TRUE to FALSE, once that customer converts (signs up for a paid account).

Because I’m a nosy marketing person, I wanted to know the exact moment that happens. It’s informative, but it also gives me a psychological lift of “Hey, we have a new paying customer!”

Now, I could have written a simple policy that said anytime that record is updated and the trial_account field is FALSE, send me an email. In fact, I tried that. But then anytime that record would be updated for any reason, that email would go out, and I was deluged with unusable notifications.

That’s where the PRIORVALUE function comes in. Here’s what it looks like. (Click on the screenshot if you want the full size view)

This is an action-based policy that runs whenever the record is updated and it compares the PRIORVALUE of trial_account to the current value using the formula-based criteria. The key is to build the expression to check for both the prior and current value.

(PRIORVALUE(trial_account) = TRUE) && (trial_account = FALSE)

When that change happens on a record, the policy executes a simple email notification action to me that includes the name of the company that converted and the number of users. I could also send this to multiple team members.

Of course, this basic logic could be used for a host of process situations and results. Let’s say you have an employee candidate that goes from prospective to hired. Or let’s say as part of this policy, I also want to update another field in the record. Or I want to start following that record in Relay. Or, through the beauty of LongJump’s data policies, you could string up multiple actions to take place. You can do a lot of process automation, simply by recognizing your historical values. PRIORVALUE can even be the basis for a view or report.

Have other examples of how you might use PRIORVALUE()? Submit a comment below as I’m sure we’d love to know about them.

For more information on Data Policies, go here. And for more on our Formula Expressions, go here.

Technorati Tags: change management, change notification, change tracking, formula

The advent of social (Relay) and mobile (Javelin) interfaces to LongJump’s PaaS and Online Database solutions has gotten some good write-ups by members of the technology journalists. Here’s a sample of who’s covered the release.

• David Carr at InformationWeek talked about how “customers will be able to add social media features to their applications, and also make those applications available to mobile users”
• David Strom at ReadWriteWeb noted “Relay has the look and feel of a Facebook or Twitter news feed that is increasingly being used for a variety of social enterprise applications to show real-time visibility and activities”
• Jason Campbell over at CMSWire had the most provocative point in his analysis comparing LongJump to Salesforce.com
• Andrew Hickey at CRN indicated that resellers, VARs, ISVs and MSPs view is that “the integrated cloud platform gives developers and solution providers the ability to embrace converged cloud, social and mobile applications”
• Kristen Nicole at the SiliconAngle blog definitely made the connection about how important it is to be “creating simplified processes for businesses to utilize their existing data”
• Brittany Farb, who covers technology for DestinationCRM, stated “LongJump is the first platform-as-a-service provider to offer a social and mobile integrated platform, enabling business to take advantage of cloud, social networking, and mobile technologies”
• Mike Vizard, covering IT trends at ITBusinessEdge, notes how Relay and Javelin can solve a key issue affecting today’s small and medium sized enterprises: “One of the problems the average company today has with developing anything that looks like a custom application is all the complexity involved.”

The original release is available here.

**UPDATED**

• I left off a great in-depth interview by Martin Tantow at CloudTimes with Pankaj where they go into LongJump as a company, as a service, and more. Truly a unique piece.

Technorati Tags: andrew hickey, brittany farb, cmswire, crn, david carr, david strom, destinationCRM, informationweek, itbusinessedge, jason campbell, javelin, kristen nicole, mike vizard, mobile computing, online database, readwriteweb, relay, siliconangle, social computing

LongJump’s web form feature is an easy, powerful way to let anyone add records to your database. Using a form embedded on a page in your website, visitors or customers can fill in the form and have it create a record in a specific object. It’s so easy, you just have to embed a single line of code into your page and people from outside your company can provide information.

Web forms are ideal for streamlining lead capture and customer inquiries, newsletter subscriptions, request for quotes, simple surveys, more.

Now we give you even more control with the ability to include file attachments and image fields. Maybe you’re a talent agency and are collecting headshots from prospective actors. Maybe you want your customers to submit their own photos of them using your product. Maybe you’re building a database of cats asking to eat cheeseburgers. Using web forms, you can get that information into your LongJump database in a snap.

And once that record is in the system, you can automatically assign it to other people, run data policies or simply analyze it with reports.

Technorati Tags: database form, online form, web form

We’re announcing our new release of LongJump, the online database and PaaS that helps your business compete! See the complete press release here!

The biggest addition? LongJump Javelin. Need access to LongJump apps while you’re at a customer site, in line at the airport, or at your kid’s little league game? As part of Version 8.1, you’ll be introduced to LongJump Javelin – where you can take your business with you on your iPhone, iPad, or Android phones and tablets.

LongJump Javelin is accessible anywhere you have a network connection. With Javelin, you’ll be able to:

• Add, edit, and delete records
• Add and manage your tasks
• Monitor changes of your team’s status using Relay and make comments
• Take action on workflow items

Watch this short YouTube video of our CEO Pankaj takes a spreadsheet, turns it into a LongJump app, then accesses it from his iPhone. To get you excited about Javelin, we are letting all customers use it free this summer until September 30, 2011. After that, Javelin access will be available at $4 per user per month for every user on your account.

You can access Javelin from m.longjump.com and downloadable native apps will be available soon.

Technorati Tags: mobile computing, mobile database, online database, PaaS, social computing

Have questions about LongJump, we’ve also rolled out LongJump Answers. This new feature lets you ask the LongJump user community questions about how to do something, tips, or tricks. Our App Geniuses will also be monitoring Answers to provide complete assistance.

You can easily ask questions from the new Community sidebar. Clicking on other questions will take you to the Answers site where you can read questions and answers from other users. You can also mark answers as helpful or follow questions you’re interested in.

Our goal is to make this a premier resource for you to learn, share, and thrive by making LongJump an integral part of your business.

TRIVIA: This service was built using the LongJump Dynamic Sites feature. If you want to learn how to build a similar community for your business, contact us.

Technorati Tags: answers, dynamic sites, user community, user forum

David Strom over at ReadWriteWeb has a great primer on the range of online database tools on the web. Some of the benefits include:

The process is very straightforward: you either copy and paste data or take your spreadsheet and upload it to the service, after creating accounts for you and your collaborators. Then you can make changes via your Web browser, no other software is required. Some of the services allow for more bells and whistles. Setup time is minimal; your data is properly protected by the service and safe from harm. And you don’t need to learn any Web/database programming skills either.

Right now, many organizations are looking to move away from spreadsheets for record management and process tracking, so it’s a good time to start finding a better way to collaborate around information. After all, there are risks abound with emailing data back and forth or relying on spreadsheets with unknown data quality.

This analysis was based on what David and RWW examined in mid June 2011. He encourages companies to do spend some of time checking out particular features that are deal-makers or breakers. You can do so with LongJump’s free trial program for 14-days. Of course, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact our App Geniuses for help. Moving from a spreadsheet to a database can be tricky when you start modeling your data in a more optimized way.

Technorati Tags: excel, online database, quickbase, spreadsheet, trackvia

LongJump was awarded it’s 2nd AlwaysOn OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies award in a row. LongJump was featured in the Cloud Applications Platform category for its online database and platform-as-a-service (paas) solutions along with nine other vendors. According to the site:

Inclusion in the OnDemand 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. LongJump was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

The OnDemand 100 winners were selected from among hundreds of other technology companies nominated by investors, bankers, journalists, and industry insiders.  The AlwaysOn editorial team conducted a rigorous three-month selection process to finalize the 2011 list.

Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn, also added:

As the digital information created by businesses continues to explode at astronomical rates, the need to store, manage, socialize, and share this information is becoming extremely challenging. By providing innovative technologies that help enterprises better compete in this new era of information complexity and move their data out into the cloud, the OnDemand 100 represent some of the highest-growth opportunities in the private company marketplace.

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya responded:

We are proud for our team’s inclusion in this year’s Top 100. To be named with such great game-changers is an honor and shows that private small businesses are still the great innovators today.

Technorati Tags: alwayson, cloud computing, saas, software-as-a-service

Roy Fielding’s REST-style architecture is brilliantly simple and adaptable, but it can be difficult finding comprehensive information on how to apply its concepts or get help from the development community. There are many great resources for developers or even those with some basic web development skills to learn and apply REST APIs to their front-end web projects. Here are just a few really great places to go for information beyond the REST page on Wikipedia.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: architectural style, representational state transfer, rest

You may argue the difference between SaaS and the Cloud — about how one is a technology and the other is market-ese — but one factor you cannot argue about anymore is how multitenancy must be the basis for SaaS business software going forward. In September, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, at their conference Oracle OpenWorld, had the IT world a-buzz about how multitenancy is not secure.

Says Ellison:

“Multitenancy is a horrible idea. What it means is, everyone’s data is commingled, everyone’s customer list is in a single database. That’s a horrible security model. In the 21st century, the way we support multiple customers is called ‘virtualization.’”

Certainly Ellison is entitled to his belief (or his right to say it), but let’s face it: the more copies of Oracle you have running (virtual or otherwise), the better it is for Oracle.

Software companies should consider stackware a “horrible SaaS business model” — especially in that it negates the business, operational, and economic value of multitenancy: everything from streamlining deployment operations, improving core development, maximizing common resources, and only repeating what you need, not the entire frigging architecture.

You might even argue that having multiple databases could be considered even less secure because now you’ve created many entry points into your systems and no way of knowing when you need to lock down the entire platform. One more thing: data in a multitenant environment is not “commingled.” Tenant walls, if built properly, still require you to have access rights to see data — access rights that, as just mentioned, can be shut down from a central point. No one freaks out in an apartment building about their neighbors commingling their groceries or sheets.

At Softletter’s SaaS University last week, the topic of multitenancy was a lot more constructive. Several sessions touched on it from establishing a basic understanding of how it works to what is really on the minds of SaaS businesses. Mike Ormerod from Progress Software had an excellent overview and it refutes Ellison’s point, identifying several types of multitenancy in which you can have multiple apps, multiple databases, even multiple architectures. Likewise, our own platform refutes Ellison’s point about a single database as you can build essentially instances between infrastructures that act like tenants, and deploy across instantiations.

That’s not to say you absolutely need multitenancy. If you’re building B2C type solutions or specific point solutions, not having MT is not a deal breaker. But for enterprise class solutions where a lot of complexity happens at the configuration level and where your clients are demanding manageable customization, not having multitenancy can increase your operating and licensing costs dramatically.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, larry ellison, multitenancy, oracle, saas, saas university, softletter