Archive for the 'Applications' Category
May 10, 2007
First Product Wiki in the Association Space?
Avectra, vendor of one of the major association management systems, has launched a public wiki to support their products.
This is the first public wiki to support an association-dedicated product that I am aware of. I think there is a good chance this will build critical mass with their customers. Association staff are going to have high incentive to contribute since this is such a major part of their management systems yet there are few to no resources, such as commercially published books, on the subject.
It might work better if the user groups dedicated to the AMS vendors launched their own wikis, maintaining some independence.
(Spotted on Wes Trochlil’s blog.)
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March 13, 2007
Getting Out of the Way
Bill Flagg, the blogging president of RegOnline, recently posted this report about improvements to their online registration process:
Last April we cut 2/3 of the fields from our RegOnline open account form and then saw our sign-up rate triple. The way we did that was by asking for all the billing information later in the process when they are ready to start taking real registrations. We expect to see our conversions from free to paid to go down some, but happy to say our net # of paid users is increasing dramatically.
Hope this helps.
Indeed it does! One of the entries in our book, We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change, that I wrote was about just this. Get out of the way of your members/customers when they are ready to invest with you. Here is the full entry from the book, also available on the WHADITW blog:
Many associations collect demographic data from their members when they join or renew their membership. Sometimes this can be as simple as a few check boxes to more involved multi-page surveys. When dues invoices could only be sent via postal mail, it made sense to piggy back a data collection tool with it to save money on postage and take advantage of the member’s attention.
However, just because it works well in snail mail doesn’t mean you should do it online. For example, the cost-saving benefit goes away when you invoice for dues via e-mail or accept a new member via your web site. Another challenge is that conducting an online survey of a member before they can renew is much more invasive of an interruption than including a paper form in the mail. Making online payment challenging by requiring extraneous forms to be completed reduces the benefits of paying online to your members, which will raise your costs when they choose to go with traditional methods such as calling you or mailing in forms that need to be processed.
When a member has made the decision to invest more money in the association by purchasing a product or paying dues online, get out of their way and make it as easy as possible for them to complete the transaction.
Thanks to Bill for providing an excellent case that illustrates this point.
(Two notes: I tweaked Bill’s comment for typos and clarity without changing the meaning. Also, I have an account with RegOnline and used them last year for an event I conducted. Consider myself disclosed.)
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January 15, 2007
Will Card Sort for Conference Registration
Fred at Gulo Solutions points out that ASS&T’s registration form for the IA Summit implies that job prospects are not all that good for information architects. Two registration categories for the unemployed!
I would guess that is a holdover artifact from the dot-bomb. In any case, the categories should be adjusted in order to eliminate or de-emphasize the implied failure of IA as a career.
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January 10, 2007
Outlook 2007 to Use Word for Rendering HTML E-mail
According to SitePoint, Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007:
That’s right. Instead of taking advantage of Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007 uses the very limited support for HTML and CSS that is built into Word 2007 to display HTML email messages.
Egads! This will be quite a boon for newsletter designers, once they figure out what will work in Word 2007. It will be a horrible pain for the rest of the world. Given Word’s atrocious history of HTML mark-up, I shudder to think what hoops designers will have to employ to get decent rendering.
Perhaps my traditionalist preference for plaintext will come back into vogue.
(Spotted via Simon Willison.)
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January 4, 2007
Bernard Golden on Amazon’s Computing Services
Bernard Golden, a noted open source guru, posted an excellent summary of what Amazon is doing with on demand computing services: CIO Blogs - Amazon: Books, DVDs and … Infrastructure?
Amazon’s role in this is truly amazing. It has in stealth created a vision of a new style of computing, delivered in market-appropriate, market-transforming fashion. I’m astonished they’ve turned in this direction (what, single-handedly creating ecommerce wasn’t enough?), but believe they’ve limned one path forward for the IT industry.
Read the whole post to learn more about how Amazon is striking out into a blue ocean.
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December 20, 2006
Google Deprecates SOAP Search API
Google has deprecated their SOAP Search API. This means that people who already have keys to use the system can continue to do so but no new ones will be issued. Ongoing support of the SOAP API is questionable as well. Google suggests that people now use their AJAX Search API. Here is a good discussion (read comments and follow links) of concerns about how the AJAX API is not a complete replacement for everything that was available in the SOAP API.
Update: Here is another interesting post, Beginning of the end of for open web APIs?, that is worth checking out on this issue.
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December 19, 2006
WYMeditor
Here is a new WYSIWYG editor for use in web-based content management interfaces: WYMeditor. It won’t give your users true “what you see is what you get” views of the content they are editing but it does enforce strict adherence to XHTML markup. If you have to have highly structured content then this might be a good tool to add to your system.
Spotted via Gadgetopia.
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December 13, 2006
Free Open Source Search Tool from IBM and Yahoo!
IBM has released a free enterprise search engine, IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. The engine includes some technology from IBM’s OmniFind product, so this is probably prositioned as an entry level introduction to their commercial product. It is a direct challenge to Google’s Mini search appliance, according to this story on CIO.com. Yahoo! seems to have contributed some interface design expertise for the management interface.
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December 1, 2006
IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine
Here is some helpful information from the MS IEBlog about how to run IE 6 and 7 on the same machine.
IEBlog : IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine
This is really important for any web developer or designer since IE6 will be with us for quite a long time to come. The downside here is that it isn’t possible to run both browsers within the same instance of the operating system, which is why MS is offering a free virtual server with which to run 6 in parallel. Not ideal.
I’m surprised that MS didn’t foresee this need before they launched 7.
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October 6, 2006
Existentialnet
The time is right for us to stop focusing inwards on the management of the “intranet as website”, and to ask: what are we going to deliver to the organisation in the next six months?
Good question. A better question: What does the organization need to deliver in the next six months and how can the intranet be aligned to support those efforts?
Intranets will always be viewed as a commodity (low value) when all they focus on is the processing of mundane tasks. There is huge opportunity for your intranet to help make a breakthrough in achieving your organizational goals. It will only happen when intranet managers, consultants and advisors focus on achieving the goals of the organization first and foremost.
I guarantee that you will get more resources and attention if your intranet makes tangible contributions to achieving your organization’s business goals. Policies and time sheet applications will not impress senior executives.
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