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 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

REST Primers, Tutorials and Examples

• How I Explained REST to My Wife – Ryan Tomako’s great plain-speak story of REST is the stuff of legends. Someone needs to turn it into an Xtranormal movie.
• Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures – The complete dissertation by Dr. Fielding published in 2000 for UC Irvine. Think of it as the opposite of explaining it to your wife
• Learn REST – A deep online training session by Dr. M. Elkstein that takes you into making REST calls from a variety of languages including Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. It also can be used to design wrappers around a variety of REST APIs in your language of choice.
• How to Build a REST app in .NET – MSDN offers information on using the Windows Communication Foundation to call REST APIs.

REST Development and Testing Tools

• RESTClient – A Mozilla Firefox extension that replicates calls made via REST and displays responses right from the browser.
• jQuery JSON-REST plugin – A plugin to jQuery that enables simplified calls through Javascript. Also of note is the reference for .ajax() calls.
• cURL – A binding for PHP to simplify making REST/HTTP calls.

REST References and Discussions

• This Week in REST – A weekly roundup of news about REST maintained by Ivan Zuzak. He includes blog posts on a variety of subjects.
• RESTwiki – A compendium of resources that are all about REST. This isn’t a very active reference, but it’s pretty comprehensive.
• Programmableweb API Directory – Lists APIs from a variety of services to help build Mashups by pulling in data from services like Facebook, Twitter, and GoogleMaps

*Bonus* LongJump Platform as a Service REST Resources

• REST API Reference – We have exposed almost all of our internal functionality with accessibility through our web service. It’s like having a complete backend enterprise environment accessible via REST calls.
• REST API Cheat Sheet – If you’re an old-hand at making REST calls, this quick reference gives you what you need fast.

Technorati Tags: architectural style, representational state transfer, rest

LongJump, a pioneer in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and private cloud business applications, announced today that leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC (www.idc.com) named LongJump as one of five companies in a report published October 4th, 2010.

“We view IDC’s analysis of the advancements in application development and deployment platforms as proof that as more enterprises become comfortable with public and private cloud computing, the process of creating applications will be the next critical strategy to drive innovation and productivity,” says Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump. “There are far too many software solutions that need to be built and trying to do it the traditional way is costly and high-maintenance.”

The complete press release is here on the company’s website.

Technorati Tags: application development, award, cloud computing, idc, Platform-as-a-Service

LongJump allows you to embed a form on your public site or blog to drive data into the backend with little or no programming. If you choose to use HTML coding, you can stylize the FORM objects however you like. Or if you just want a simple form, our javascript version provides all the necessary embellishments for data entry.

How Web Forms Work

When someone enters information on the form, a record is created in the LongJump backend. At that point, all the backend capabilities around workflows, data policies, permissions, etc. can all be applied to that record, automating a lot of the processes you normally would have to manually perform.

This video shows the basic web form workflow.

One web form we created was for our free PaaS Solutions Consulting page on our website. It actually generates a record in our Prospects object, which is routed to our business development team and we matched the forms look and feel to the website’s design. On the backend, we have several policies for notification and follow-up that coincide with records coming in from that form.

Are there examples of other web forms you’ve created on LongJump?

Technorati Tags: backend, cgi script, contact us, mailto, record management, web form, web to lead, work order, workflow

For enterprises and ISVs, it has become more important than ever to support a global workforce. In fact, according to AnythingResearch.com, the translation and interpretation services industry is a $2.7 billion market that has grown an average of 22 percent a year since 2004. The main thrust is the need for U.S. military and businesses expanding overseas as well as the healthcare industry.

Whether you need an application to deliver software solutions in Portuguese, French, or Klingon, chances are the challenge is not so much in software development or even the translation but in having a multi-tenant SaaS platform that can support translation of enterprise-class, web-based applications. In fact, a PaaS architecture is ideal for such requirements.

With LongJump, each individual user can access the platform user interface in their own language, and language definitions are defined at the tenant level. Through the Translation Workbench, you can define new languages and replace all UI labels and alerts based on the selected language.

LongJump’s Bulk Translation and Localization Process

If you’re creating an entire tenant from scratch and want to include support for multiple languages, LongJump provides a fast way to perform bulk translation.

1. LongJump exports all existing UI labels to a CSV file
2. The Enterprise or ISV can then translate the entire contents of the file themselves or take it to a translation firm for interpretation
3. With the new labels, you upload the file back in and choose a name for the language
4. That language then becomes available to the tenant and each individual user can choose it

When you need to update through the bulk process, the new entries will simply overwrite the existing ones. LongJump also provides support for plurals.

Incremental Translation Process

As changes occur to the platform, you might add a new object, process or field for example. Rather than performing a bulk translation process, you can dive into the Translation Workbench and choose the element and then the specific term. We’ve organized the application model into elements for easier reference.

Developer Controls for Translation

One last aspect to LongJump’s Translation Workbench capabilities is allowing the code developer to access the translated elements. The Ajax API, Java API and REST API all support the ability to retrieve the localized message labels. While coding still occurs in the native English, all the presentation results can be displayed based on the language you want.

Technorati Tags: application development, localization tools, PaaS, saas, software localization, software translation, software translation tools

We’ve introduced a new library of videos that cover the deep set of features within LongJump’s public and private cloud PaaS. Over time, this library will be extended and refined so that businesses, developers, partners and ISVs interested in LongJump’s SaaS application platform can quickly watch a short video on the features that matter to them most.

You can watch these videos from our website at http://www.longjump.com and by clicking on Video Tour on any of the web pages.

The library covers the platform’s major areas including:

• Application Design
• Development
• Reports
• Access Controls
• Productivity Features
• Personalization
• Release Management
• Distribution
• Maintenance

The videos are also available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/LongJumpVid.

Of course, no video can do what a live demo can, so you can also contact us for a complete walk-thru or sign-up for a free trial.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

Timesheet Manager is a web-based customizable timesheet/timecard management application. It features ready-to-use timesheets that can be related to employee data as well as other objects such as Accounts or Projects.

The app is constructed around three objects.

• The Timesheet object, used for recording weekly timecards for each employee
• The Daily Timecard object, which is the “Detail” object to the Timesheet “Master” object (you can read more about Master-Detail relationships in our wiki)
• The Employee Rate Table object, which is used for “looking up” an hourly rate to fill in some Timesheet values

Some enhancements to the Timesheet Manager go beyond just objects and fields including:

• Using a Formula to set the Default Value for Week Start as the nearest Sunday
• Using a Formula field to automatically determine Week End
• Using a Formula to set the Weekday based on the Daily Timecard Day
• Using Rollup Summary Fields to sum up hours recorded by Daily Timecards to the main Timesheet
• Using a Data Policy to execute Java Code that converts a Rollup Value to a Number Value
• An approval workflow to ensure management sign-off
• Reports for current hours/wages anticipated and approved wages
• Using a Post Selection JavaScript when a user completes an Employee lookup to the Rate Table to automatically retrieve the Hourly Rate

Of course, you can completely modify this app to suit your needs. We’d love to hear your experiences and suggestions on this app as well as any permutations that this app has inspired in your business.

You can Test Drive the Timesheet Manager app here, or install it into your account (Free!).

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, enterprise applications, formula, master-detail, rollup, timecard, timesheet, workflow

I don’t know a single programmer who likes wasted effort. In fact, there’s a beauty to what they do, much like a poet, when they are able to refine and compress layers of code into well-thought out simplicity and modularity. It is this very reason the LongJump platform was created.

So here are some ways that Platform-as-a-Service can make Programmers happy:Cut the Code

One of PaaS’s inherent benefits is about leveraging existing functionality across multiple applications all on one instance. That means specific object models and processes or custom code can be used across all apps running on the platform. You build things once, rather than try and invent the wheel with every project. That reduces coding requirements and maintenance. Programmers can then focus on unique projects and core applications, rather than common stuff, which leads us to…

Make Programming Fun

Programmers think programming is fun. That’s why they do it into the wee hours. There’s something about taking nothing and turning it into real processes that make life ultimately better. So, should they focus on stuff they did last time (for example, building another reporting component) or should they spend their energy on new challenges? Platform-as-a-Service frees programmers from such monotony and gives them more time to spend on other challenges.

Everything is Connected

PaaS puts a lot of focus on foundation building and as a result, when a programmer creates some model or process in PaaS, it has serious reuse potency. Programmers can leave their mark on a core piece of the pie that becomes the norm through all applications that come afterwords.

Empower Them

With PaaS, the status of the programmer is ultimately elevated. Why? Primarily because a lot of common lifting is being done at the IDE levels where business people are essentially mapping out their own data and processes, the programmer is called in when serious effort is required. Maybe it’s a JavaScript or a creation of a class element or a SOAP connector, but PaaS lets programmers go beyond the minutiae of daily business processes and solve the key technical problems.

Reduce Deployment Lag

Most PaaS instances are live. There’s a beauty to that in being able to build, test, and deploy in the same day rather than having to go through big deployment efforts. (You still can have a formal release process if your PaaS supports multiple instances). For a programmer, that means their work is happening in lock step at times with requests that are being made. Technology is no longer the gating item, and instead the overall business approach becomes what needs to get worked out.

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, manage programmers, PaaS

ChannelWeb has recognized LongJump as one of the 20 Coolest Cloud Companies, positioning it with the likes of Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. This comes on the heels of last week’s naming of LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya to their list of Top 25 Technology Thought Leaders. As indicated by ChannelWeb,

“LongJump is actively rounding up ISVs to brand and host their own SaaS offerings.”

The channel community is one area where cloud computing can truly be a “sky’s the limit” proposition. With all that experience in IT and application services, VARs, MSPs, and solution providers can realize significant potential creating vertical applications that meet the needs of businesses across the globe.

It is likely why ChannelWeb is actively discussing cloud computing:

“Cloud computing platforms facilitate and ease the deployment of applications into the cloud, limiting the cost and complexity by cutting the need to buy and manage hardware and software. As cloud computing continues to gather steam and more VARs and their clients are looking to design, develop, test, deploy and host apps in the cloud, a robust, flexible platform has become a must-have.”

Technorati Tags: channelweb, cloud computing, crn, isv, msp, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, var

ChannelWeb has named our CEO Pankaj Malviya one of the top 25 Technology Thought Leaders. Specifically, editors were most impressed that:

“Malviya is breaking new ground in the cloud computing market with LongJump, an innovative software company with an end-to-end cloud platform. The LongJump offering is winning raves from solution providers for its flexibility and firepower. It’s also garnered a number of awards including Everything Channel’s XChange Tech Innovator’s Xcellence award and a place in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.”

Says Pankaj:

“I’m honored to be selected as a thought leader with the likes of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Ray Ozzie and Donald Ferguson. It is a testament to the eventual tide-shift that has emerged through cloud computing technologies for enterprises of all sizes and their critical relationship with channel solution providers and ISVs.”

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, everythingchannel, gartner, magic quadrant, pankaj malviya, xchange

PaaS allows application developers to simply build applications in the cloud, without ever having to worry about hardware acquisition and configuration, software installation, configuration, and maintenance, scalability, availability, backups, recovery, etc. You just sign up and start building, deploy with the push of a button, and pay for your usage as you go.

Bobrowski suggests that enterprises have a real option for cloud computing as some PaaS vendors start offering licensed versions of their platform. He urges enterprises keep their eyes “on the emerging trend of new PaaS and IaaS technologies that are available for licensing within your own data center as you consider how you might transition applications from inside your data center to the cloud.”

He also met with LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya to get some perspective about how our customers are using our installable business applications platform to develop applications faster.

“We are not exclusively a cloud vendor and PaaS on-demand is just one vehicle for our customers to derive value from the LongJump platform,” LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya told us. “In fact, our customers take a movable application approach so they can develop on one instance (our PaaS, for example), test on another (a LongJump instance on Amazon EC2), and publish on yet another (LongJump in a private hosting environment). Our real value is helping to streamline application development and delivery and being agnostic to the application infrastructure. With more private cloud options entering the market, there is also less risk for businesses because they still don’t have to outlay any hardware to develop and test their applications.”

For the complete piece, click here.

Technorati Tags: amazon ec2, cloud computing, enterprise applications, iaas, on-premise, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, private cloud

Gartner is tracking the hype around Cloud Computing in their latest report “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2009″ and cloud computing’s path towards mainstream acceptance. In particular, it looked at APaaS (Application Platform as a Service) and suggests that it is a transformational technology that is only 2 to 5 years from being adopted by mainstream IT while its initial penetration is less than 1%.

According to Gartner, “application platform as a service (APaaS) is a development and deployment environment for cloud-based applications, offered to IT organizations as a service.” Businesses will likely need to rethink their perspective on applications, as Gartner also states that:

APaaS is a part of a fundamental and discontinuous change in the application platform market. It is part of a larger SaaS and cloud-computing phenomenon, all amounting to one core change — the transition from IT solutions that are conceived, deployed and managed under the control of an enterprise IT department to IT solutions that are applied and composed by the enterprise, but executed and managed by expert third-party providers. It is a step toward greater industrialization of IT, to predictable, dependable, professionally managed, plentiful and agile information resources.

Gartner estimates that most IT organizations are or will in the next five years become partly dependent on SaaS-style software. Some may begin developing their own custom applications on APaaS leading to a change in IT jobs, organizations and budget allocations.

In a separate hype cycle report “Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure, 2009,” Gartner also looked into application infrastructures. There it examined SaaS/Cloud-Enabled Application Platforms, also a transformational technology due to make its mainstream impact in 2 to 5 years. Gartner describes SEAP as a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-enabled application programmable platform for the development and deployment of custom applications that is specially designed to support SaaS-style applications. SEAP is inherently multi-tenant and is designed to provide a complete platform for ISVs to develop their own suite of SaaS applications.

Technorati Tags: apaas, cloud computing, gartner, PaaS

The recording from last week’s webinar on Developing and Deploying SaaS Applications featuring MySQL and SIMCO Electronics is now available. The webinar discussed many aspects of building a SaaS business including how to get to market faster without significantly adding a lot of investment and resources. It also discussed many aspects of readying SaaS applications in the public cloud as well as on-premise and private clouds.

The webinar covers the complete application lifecycle for a SaaS deployment including:

• Data Modeling and Application Development
• Test and Release Processes
• Deployment into Public and Private Clouds
• Publishing and Version Management
• Partner Enablement and Ecosystem Building
• Platform and Application Upgrades
• Establishing Application Portability
• Billing and Tenant Support

To view the webinar, go to http://longjump.com/mysql. If you are not a MySQL registered user, you will have to sign up to view the recording.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, multitenancy, mysql, saas, simco, software-as-a-service, sun mic, sun microsystems, webinar

Our latest LongJump release (version 6.2) has hit the cloud with something desperately needed in today’s business application space: Flexibility and Visibility. Flexibility in the way that information is displayed and visibility into a deeper set of information and analysis. Many of today’s cloud applications come out of the gate serving a basic set of functions in a basic way. Rarely can the interface adapt to suit the needs of a wide array of users, and few can match LongJump’s depth in terms of features, scalability, and adaptability.

Over the course of the next week, we’re going to take in-depth looks at some of the big features that have been added like Digital Signatures, New Form Layouts, Object Inheritance, RSS/Atom Feed Report Publishing, and Data Snapshots.

Until then, be sure to check out our feature tour and the press release.

Technorati Tags: atom feed, cloud applications, digital signature, form processing, rss feed, snapshot data

Gartner has named LongJump one of it’s Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure for 2009. Below is an excerpt of the report available to Gartner research subscribers:

Why Cool: LongJump is a cloud application infrastructure service provider delivering an application-platform-as-a-service (APaaS) offering. The company also has a history as a CRM vendor and offers a solution called “Relationals” (also the name of the parent company) that is delivered as a cloud application service.

Its Business Application Platform, branded as LongJump, is similar in concept and origin to Force.com’s underlying salesforce.com CRM application. LongJump is a APaaS cloud platform provider that stands out. It offers a runtime environment and a multitenant development environment, and it supports the creation of multitenant applications. It also offers multitenancy configuration options that allow the user to store data in a common multitenant database, one tenant database instance that is dedicated to the user or in a mixed multitenancy model. The service offers a visual development environment and uses Java as its programming language. LongJump also offers a range of delivery options. In addition to the cloud computing service, the company supports hosting of its environment on third-party infrastructure (for example, Terremark Worldwide data center, Amazon EC2/Amazon Simple Storage Service [Amazon S3] or installation as software in an enterprise data center).

Who Should Care: IT managers who are looking for flexible on-premises and off-premises deployment options using a business-oriented platform will find LongJump’s approach useful.

You can read the complete press release here.

Technorati Tags: app, cloud computing, cool vendor, gartner, multitenancy, PaaS

This is something we’re predicting will coalesce; right now it’s a bunch of individuals doing this on their own, but we expect lean software to catch on… Lean software could be the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications and could be helpful in a down economy.

Rymer describes lean software as:

An approach to building, delivering and running software that values fit-to-purpose, simplicity and time to results above all. Lean approaches minimize complexity, startup time and resource usage, and [avoid] features and methods not essential to fulfilling the application’s business purposes. Developers can easily combine Lean software components with others when large systems require more features.

Rymer is spot on in discussing the need for programmers to build leaner, smaller applications. One thing the Web 2.0 push has taught us was to be more introspective when it comes to our application needs. Do we really need every application to be a monolithic exercise in features and functionality? Probably not. Lean software is also very much akin to situational applications.

At the same time, the platform those applications are built on are extremely important. The platform itself must be rich enough to support agile development models where apps can be deployed at will and common business infrastructure components don’t have to be built up from scratch. It is also important for the platform to allow situational and lean applications to connect to each other natively so you don’t end up creating another application silo.

Rymer also stated seven principles to follow for developing lean software:

1. Use fit-to-purpose tools and platforms
2. Employ a lean and agile development process
3. Follow standards that enable pluggable components for tools and applications
4. Hire skillful developers
5. Leverage open source
6. Optimize deployments
7. Rent or outsource context and own core applications

As Rymer mentions, there are some solutions already in the form of OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative), SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service), which provide modular and elastic alternatives to heavy solutions.

Technorati Tags: application development, custom applications, developers, enterprise applications, eweek, forrester, john rymer, lean software, PaaS, situational applications

Unfortunately, the article seems to miss the point. Platforms like LongJump, while are easy enough for savvy business users to create applications, also improve the position of coders. Why?

1. Developers are going to have to code a lot less and will not have to revisit applications they create as much because the majority of the object and process modeling needs in the application are already provided as part of the platform framework.
2. That means less boring coding like writing yet another rule engine or yet another SOAP connector for some small special project. Instead, the evolving challenges of development can be tackled instead of being quagmired in reinventing the wheel.
3. PaaS also reduces the cost of application development for highly specialized applications, allowing companies to do more with less resources while also optimizing internal processes and improving transparency of information.

Sophisticated applications, those with special needs or complex processes, will still require custom coding or customization of some kind that will require the discipline of a skilled developer who understands data, efficient processes, actions and design.

What PaaS does provide is an opening for a new kind of application development where business units, instead of running their operations on spreadsheets and emails, can quickly create collaborative applications, workflows, processes and reports for basic business tracking, management, and analysis.

One way to think about PaaS is that it is sort of like of Adobe Dreamweaver. The basic core function is to create a usable solution to a problem quickly and easily. If you need more sophistication, the coding engine is there for an HTML/Javascript expert, but in the meantime, a business user can go in, mock up what they need, make basic edits, or even have a serious contender solution and not have to code a single line. These would be applications that most companies would not have paid a developer for anyway.

So if you’re a coder, relax. We’re just getting rid of the junk work so you can spend your time on the cool stuff.

Technorati Tags: developers, infoworld, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

Software vendors throw around the term “enterprise” quite a bit, and while LongJump is no different, for us, the term has a real meaning. For our applications (everything from our CRM solutions to our Employee Manager) and our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), LongJump truly supports the notion of an enterprise: a business or organization that features multiple departments.

This is critical to understanding the depth of our platform, including our built-in team and role permission management system that offers enterprise-grade security to our highly extensible application interface. Our business model was built with enterprises of all sizes in mind. From the 10- to 20-person startup to the 20,000 Fortune 500 company, we’ve tried to maintain a critical balance between functionality and affordability because in the end, both spectrums have a thirst for both. The small company is going to need powerful tools if it hopes to grow and a Fortune 500 company is going to mature, deep functionality at an economy-of-scale to support all their constituents.

Obviously SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and PaaS solutions provide that immediate time-to-value. You’re up and running on a complete platform and application space literally in seconds. Your team just logs in and is ready to start working. But certainly there are concerns, as indicated by J. David Lashar in The Hidden Cost of SaaS. Lashar states:

The relatively limited scope for configuring or customizing a SaaS initiative makes for low-cost, fast-paced implementation. However, this limited scope and implementation may not support the requirements, may not include the automations, and may not generate the intelligence (i.e., reports and dashboards) that are critical to the business. In other words, SaaS may actually impede the ability to realize full entitlement to CRM value. The cost is not a direct cost, but rather an opportunity cost in terms of lost CRM benefits, at least for enterprise-scale organizations that can afford on-premise solutions and might therefore be able to achieve greater CRM benefits from the greater functionality available from those solutions.

Certainly it is true that many SaaS CRM providers (and even on-premise CRM providers) have a limited scope in their ability to draw from enterprise sources and connect to the entirety of operations within a business. One reason is that those tools are often left to only certain members of the team. Others have to fend for themselves because of the cost of adding them as users. That’s why a platform strategy is critical, because platforms are extensible and designed to connect multiple applications and multiple departments. The economy of scale allows for a greater reach across the entire enterprise.

For example, LongJump’s SOAP Web Services API provides a direct connection point to a variety of web systems and is key to understanding how even on-demand applications contribute to the enterprise. Many SOA initiatives are locked into exchanging information across certain systems. Rarely do end-users see the benefit to help streamline their processes or analysis.

At LongJump we really believe that if you’re going to implement a PaaS solution, and you expect it to be wide-ranging enough within your multi-departmental enterprise, it needs to be truly affordable today as well as tomorrow.

This means supporting a complete enterprise view for everyone in the organization, not just a priviledged few.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, enterprise, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, soa, software-as-a-service

• Basic concepts of PaaS, e.g. benefits, technology, potential risks and hurdles, etc.
• Applications suitable for PaaS
• Roadmap for successful adoption and integration
• Q&A

Date:
Wed., Sept. 24, 2008

Time:
8am Pacific Time
11am Eastern Time

Duration:
1 hour

Speaker:
Derek Cheng,
Director of Products and Marketing,
LongJump

To register:
http://www.longjump.com/paas-webinar/land/paas-webinar-sep08.htm

Technorati Tags: Applications, cloud computing, PaaS, Web2.0

They often run $100-million or more to make. The reason is that every movie project is a product; fully conceived and produced from the lines in the script to the distributed prints that get sent out to the movie theater. Hollywood studios often have to create everything from scratch, and most of the time, have to recreate entire worlds for every different movie. That might work in the entertainment industry or in art, but if IT services outside core business functions took that approach, it’d be a plot for disaster.

To understand how IT has gotten to where it is today, we need to examine how new applications are introduced.

Application Development and Deployment 1.0

Traditionally, IT would have to purchase physical hardware and then deploy some type of application infrastructure. That includes web servers, application servers, databases, creating application frameworks, etc. Of course, that means someone has to manage each of those layers. Scalability, data recovery and security issues also come into play. In many cases, much of the resource time and costs involved in building occur before the application has ever been defined.

Then application managers and architects are tasked with:

• Requirements gathering
• Designing and creating data models
• Designing user interfaces
• Mapping out workflows and processes
• Building connectors to external systems

Invariably, the endeavor involves essentially developing, quality assuring and releasing a complete software product. This internal product comes burdened with a list of technical, business and review requirements, a series of development cycles, and a complete application infrastructure that is specific for that one type of operation. It also needs to have some method for connecting to existing systems.

In the process of pulling together even simple applications, developers will have to find ways to build or buy application components for security access controls, user authentication, data view management, reports and dashboards, custom processing, and much more. Businesses often bring in independent contractors or services companies or platform specialists.

The IT application portfolio gets thicker with more vendors, more off-the-shelf software and an increasing number of sub-projects. Applications take on a life of their own, which is why entire suites of solutions are geared towards application lifecycle management.

Let’s also add that features that are developed in these silos often cannot be leveraged into other applications. They are disconnected and separate. This drives the cost of maintenance sky high and results in unpredictable IT spending whenever that application needs to be updated.

Ultimately, the application becomes its own silo and development teams have to reinvent the wheel for every new business problem or application function. Over time, multiple silos start appearing and management of these fragmented applications becomes more complex and expensive.

Application Development and Deployment 2.0

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions like LongJump can add significant value to enterprise IT by enabling IT to better serve the business, operate at a strategic level with business divisions and rapidly deliver application solutions to business partners.

PaaS enables IT organizations and their CIOs to do more faster and for less. They are able to deliver on-demand business applications quickly and easily to manage data, streamline collaborative processes and provide actionable analysis. PaaS solutions reduce the complexity of custom applications across the organization, enabling better use of the IT dollar and improving overall processes.

Technorati Tags: application development, custom applications, IT projects, IT silos, Longjump, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service

Technorati Tags: Applications, cloud, Longjump, PaaS, Platform, saas, Sales and CRM, Service

This makes yet another case for SaaS and Cloud Computing solutions. Many organizations are under the false belief that traditional, on-premise systems are safer and more reliable than leveraged enterprise software that is offered on-demand. In the case with Childs, his IT terrorism is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars. However, if San Francisco’s data were hosted, a simple call to the application provider (with proof of administrative creditials) could have restored access in minutes, as well as lock-out Childs from any future access. Hosted software providers are like an additional safety firewall for businesses.

Most SaaS providers like LongJump operate on fully-monitored, secured backends. Data is mirrored, backed up on a daily basis, and an entire operational workflow is engaged before critical changes are made. In addition, people with access to sensitive systems are screened and no one has “exclusive rights.” A third party SaaS provider can quickly correct these types of catastrophes (which thankfully are rare, but always possible) and save organizations like the City of San Francisco the cost and embarassment of a renegade IT terrorist.

Technorati Tags: hosted software, IT administration, on-demand, on-premise, saas, San Francisco, software-as-a-service, Terry Childs

We sat down with Sheela Sarva who works with the LongJump Support Team to talk about building applications on LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, and what are some of the challenges for businesses before they jump in.

Q. Hi, Sheela. Can you tell us what you do at LongJump?
A. I work on the support team, primarily focused helping customers with new application development. It’s a very interesting position because we learn about a lot of the different challenges business users and IT departments have and how they are trying to solve them on the LongJump platform.

Q. So what kind of applications are customers trying to build on LongJump?
A. Well, the best applications LongJump can support involve information management, passing information from one user to another, or pulling information from a lot of different people and sources to build some analysis or to trigger some actions around that data. It sounds simple, but when you factor in all the IT infrastructure that needs to go into these applications, LongJump’s Platform-as-a-Service solution really removes the IT management issues and gets to the heart of the business problem.

Q. How do these businesses usually handle these issues?
A. Most organizations don’t have time to think about their problems in a structured way. We see many of our customers going right to their Excel spreadsheet, rather than trying to model their situation in a relational way. Databases can be hard to use, especially when you start sharing information or trying to build reports. And with all the IT staff usually taxed with mission critical problems, a lot of the smaller, but still complex issues don’t get the time of day they need.

Q. And that’s the advantage LongJump provides…
A. Yeah. Definitely. Spreadsheets are great because they’re fast. But spreadsheets can become monsterous if you have a lot of related information. What’s nice is that the time it would take you to model the information in LongJump is about as fast as building a spreadsheet but you get the benefits of that relational data. Then you do all of your reporting or create actions on top of the data (like triggering an email or running a JumpScript), and you’re 80 – 90% finished with the application in most cases.

Q. So what’s the first thing someone should think about before they start creating an application on LongJump?
A. You have to start with the data, or even more basic, what’s the business problem you’re trying to solve. We had a business that was trying to essentially do a very specialized form of licensing and contract management. They have third party vendors, contracts, international use rights, and each of their products had different software and different distributors. They were managing the whole thing on a 1,000 column x 1,000 row spreadsheet with multiple worksheets. It was amazing. Completely color coded and everything.

Their problem was that they needed to make sure that their product managers could go into a geographic market and verify that a specific device, loaded with a specific software, sold by a specific distributor in that specific country met the licensing rights they had with their third party vendor contracts. If it didn’t, they were at a compliance risk and would have to either negotiate new contracts or pay a penalty. It would take them a couple of weeks to fully analyze the information when the dreaded compliance questions came up.

Q. How did they break down their monster spreadsheet into LongJump?
A. The first thing we asked them to do was individualize the different “players” in this problem. So a vendor became an object in LongJump, the device became another object, distributors another object and so on, until the all physical aspects of the problem were represented as data objects that could now be related.

Q. How long did that take?
A. Well, given that they didn’t spend their entire workday on it, it probably took them a couple of hours to think about how to break down the information in a relational way. That also included what field information to map out as part of that object.

Once that basic object data model was identified, building it in LongJump took minutes. Then we ran a few test records to it based on some of the data from their spreadsheet, just to make sure that information was completely linked. When we verified that the data pretty much looked like what it needed to, we started importing their data which took less than half-an-hour.

Q. But that’s just modeling and importing the data.
A. Right, but that’s the hardest part for most people — to learn to think relationally. But once the application is modeled and the data is imported, you can sort of let users ride the application on their own by adding reports and putting dashboards on their home tab to monitor information. They also added alerts to information themselves, so if a contract was coming due or someone added a new license, their core team would get an email alerting them using our Data Policies of the details. Plus, their product managers could get their own view into the data, see the products they were responsible for, and track and add their own information as well. That’s all stuff, if you have to create your own application platform from scratch, you’d have to compensate for.

Q. So that’s a basic application anyone can build.
A. Yes, basic, but still very complex. It just took a little forethought as to how information should be treated as relational objects. But once it’s done, you can’t imagine the time savings. They can now react to problems they know they need to act on, they can quickly look at just the information they need, and they can move on to other more important areas of the business instead of spending time combing and analyzing their data. And they have a single point of truth for their entire team to work from.

Technorati Tags: application development, enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, spreadsheets

Workflows themselves are nothing new. Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Business process reengineering, and Lean systems have all focused on some aspects of workflow management and improvement. By establishing and standardizing best practices, many organizations have streamlined the physical aspects of operational tasks.

But more often than not, the software tools to move that information across the organization (such as forms, faxes, emails and even intranets) have not kept up, involving additional complexity, consultation, and process-slowing human error. Systems that are built are often customized to such a point that changing them would cost businesses considerable time and expense. And in most cases, workflows are only built for the most important activities rather than the most common.

LongJump today introduces a graphical Workflow Designer to help businesses map out their data-driven, repeatable processes and route actions across an organization, enabling consistent best practices and streamlining delivery cycles. With the easy-to-use, web-based Workflow Designer, users sharing data and activities in LongJump are empowered to improve operational efficiency and quality and information flow.

With a simplified workflow metaphor, yet with extensive capabilities to support to virtually any business process, both simple and compless processes can be automated and routed throughout an organization. Everything from vacation and expense approvals to hiring processes to creative production projects, to service delivery can be mapped out in LongJump, its data stored, information and actions routed to key constituents, and its status maintained.

To learn more about how to create workflows using LongJump, click here for the feature guide.

So what does that mean?

Databases are these storage areas for information – essentially file cabinets converted to digital format. To store data, you have data records, which is data that complies with the structure you’ve defined.

In the case of iTunes, for example, the structure is around songs, artists, and albums (also called objects or tables in database lingo). Each object also has a record structure, for example: a song has a title, length, cost, date, etc. and also points to the album and artist. An artist has their name, description, and all the songs and albums their on. And each album has a name, price, and a collection of songs, and might also be related to a specific artist or artists. Everyone one of these objects might also be categorized as another way to dissect the data.

This is classic relational database structure.

Glue-Based Administration

What’s interesting is that the actual sum of a database’s parts constitutes a nebulous series of pointers or joins hooking one bit of data to another. It’s the glue, if you will. And in the old-school world, unless you’re a database administrator, you’d have no chance of ever changing that data structure. In fact, it often takes teams of people to hold the thing together, because one wrong move and your data can be lost or mangled beyond recognition.

Administrating this data is part of what LongJump has tried to simplify most. LongJump lets you define your structures however you need to and we try to make it bullet-proof for you. The result is that you get away from the management side and start doing stuff with the data, like analysis, running reports, filtering for information, or applying the data to team-processing, project workflow, or data tracking.

Looking Before You Leap (Jump)

But if you’re creating your own application, it always comes back to something even LongJump can’t do for you, which is defining what your data should look like and organizing it in a way that makes sense in a relational database world.

So before you start designing, start mapping out how you think your data should look. In the mean time, here are some nice resources for you to read up more on database theory:

• How Stuff Works: “What are Relational Databases?”
• Dummies.com: “Exploring Database Design Tips”
• In-Depth Write-up by Barbara Knauff of Dartmouth College: “Design Your Own Database, Concept to Implementation”
• LongJump Application Design Guide

• Powerful List Management: Import and export lists into LongJump. The Campaign Manager also comes with a complete set of list management tools including merge, de-dupe and the ability to support opt-outs.
• Customizeable Templates: The Campaign Manager comes with built-in customizeable templates you can use for your email campaigns. You can also use the built-in design wizard to create your own or simply important your own designs or HTML templates from services like vFlyer.
• Image Hosting Included: LongJump is capable of hosting all the images used by your HTML email campaigns taking the hassle out of the process.
• Comprehensive Metric and Reporting: LongJump provides comprehensive metrics and statistics on how many people received your email, how many open it, how many opted out and other important marketing information.
• White-Listed Delivery: LongJump is partnered with VerticalResponse, the premier email delivery service, to ensure that correspondence is white-listed for delivery across spam filters.
• Automate Follow-Up Tasks: LongJump makes it easy to assign a call back to any of your team members when someone opens or clicks on an email. This accelerates the selling process and proactively goes after those who have expressed an interest in your offering.

The LongJump Campaign Manager is an easy, effective and cost-effective email marketing solution that let’s you create professional-looking emails with no technical experise and to establish and build strong and lasting relationships with your customers. Give it a try today!

• Support Case Manager
  The Support Case Manager provides a complete case management support solution through a built-In customer self-service portal. The Support Case Manager is an extremely robust application that allows you to not only track cases securely but also provides such advanced features like notification options, a customizable workflow as well as escalation policies. One of its “killer features” is the ability to integrate it directly into your website using a single line of HTML code!
• IT Asset Tracker
  Most IT departments maintain (or should maintain) important financial, service and location information on laptops, desktops, servers, mobile phones, and other equipment you may have in your company. Too often we here stories like the 1,100 laptops missing from the Commerce Department or other organizations which is a result of poor (or non-existent) inventory management! The IT Asset Tracker does a great job of help solve this problem by enabling to track assets by serial numbers, asset tags, expiring warranties, lease status, or a list of other factors. Additionally, it comes with the ability to generate financial reports based on asset allocation or department!

OfficeSpace is really a collaborative environment that allows teams and workgroups within and outside your organization to work together! By allowing team members to share calendars, tasks and other important information they can better coordinate team efforts. Some of the key components you’ll find in OfficeSpace include:

• Shared Calendars
  OfficeSpace provides you with the ability to schedule resources (such as conference rooms), company and group events by supporting both group and personal calendars and allowing you to layer individual team calendars.
• Task Assignment
  OfficeSpace helps you organize team and individual tasks into project as well as seamlessly maintain non-project related tasks. You can assign tasks to each other, send reminders, and generate reports around tasks.
• Document and Photo Sharing
  OfficeSpace provides a secured area that centralizes the current and past versions of your documents. Documents are organized in access-controllable folders. Documents can be can easily be updated, backed-up or archived.
• Discussion Forums
  OfficeSpace enables your team to participate and discuss project related items in a searchable online forum. Forums can also be categorized for improved organization.
• Microsoft Outlook Integration
  OfficeSpace enables you to seamlessly synchronize personal appointments and tasks within the application with Microsoft Outlook.

Whether you are considering using OfficeSpace for your sales team, marketing team, or a project related team in your organization, visit the LongJump Application catalog and find out how the LongJump suite of applications can help boost your business productivity!

• 360º Sales Visibility: The ability to view all aspects of your prospects, accounts, contacts, and opportunities.
• 30–Second Call Log: The ability to log calls quickly (usually in under 30 seconds) with complete access to customer records, call details, and follow-up tasks and reminders.
• Built-In Prospect Manager: The ability to manage your potential sales leads collected through your website and assigning them to sales reps based on rules and policies.
• Built-In Deal Tracker: Ability to store product and price information, track deal status, and maintain key live metrics on activities related to deals.
• Built-In Contract Manager: Ability to track and maintain contract information for licensing or services as an integrated part of your customer management.
• Microsoft Outlook Integration: Ability to quickly log emails sent to contacts, and synchronize appointments, tasks, and contacts all with Microsoft Outlook.

If you have a sales organization in your company and need an effective way to manage your sales force, be sure to test drive the LongJump Sales Force Automation today!

Today we look at some of the other applications in the HR category. These include:

• Employee Manager
  You can use the Employee Manager to securely store important employee data, and streamline time-off requisitions and approvals. It gives you the ability to securely maintain information on employees including hiring dates, review cycles, training, PTO requisition, and benefits data. Like other LongJump applications, the Employee Manager can share information with other applications to relate employee information to other areas of your business.
• Recruitment Agency Solution
  As I mention in my previous post, the Recruitment Agency Solution provides a complete solution for internal and external recruiting teams that helps them maximize their matchmaking skills! It not only stores candidate information, but matches it to job openings as well as allows you to manage hiring companies and contacts. Recruiters can use it to create candidate and company assessment profiles and obviously store resumes in a central location. The Recruitment Agency Solution also integrates with email, calendar, and task activities to provide a complete picture of candidates and companies.
• Job Leads
  This application provides a simple way to capture job leads from your website. Using a single line of HTML, you can embed a web form on your existing website or blog that collects information from job leads and stores it directly in LongJump! Job Leads also provides email notification and tracking capabilities.

You can find these and other business application in LongJump’s application catalog!

• Store candidate information: provides a central store for incoming application information such as resumes and CV’s
• Managing recruiters: allows you to manage external recruiters that you may be working with
• Profile creation and management: ability to create candidate and company assessment profiles
• Job and Skill matching: match candidate profiles and information to job requirements quickly and easily
• Website Integration: integrate web-based job inquires from your website with the Recruitment Agency Manager
• LongJump Platform Integration: share and use data and contacts from other LongJump applications such as email, calendar and task activities.

Here are some other tips and guidelines that can be applied with your use of the Recruitment Agency Solution and within your organization to improve your hiring process and employee retention:

• Make a Staffing Plan
  What exactly is the type of job that needs filling and how many of those jobs are there? What are the precise specifications and descriptions? Decide in advance what the salary and benefits will be. Create the necessary profile within the Recruitment Agency Solution and create time lines (Calendar) and budgets as part of the process.
• Find Good Candidates
  What type of advertising will you do to attract the candidates you – newspapers, trade journals, Internet? Consider using a Internet job board or a solution like vFlyer (that syndicates your job posting to all the leading online marketplaces). Use your website to collect information from potential candidates through the web-based integration capabilities of the Recruitment Agency Solution.
  
• Prepare Interview Questions
  A good interview has a purpose and a direction. Consider using a collaborative environment like OfficeSpace to manage the collection and assembly of interview questions. If the applicant has interviews with multiple team members, LongJump can easily hand the communication, scheduling and collaborative discussions that accompany such interviews. Here are some additional content and legal guidelines than can help in the process.
• Avoid Common Errors
  Try to avoid any and all of the following common errors. Asking leading questions. Making decisions too early in the interview. Lacking knowledge of precise job requirements. Letting the pressure of your duties shorten interview time. Doing more talking than the candidate. Failure to direct the interview.
• Check References
  If possible, check three references on each candidate. This demonstrates that you are using reasonable care in the hiring process. Careful reference checks ensure that candidates are right for the job and they are who they claim to be.

• Customer Manager
  This sales application allows you to store and share customer account information with your sales organization. The Customer Manager gives sales professionals a “360–degree” view of the customer relationships and keeps track of all the activity and communication history that relates to their account.
• Contract Manager
  The Contact Manager helps your business maintain and automate contract activities for prospects, customers, and vendors. Important account cycle activities like contract and account expirations, and other important events relating to product or services contracts.
• Deal Tracker
  This application allows you to build sales opportunities with integrated price books and product lists, at the same time providing an accurate outlook into your sales opportunities. Using the Deal Tracker, you can store product and price information, track deal status, maintain key live metrics on activities related to deals, and turn your sales representatives into a goal-oriented, focused sales team.
• Prospecting Manager
  Use the Prospecting Manager to really focus your sales efforts. The Prospecting Manager to “mine” for potential sales leads. These includes things like driving new prospects from your website and assign them to your sales reps, identifying which prospects need special attention, and even automating parts of you sales channel.
• Sales Force Automation
  The SFA applications serves as the flagship application for sales teams to track progress and share customer information. If you have used CRM tools before, LongJump’s Sales Force Automation (SFA) provides all of the sales management functions you’re accustomed to in enterprise-grade applications plus much more.

Remember that you can always visit the LongJump Application Catalog for a complete listing of available business applications.