Click Happenings

On any given day, I’m involved in a broad array of activities and projects here in the Beaverton office. This allows me a perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise get if focused on a single project. This horizontal awareness allows me to see trends and patterns and I thought I’d share some of them with you today. I encourage you to participate in the discussion by either commenting on this post, or posting to the forums at http://forums.ClickCommerce.com.

We’re growing
This is an easy one to notice. Over the past few months, we’ve increased staff in Professional Services, Applications, and even our Sales team. Having suffered through the rapid contraction in the software market during the Dot Com crash a decade ago, it feels good to share the excitement of a growing organization. Growth does pose it’s own challenges related to bringing the new talent up to speed but it’s a good problem to have. All of this means good things for you as we continue to grow to meet demand.

Upgrades are going strong
Your peer institutions are active on the upgrade front. While the majority have already made the leap to Extranet 5.6 or 5.7, there are still many needing to make the leap. We’re also seeing upgrade efforts from those already on Extranet 5.6 moving to Extranet 5.7.1. It’s great to see such an active customer base and this effort leaves you well prepared for the move to Extranet 5.8 (more on that release a bit later). I assume this momentum is driven by the draw of new and improved features but I’m sure another motivation is to stay current so that our support team can better address your concerns. Whatever the reason, staying current increases your choices in how you approach the configuration of your site.

Cool things are coming
The release of Extranet 5.8 is roughly a month away and in addition to the many fixes and optimizations, I’m looking forward to several of the enhancements it brings. The full list can be found on the Extranet 5.8.0 Details page at ClickCommerce.com. Here are a few of my personal favorites:

• Corrections to Multi-Solution Support in Process Studio.  I explored this feature when it was introduced as a technology preview in Extranet 5.6, and even posted about it. My trial at that time revealed a small number of serious issues that have now been addressed in Extranet 5.8. I’m excited to give it a try again.
• Improved paging of Project Listing, Project Log, and Reviewer Note components. One of the earlier implementation patterns within the Extranet product was to use full page refreshes when paging through listed results. From a performance perspective, this is less than ideal. I recently saw a demonstration of the improvements in 5.8 to use AJAX to only update the list itself on a paging request. This looks and feels so much better. As an added bonus, the end user will also be able to specify their preferred page size.
• Other improvements to the Project Listing component include the ability to directly navigate to a specific SmartForm step and directly execute activities.
• The ability to configure how the Activity links on a project workspace are grouped and ordered.
• Definitions for Scheduled Background Tasks and Web Service Interfaces in source control can now be included in configuration updates. Though there are still a couple items remaining on my wish list in this area, this is excellent news.
• Web Services are getting Pre and Post script hooks! Need I say more? There are countless ways this could be leveraged so I’m looking forward to this enhancement.

New Techniques Are Emerging
We’re always looking for better ways to accomplish our goals at any given moment, there are new approaches being evaluated and perfected. Here are some examples that are likely to be topics at C3DF this September:

• The Applications team is perfecting a new approach to how views are built which involves the use of HTML Lists instead of Tables. This is an evolutionary step beyond the techniques presented by Rob Anderson at C3DF 2010 the makes view maintenance significantly easier.
• In support of our Animal Operations solution, we’ve extended our use of SQL Server Reporting Services to perform server-side generation of Invoices as a PDF document. This is also the first phase of a common Invoicing Module that I hope will eventually be applicable to other Invoicing needs as well.
• Other efforts are aimed at improving how separate stores communicate with each other, handling large lists, and the parallel amendment process I posted about earlier.

Click Solutions are growing in prominence at the Enterprise level
Since our integration into Huron, we’ve been able to strengthen our combined expertise in the market and we’ve been delighted in our increased ability to address needs across the broader enterprise. This has long been a goal of ours and it’s here. We’re already exploring new offerings and implementation approaches to meet this new demand.

Excitement is building for the upcoming C3 Conference in Boulder
I anticipate that the agenda will be posted to ClickCommerce.com very soon and registrations are already flying in. It’s going to be a great conference with expanded discussion time and I hope to see you all there.

---

I could go on but that’s enough for now. Let me know if this is the kind of newsy news you’d like to see me continue to post or if there are any other topics you’ve been hoping to see discussed.

Cheers!