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Random Thoughts about Axosoft and technology
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Yes, ladies and gentleman, it's hard to believe, but Microsoft has just announced that Windows 7, the $20 billion a year operating system that runs on hundreds of millions of PCs around the world will be way better than your...wait for it...wait a little...
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The launch of Axosoft's OnTime 2008 is the most significant event in Axosoft's history and with it, we have a lot of other announcements, too. This article is a summary of what's new with the launch of OnTime 2008: OnTime 2008: The Most Exciting OnTime...
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When we started the development of OnTime 2008 immediately after the release of V7 in February of this year, we were targetting a Dec '07 to Feb '08 release window. In the past couple of months it became apparent that we could easily come in on the earlier...
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With the introduction of OnTime 2008's new Wiki functionality, we are extremely excited about the collection of tools that OnTime provides for managing projects in a single application suite: A Team Wiki allowing teams to collaborate on document creation...
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Today we are announcing the immediate availability of OnTime 2008 Beta! That's V8.0 for those of you keeping track making this the 8th generation of the OnTime software suite. We have added more than 60 new improvements and some of them, such as the new...
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Since the release of PhotoDrop a little more than a month ago, we've been quietly adding more and more features. Collectively, the new features are very exciting, so I wanted to take a moment to point them out: Public Album Browser - Now when you upload...
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This week, we attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference. As a Bronze sponsor of the event, we had a 10x20 booth in the Expo hall. Our booth was buzzing with people the entire time, but what was really cool is the shear number of Axosoft customers...
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Three months ago, I was pleased to announce that in the first calendar quarter of 2007, Axosoft sales of the specially priced 3-User version of OnTime generated $4,200 for various Axosoft charities . The pace of sales in the 2nd calendar quarter of 2007...
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As software developers and technologists, we often get wrapped up in the day-to-day heads down "feature" development of our products. Sometimes, this is great as the features we add are often the result of customer feedback and truly improve our offerings....
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I recently discovered Jeff Atwood's blog, CodingHorror.com and I have to say, I have been extremely impressed with the quality of articles and subject matter that Jeff writes about. His articles are consistently about interesting topics, thorough, well...
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As many of you know, we setup a geek marketing contest a while ago where anyone could submit an idea, a video, image or anything that might have some kind of viral effect to help Axosoft get some unusual marketing exposure. We had more than 60 submissions...
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A couple of years ago Dan and I spent a weekend developing a simple way to send large files over the web. We documented the 20 hours of development we spent on creating the file transfer service and the result, TransferBigFiles.com , turned out to be...
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Wow, I can't believe how many people have totally missed the significance of Apple's announcement about Safari for Windows. I've seen a dozen blogs and major web publications describe Apple's Safari for Windows as either "igniting another browser war"...
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Up to 10 TIMES Faster! If there's one word that could summarize OnTime V7.1 enhancements, it's Performance. As OnTime users continue to put more and more data into the OnTime system, the ability to retrieve that data in a timely fashion has become an...
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Fear The Bug As you may have heard, we've running a Geek Marketing Contest and putting up $5,000 for the best viral marketing idea we can find. While we were waiting for submissions to the Geek Marketing Contest, we decided to move forward with the creation...
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Recently, I called HP sales to find out if there was a place I could download the drivers for an HP Laptop I was considering purchasing. Since I hadn't yet purchased this computer yet, I figured it's a pre-sales call. I wanted to make sure the drivers...
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After yesterday's tech lunch, Tim Heuer , the local MS evangelist, came to our offices along with Scott Cate. We were chatting about some of the new technologies on the net including Amazon's S3 service. If you don't already know about Amazon's S3 , it's...
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For the past year or so, Scott Cate of MyKB.com (also the local head of the .NET user group), Matt Birmingham of New Amsterdam Consulting and I have been meeting every Wednesday at a local Chipotle for lunch. We talk about the tech industry, how we can...
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I have to say it. I've been pretty disappointed with our Geek Marketing Contest results so far. A little more than 30 marketing ideas have been submitted and nothing so far that has been worthy of a $5,000 prize. There is still plenty of time, but if...
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I just ran into a marketing flashback project that we had done a while back. A couple of years ago, in an attempt to create a viral marketing site for OnTime 2005, we came up with a funny web site, ShipSoftwareOnTime.com, which among other funny things...
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Since we announced our Geek Marketing Contest a couple of days ago, my geek radar is much more sensitive now. Angelo pointed to a number of articles that revolve around geek marketing, but lately, everything seems to be geek oriented. Just now, I saw...
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Axosoft does all kinds of marketing and advertising. We do Google AdWords, SEO optimization, print ads and other online ads. We spend a lot of money on these activities and we're always trying to find a better way to do it. The more efficient we can be...
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A little known secret: with the release of OnTime 2007, we introduced a specially priced 3-User version of OnTime for just $197 (a product that's worth about $600 - $199 per user x 3 Users). But here's the really cool part - we decided that for each of...
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Early on in the development of Axosoft's OnTime, I made the conscious decision to focus all of our marketing efforts on software development teams. But as many OnTime users have already noticed , the OnTime product is extremely flexible and can manage...
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Every now and then, I read a blog post that's more than just interesting. I thought I'd share a few with you. In the past couple of weeks, these posts have stood out for me: In the "Ship Software OnTime" department... Andrés Taylor writes about Top ten...
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With nearly 10 days to go in Q1 of 2007, Axosoft is already in the midst of another record-breaking quarter (our 14th record quarter out of just 15 quarters total - I know, it's hard for me to believe too). Besides being an exceptionally great financial...
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Yesterday, we launched the Axosoft Community Site . With over 50,000 users worldwide and rapidly growing, the OnTime user community is a sophisticated group of individuals who are some of the best software developers, testers and project managers in the...
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I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of OnTime 2007 for Windows, Web & VS.NET 2005. The new version adds a huge number of improvements over OnTime 2006 including new help desk incident tracking, a completely redesigned AJAX-based Web UI...
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Yesterday, I had a second chance to build a first impression of Microsoft's Vista. You might recall I installed Vista on my Dell laptop a couple of months ago and have been using it since. So far, my experience with Vista has been less than stellar. I've...
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February 20th. That's the date OnTime 2007 (V7.0) final-version will be released. This version is by far the largest set of improvements we've ever introduced in a major new release. I couldn't be more excited! We've been using the new Incident tracking...
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There have been a number of people asking about the lack of a 10-User Starter Pack in our new OnTime 2007 pricing . We've done this for several reasons. Currently, the OnTime Small Team Edition has a 10-user restriction, meaning if you want to go beyond...
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Yesterday was a tough day for me. You see, this past Saturday, all of a sudden I got this feeling that we were going the wrong direction with our OnTime 2007 pricing. If you read my posts, you might recall that I announced OnTime 2007 pricing and requested...
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Working with different software development teams over the years, it always amazed me to see the number of teams that use the same bug tracking tool to track requirements or customer feature requests and sometimes even support incidents . I don't mean...
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Here’s my list of favorite new features in OnTime 2007: New AJAX-Based OnTime Web Interface This one feature actually sums up more than 100 improvements in the OnTime 2007 Web UI. When we set out to create OnTime 2007, we wanted to make sure we...
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About a year and half ago, Dan and I had a crazy idea to see if we can build a complete, fully functioning web site to send large files of up to 1GB to someone (files that email programs typically reject) in just a weekend. After just 20 hours of development,...
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Robert Scoble just published an interview he did with me about a month ago: (This is his interview with me) (This is a demo of OnTime 2007) If you watch these videos, make sure you get to the end for a little special treat. Scoble has interviewed some...
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On Friday, Windows Vista RTM finally became available for download from the Subscriber Downloads section of Microsoft's MSDN site. I was really excited that finally, I'm going to get Vista installed on my new Dell D620 laptop. I had previously given up...
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Congrats to Microsoft for RTMing Windows Vista today! http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/windows-vista-releases-to-manufacturing.aspx If I'm not mistaken, it should be available for download on MSDN Subscriber downloads...
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In preparation for the OnTime 2007 Web Hosted rollout, we've made a number of upgrades to our data center infrastructure. A Little About Axosoft Data Center, Limelight Networks If you don't already know, we lease data center space from Limelight Networks...
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Wow. Within 2 business days of releasing OnTime 2007 Web Beta we had already hit the 200 account limit we had set for Beta 1. The response to the beta has been incredible. There was a period where we were getting more than 25 new account signups every...
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UPDATED: The pricing and edition information in this post is outdated. Please see this post to see the new pricing information for OnTime 2007. Just to be clear, we're still a ways away from the release of OnTime 2007. It's scheduled for Q1 of '07, but...
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We're approaching the 1 year anniversary of OnTime 2006 (V6.0) release, which was November 14th, 2005. For the past year, we've been working on some important enhancements that help teams ship software on time. Much of our time has also been focused on...
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Our good friends over at ComponentArt have started blogging: http://blogs.componentart.com/ If you don't know about ComponentArt and you're a developer, you should. They make some of the best ASP.NET controls on the market today. In fact, Axosoft has...
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In May of 2005, Axosoft pioneered a new pricing model that's definitely unique in our industry. We created a special “Small Team” edition of our software for companies that require fewer than 10 licenses of OnTime. For this group, we actually...
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There's a great book called the Innovator's Dilemma that talks about why new technologies cause great companies to fail. The principle reason of failure is that businesses define their business incorrectly. For example, car companies, airplane manufacturers...
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This past Wednesday, I had the opportunity to deliver a 10 minute presentation on “Shipping Software On Time” at a local event in Phoenix where Scott Guthrie (the “father” of ASP.NET) and Eric Sink (founder of SourceGear and author of “ Eric Sink on the...
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The other day, we decided to do a little fun experiment to see where our customers who use OnTime are on a world map. We decided to do this using Google's Map API service and loading up our customer database of over 5,000 companies to see how it all looks....
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What proof do I have to support my statement that “Global warming is a bunch of hogwash?” None, of course! Because if I actually tried to provide a shred of evidence, my whole argument would fall apart. That doesn't seem to stop many so-called “journalists”...
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The short version of this story is that OnTime Language packs are now available for OnTime V6.1.2. You can download them here . But the following story is a bit interesting and might be really useful if you're looking to do any localization... A few months...
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Axosoft has been developing software for software development for four years now. During that time, we have received numerous emails from clients telling us how OnTime has saved or re-energized their projects, how much they love the UI and the ability...
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ASP.NET Pro Magazine just announced their 2006 Reader's Choice winners and OnTime 2006 came in at the #1 spot beating TestTrack Pro, FogBugz, AQDevTeam, Active! Focus and Altova DiffDog. The great thing about this award is that the top products are picked...
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FINALLY! Apple announced their “Boot Camp” product today which allows for users to boot Windows XP on the new Intel-based Macs. Here is the link for details: http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/ I can't wait to punish Dell and HP (Compaq)...
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March 31st closed out Axosoft's 11th consecutive record quarter of revenues and profits. We've all been blown away with the results. Just at a time when we expected sales growth to slow down, we grew faster than ever before with more than a 60% increase...
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A quick note that Axosoft has released OnTime V6.1. This latest version adds a number of features that were frequently requested by customers including enhanced time tracking capabilities (using a new “Work Log” tab), enhanced custom reports...
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This is a story about understandings and ideas. Sometimes, when they collide great things can happen. Recently, I had a little idea, and once it was set into motion a big drama began to unfold. Over the next three days, amazing things were going to happen....
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This is a bit off topic for my usual posts, but I just saw a headline that read “ Google loses status as premium-priced Web stock ” and it made me mad. So you're telling me that at $350 per share and a PE of 68, Google is no longer a “Premium-Priced”...
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Axosoft is getting ready to launch Squeet, an email-based RSS-reader that requires no software installation of any kind. You simply login to your Squeet account to setup your RSS feeds: You can try it now without setting up an account. Just go to this...
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Last night we celebrated two major milestones in Axosoft's history: The launch of OnTime 2006 (V6.0), the 6th major release of this product On November 1st, OnTime hit a sales milestone of passing the $1 million mark We celebrated the OnTime 2006 launch...
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Every now and then, I come accross some really fantastic products that really jump out at me. The usual suspects such as Google Desktop, Virtual Earth and the like spread quickly and don't need my mention, but there are some other products that are truly...
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After the release of OnTime 2005, we set out our top 10 list for what we would love to have in the next major release of OnTime. Our top 10 list included some really hefty features which included “the most powerful workflow in our industry”,...
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Over the past serveral weeks, we've had a number of meetings regarding OnTime 2006 pricing. The general consensus has been that we would significantly increase our prices for OnTime 2006 accross the board. We had a lot of really good reasons for the justifiable...
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The feedback on OnTime 2006 Beta 1 has been amazing. Users tend to really love the new functionality, power and flexibility provided by inherited project settings, enhanced workflow, custom reports, field templates, required fields, improved security...
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With OnTime 2005, we introduced 3 new products: OnTime 2005 for VS.NET, Customer Portal and Enterprise Server. To represent each of these products, we decided to have a software box. So we had a total of 6 differen product boxes. That became a little...
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As we get closer to the release of OnTime 2006, one of my tasks has been to choose a box design and logo to represent the new version of the product. Our graphic artist, Bob McCarroll, is amazingly tallented and came up with a few designs for us to choose...
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OnTime 2006 (V6.0) Beta is here! OnTime is so much more than just a bug tracking application and this new beta adds tons of incredibly cool new functionality in this major release of OnTime. It's OnTime's 6th major release and it's by far, the biggest...
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Wow! If you read my blog, you already know we were attending this year's Professional Developers Conference which was held last week in Los Angeles, CA. What an amazing show. The whole team had such a great time. There was tons of drinking, partying and...
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Scott Hanselman has done a review of OnTime on his web site: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ReviewOnTimeDefectTrackerFromAxoSoft.aspx A few of my favorite quotes... “There is an SDK in the form of a rich Web Services interface...This is pretty powerful...
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As many of you know, Axosoft will have a 10x20 booth at this year's PDC. We've setup our booth so that we can demo the OnTime 2005 product line. Here's what to look for: We'll be doing short 10-minute demos of OnTime 2005 and possibly previewing the new...
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A Little History When I started working at Microsoft, I was blown away by its competitive nature. Microsoft competes to win and when it sets its focus on a target, the target has eventually become irrelevant within a short period of time. Microsoft and...
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We just released the latest version of OnTime 2005 integrated inside the VS.NET 2005 environment. For all those who are interested in simplifying your bug, feature and task tracking inside the VS.NET 2005 Beta 2 environment, you can do it now for free...
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Have you seen this ad? If you've seen this ad, it could have only been in one place: MSDN Magazine July 2005 Edition. The above text was the entire contents of the full-page ad in MSDN magazine. If you saw the ad, the question is, did you do it? Did you...
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I’m on my way back from the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I think my blood alcohol level is still above the legal limit. As I write this blog entry from row 7C of this Airbus 320 on an America West flight,...
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We've been quite busy at Axosoft. Contrary to what you might think we've been busy with (if you read my blogs), OnTime 2006 is what has been keeping us plugging away. I can't share much of the details, but I did want to let you guys know a couple of the...
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WOW! The demand for this service has been incredible. Sending large files on the Internet is apparently a big problem that is faced by most everyone. By the second day after launch, TransferBigFiles.com was using up more bandwidth each day than all of...
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20 hours. That's the amount of work we estimated each one of us would have to do to write the code, setup the database and move the servers for what would become TransferBigFiles.com. With that estimate in hand, we decided we'd work two 10-hour days:...
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Before writing the full story of what we did this past weekend to implement TransferBigFiles.com , I wanted to provide a quick guide on how the service works. As you can see from the screenshot above, the home page of this site is the main page used for...
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WE DID IT! Dan and I are sitting here in the data center right now and we just finished setting up the TransferBigFiles.com servers. Everything is live and ready to use. The full story will follow. In the mean time, check it out: http://www.transferbigfiles.com...
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Not a single line of code has been written, nothing has been tested, the hardware is not even in the right location, yet by 10pm on Sunday night (June 5th), we expect to launch the beta of TransferBigFiles.com . So why am I so confident that we'll be...
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When compared to most defect management systems available, the OnTime 2005 performance, especially when it comes to searching and filtering, is unmatched. But even though OnTime is faster than most competing products, as the size of your database grows...
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A few updates about our crazy project : We have received the Dell hardware we ordered! (it looks great, but it’s not setup). Dan and I have had 1 lunch meeting so far where we discussed the requirements (see below) We’ve picked the name “...
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We have ordered the hardware for our crazy project to help people transfer big files on the Internet. We decided to go with 1 main server for web and SQL and a separate, external 1.2 TB Network Attached Storage (NAS). This hardware layout will allow us...
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The other day, Dan (an Axosoft co-worker) and I were talking about a service we use to send large files to customers or to obtain large files from customers. The service is called yousendit.com and it works something like this: you go to a web site and...
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A lot of people have been asking me about a product roadmap for the OnTime Project Management system . I wanted to give you guys a quick preview of some of the new features under development in V5.1: Paste as Attachment - This cool new feature allows...
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I just picked up a copy of “ The Art of the Start ” by Guy Kawasaki (founder of Garage.com ). Just a few pages into it and I can already tell I'm going to love this book. Many of his suggestions are contrary to all the “common wisdom”...
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If you want to see some pretty cool marketing technique to promote a new Hitachi technology, check out this funny flash annimation: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html It's worth the 5 minutes of your time...
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Alright, for a while now I've been trying to figure out a good way for us to offer our products to small software development teams at a price they can afford. I think this past weekend, with a little help from friends at The Business of Software , I've...
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One of the most popular features of the OnTime 2005 product is its ability to fully customize the add/edit form. The standard OnTime Add/Edit form contains all the built-in fields and any custom fields you may have created. So here we see the standard...
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We often get asked by customers or potential customers how the OnTime 2005 product line compares to Microsoft's Team System. There are a number of differentiators between the products, but most recently with Microsoft's announcement of Team System Pricing...
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I've decided to start a series of posts for OnTime Tips & Tricks and best practices. This is the first in the series and it focuses on user permissions by project. We often have customers who's OnTime users have different roles on different projects....
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ASP.NET Pro is doing their annual Reader's Choice awards for the most popular tools in various categories. If you like the OnTime product line, be sure to vote for us. We are on the 5th page, under the “Project Management/Defect Tracking”...
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I just found this site http://babynamewizard.com which shows a graph of nearly 5,000 names and their usage percentages over the course of more than 100 years. It's incredible! You just start typing in “J” and it shows all names that start...
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I've been a Google Desktop user since early beta and I love the tool, but to my amazement, Google Desktop search results included my password protected AND encrypted Microsoft Excel files. The release version of Google desktop now includes an option not...
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I'm writing this from the San Jose International airport as we wait for our over-booked flight back to Phoenix. As usual, America West has oversold the plane and now they're offering all kinds of incentives for people to give up their seats. I digress....
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As Justin points out in his blog, the new Shuttle XPC system is a nice design in the PC world. Finally a PC manufacturer who's willing to break the mold, but even this system doesn't go nearly far enough. Apple is still far superior in its PC designs....
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There are over 100 Defect/Bug/Issue/Feature/Task tracking tools out there, but I want to know which are the most popular. Being the founder of one of the companies who makes one of these tools, I have some ideas of which are the most popular and which...
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For the past 10 years, I've been using Crystal Reports in one form or another in nearly every project I've been involved with and for the past 10 years, I must have damned that company on at least 200 different occasions. The latest damning happened just...
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Scott's newest product, EasySearchASP.NET allows you to easily incorporate a site wide search into any web site. It's incredibly powerful - much like Google, or better yet a “Mini” Google just for your site. One of the coolest features is...
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Jonas is a development team member at Axosoft. Check out his new blog ....
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My professional life currently revolves around a software development tool known as OnTime. Last night, we released the beta of OnTime 2005, which is an incredible leap over the functionality provided by OnTime 2004. I am extremely excited and proud of...
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I normally don’t blog about politics, but the Presidential race this year has gotten me thinking about the American Democracy and how we Americans pick the President of the United States. We all know that when we vote for the President, we’re...
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