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

Many thanks to Adam Day, VP of Business Development at HRAnswerlink for his participation on describing how his firm was able to leverage LongJump’s on-premise PaaS to drive rapid deployment of their new SaaS offerings.

This follows past eSeminars including:

• Cloud Computing, SaaS and Its Impact on Channel Solution Providers

• New Strategies For Building Business Applications In 2010

If you’d like to view this eSeminar and any in the past that cover SaaS, PaaS and Cloud Computing, you can click here for recorded archives.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, enterprise, enterprise applications, isv, IT department, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge had a thoughtful post regarding the challenges facing IT in determining how much to rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms to deliver applications versus running those applications on their own internal infrastructure. He adds:

The real question IT organizations might want to ask themselves in 2010 is why they have to make this kind of decision in the first place. In an ideal world, IT organizations should be able to develop an application that can be dynamically deployed as a service or on their own local infrastructure as they see fit.

You can read the entire article here.

Technorati Tags: application development, enterprise applications, IT projects, on-premise, saas

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

LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya was in San Francisco last week for a video shoot. We won’t go into details about what we were shooting, but we do think the video will go a long way to articulating our vision and value proposition for the LongJump platform.

We feel like our product is starting to take off. Besides being named a Cool Vendor from Gartner, many doors have opened in the recent months and it is clear that the LongJump platform’s ability to quickly enable companies to build their SaaS application business has a real, recognized value. There also seems to be a real trend for companies who have made a point to start building applications on the cloud, don’t want to go rebuild from scratch. Everyone we talk to lately seems to see that LongJump changes the development cycle with a multitenant application platform that enables faster application creating, less wheel reinvention, and greater control over applications deployed to your customers.

The video will be available some time in August. Look for it!

Technorati Tags: cloud, enterprise applications, pankaj malviya, saas, software-as-a-service

Technorati Tags: application development, coghead, custom applications, enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform, Platform-as-a-Service, techcrunch

There’s a new, vendor-neutral site called Power in the Cloud that is completely focused on situational applications: custom applications that are tailored to meet specific business needs. They have a particular interest in the different platforms, like LongJump, that are geared towards situational apps and are having some interesting discussions around some of the advantages and challenges of this emerging space.

The discussions tend to be around how the more advanced business user or analysts can take advantage of these platforms, but they also recognize tools for more hard core developers.

Here’s their coverage of LongJump.

Technorati Tags: enterprise applications, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, situational applications

Additionally, we have added some important features for tracking information, improving administrative update performance, and application design as well as a new help system.

More Interface Changes

As part of the user interface update, users will be able to choose their own color schemes within Setup and companies will be able to load their logo for display on the left of the home page. Additional interface updates include:

• moving action buttons to the top of a view
• moving the record counter to within the view management icon
• introduction of widget-based web tabs for putting dashboards anywhere in an application, not just the Home tab
• introduction of database joined view web tabs for displaying views built by joining objects
• the ability to hide empty fields in a form layout within a section
• record owner information can be moved to the top of a record detail or to the bottom within a layout

Field History Logging

LongJump now makes it possible to keep a change log for specific fields in a record for change management, auditing and compliance purposes. By enabling  audit logging on a field, changes to that value will be time stamped including who made the change, the previous and new value.

Applying Formulas to Report Summaries

You can now create custom summary formulas to build additional analysis by taking a total summed value computed by the report and applying a more complex formula to it. For example, a summary of total goods sold can be shown with an additional calculation to determine sales compensation.

Wildcard Searching

Users can now use wildcards like * and ? to help with searching. LongJump’s search algorithm will look for patterns based on the wildcards.

Public and Private Tagging

Records can now have two levels of tagging: public and private. A private tag is one created and used only by the user. Public tags are shared across the organization.

Static Resources

Application developers will be able to load and store web resources such as CSS stylesheets, images, Javascript files, ZIP and TAR files to be served when called from custom pages, code, or other areas of the application.

Mass Data Operations

For any of the administrative data operations such as mass update, delete, ownership change and emptying the recycle bin, processing for more than 2,500 records will be conducted as a background process so users can continue to work freely and be alerted via email when the operation is complete.

Exporting Attachments

Users will be able to export any documents or attachments associated with a record during the export process. Files will be encoded as either ISO-8859-1,
UTF-8, or UTF-16 format during export.

Other Changes

• fields now support default values
• the Photos tab has been removed and has been consolidated with the Documents tab

Technorati Tags: application development, developers, enterprise applications, Longjump, Platform

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

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