The system has developed a lot this year particularly in navigation ease and visibility of information… The potential must be vast, particularly for companies looking to control data over a number of sites or with remote workers

which we heartily agree with. We also had lots of good practical ideas from clients, some of which have already been implemented, such as simplified filtering. We certainly don’t plan to slow down.

For 2012, we’re looking at two really big features that will allow agileBase to adapt to even more situations.

The first is a form builder. Business people can already throw together basic forms really quickly, but this upgrade will put the focus on improving end user usability. In practice this means giving you the ability to lay forms out in the fashion that best suits your staff, combining input fields from different areas into one screen.

The second is a global search. The amount of data some clients store is getting so big you really need a google-like search bar so you can quickly find any data, attached document or report, so that’s exactly what we’re planning.

On the business side we’re also talking with other some companies about partnerships and hope to have some more news on that later in the year. We’re still really keen on offering other new partners the great deal of 50% of revenue so if that’s something that you think may be interesting, please drop us a line.

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Update: the forms usability work is already bearing some fruit. Administrators can go to a table and select a number of attractive new layouts. Here’s a sample of one as it stands (still in progress…)

Please take a look here:

Note: if you have enough bandwidth, view the video full screen in HD to see the details of what’s going on on screen. Apologies for the bottom of the screen getting cropped off during production – when I move the mouse below the screen, I’m usually clicking on a tab like ‘edit’ or ‘charts’.

Every agileBase field now has an icon beside it that links to this comments function. The latest entry in the field will appear on top of all the earlier ones and will automatically have the author and a date and time stamp added to it.

To add a comment, click the speech bubble that fades in when the mouse pointer is over a field.

Really useful but equally simple and quick.

“Perfection is achieved not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to take away” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In that light, before making any additions we’re removing and demoting components from the user interface, to de-clutter it in order to allow new developments to add to the product without adding to the complexity. Before I go any further, don’t worry! Your favourite feature isn’t being removed, it’s still there but it may just be in a slightly more fitting place.

The most obvious example is the import and export functions. These are features that are used every now and again rather than every day. Rather than keeping big buttons for them in the toolbar, they are now links at the bottom of each report. This means that

a) they’re obviously relevant to the report that you’re looking at

b) visual complexity is reduced for the majority of users who never need to see them. They are discoverable but not in-your-face

They’re also only shown when necessary, for example the import link is only shown when you’re viewing a table.

You may also have noticed over the past few weeks the general style of the interface has got a lot cleaner – removing unnecessary row and icon colourings to focus on the content of your information.

Roadmap

Of course new features then have to be added in a way that maintains the simplicity and cleanliness of the interface. So what are they?

Short term

• Inclusion of user statistics in agileBase. At the moment you can download a spreadsheet of usage data from the dashboard but why not make the usage logs available as normal data tables in agileBase itself? To start this, we’re also going to make the access count for each row available in the row itself – very useful for gauging the popularity of individual items if they’re things like learning resources

http://leanitforsmes.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/evidence-based-problem-solving-in-a-complex-environment/

Often, there is much data available in any database system, across a period of time, but no easy way of building a narrative to explain its meaning and impact.

The new TIS allows you to add narrative data points along the top of a page on a timeline – any event data can be added and coloured according to type. Descriptions of each event appear when the mouse is hovered over a point. Below this time-based narrative, a series of charts can be added which will show the same time period as the timeline, maintaining the link even when you zoom in or out to show a shorter or longer timespan. This allows cause and effect match-ups to be seen, between the narrative and the charts, or between one chart and another.

One obvious use is for Marketing Information Systems – you may wish to show events such as trade shows, campaigns, PR, relevant industry news etc. against metrics like website visits, signups, sales etc. and possibly even external metrics like stock values or GDP.

This screenshot is another example from a successful day session with an IT department that was struggling to understand what the main causes of instability were in their platform.

In plain English, what does this mean? Well say you’ve got two tables – contacts and sales enquiries. A contact can have a number of sales enquiries. Now if you’re in an enquiries report, you’ve always been able to join to to contacts to pull in contact information for each enquiry, just by clicking a ‘join enquiries to contacts’ link. Now you can do the same in the opposite direction, from parent to child.

So if you want a report of the total value of enquiries per contact, you can start with a contacts report, go to joins and click ‘join contacts to enquiries’. You’re then free to do things like add a calculation of enquiry data e.g. sum({value}).

Of course the manual join option is still there for use if you know a bit about join theory and want to do something out of the ordinary but these new links should make things a lot easier both for database administrators and business analysts. For example, this is what I see when I look at the possible joins from my ‘organisations’ table:

• innovative ideas and requests by clients
• recent work by companies such as Apple and Google
• input from user experience experts

and the journey of development has taken us much further than originally planned.

In brief, the major benefits are

Faster, more intuitive data input and retrieval

Many users of agileBase spend most of their time searching for and entering data. For these users, some of the advanced features, such as the ability to do data analysis with charts and complex filtering, global editing of many records at the same time, or exporting and importing are just clutter.

A completely fresh interface has been designed specifically for these users.  It removes the clutter and makes the major functions more accessible. The layout is similar to Apple’s much touted new two-pane email interface (not yet released to the public).

Not only is data retrieval quicker, with one simple search box to find any record in a report as you type, but once you’ve found what you’re looking for, working with the data is much improved.

Want to get a complete overview of a client before giving them a ring? Simply load it up and have all the related data at your fingertips, whether this be recent sales calls, projects, photos, support enquiries or whatever is particular to your company. A ‘card’ will show all the major details and you can ‘drill down’ simply by swiping right. Everything you’ve looked at is cached locally, so if you follow across from a client, to a sales enquiry, to a quote, you can get back to the start instantly at any time, just by clicking on a breadcrumb trail at the top of the screen.

Entering a new sales lead and realise that the organisation it relates to isn’t yet in the database? Not to worry, just add a new one from the same screen. You’ll be prompted for the most basic details, i.e. company name, then when you’ve finished entering the enquiry details, just click on this name to enter any further details such as address, website and perhaps contacts.

Wherever you are, you can view and navigate to related data, be that going up a hierarchy, down or across.

The advanced interface is still available for those users who have more analytical or administrative tasks to perform. Users can switch between them at any time and setting a preference will determine which one appears on login.

Custom printout/email designs

Create templates in a wordprocessor, or your favourite HTML editor, and upload them into agileBase for use in ‘mail-merge’ style printouts. To include any field, just include the name in lowercase preceded by a dollar sign. Full documentation will be forthcoming.

Integrations with third party websites and applications

For the technically inclined, agileBase now has JSON, RSS, REST and iCal APIs, to integrate with your own web applications or websites.

Want to have your web forms go directly into your database? Just give your web designer a link to include in the site which will generate the necessary form. What’s more, any fields you add or remove to the table in future will be instantly reflected on the site.

Have a set of documents you want to make publicly available? Just give a JSON link to your web firm and they can feed them into a website.

Want to keep up to date with any new information entered into your particular areas of the database? Set up your phone or favourite device with an RSS reader to report on them.

Writing a data-based web application? Use agileBase as the data store and take advantage of all it’s powerful features. One client has already made a head start doing so.

A whole set of nice enhancements

• Twitter integration (with LinkedIn integration possible in future)
• Automatically go to the most used report (or a predefined report) when a user logs in
• Many more nice tweaks that just make the user experience more enjoyable

So what’s next?

Of course, development doesn’t stop there. Over the past year we’ve introduced many other new features, such as a drag and drop calendar interface, word clouds, photo display in reports and an iPad interface. We’ve just as many planned for the future, including

• a global ‘google-like’ search for searching the entire database, including all reports and documents
• an innovative ‘timeline’ view to enable users to see cause and effect connections between different datasets, e.g. activities and metrics like website hits and sales leads
• integration with accounting packages
• geographical mapping of data
• offline access

Want to know what is coming in from other outside sources (forms on your website etc.)? Just use the same function.

RSS pushes data using the method of your choice. Popular ways of reading RSS are,

• Phone / tablet apps from your mobile app store (search for RSS)
• Sites such as Google Reader
• Dedicated applications for PC or Mac
• Email clients such as Outlook
• Modern web browsers also let you subscribe to feeds

To access the feed for a particular agileBase report, go to the report’s ‘manage’ tab and click the ‘sync’ button. If you don’t have a manage tab, please ask an administrator.

I hope you enjoy trying out this new feature and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks to Think Drinks for suggesting and commissioning this development

• Super fast data entry, even when dealing with complex tasks, such as entering a new organisation with three contacts, a project and an attached document.
• Reduced need for custom built complex data entry wizards, saving time, money and speeding up adoption
• An ability for clients to define custom outputs themselves, e.g. for autogenerated  emails and mail merges

The new data entry interface will be a lot more user friendly but will also be optional and will only appear for people it’s selected for, allowing everyone to adopt at their own pace.

New now

As a bedrock to make some of this possible, some changes are being introduced now, ahead of time. The ‘view’ tab and default printouts are being improved so that they take up less space and look more attractive. Printouts which previously would have taken up two or three pages now take up just a single page.

There are various options for customising the new layout. You can now control the information that’s visible per field – as an administrator, go to table fields and select a printout option under ‘more info’ next to each field. The layout of the different blocks on the screen can also be moved around by dragging the field IDs above or below one another using the fields tab of the report.

In short, if you’d like the view tab or printouts to be altered, just get in touch with a system administrator.

Custom company headers and footers can also be added to all printouts – please get in touch if you’d like to add one for your organisation.

Finally, content can be emailed (in plain text format) from the print preview page with a new Email button.

photo thumbnails in reports – useful if you have a better memory for faces than names for example!