Alpha demo released to the public

A few days ago we gave a demo to the company showing many of the new features that will be released with the upcoming Standard Billing. This demo is in a presentation format with a few questions from the audience mixed in. It's about an hour and a half long and should give everybody a better idea as to what is going to be released.

Let me apologize in advance for the annoying beeping sound that you will hear in it. This was a problem with the recording that we wish did not happen but given the amount of content and the desire to allow our customers to view and give feedback, we decided to go ahead and release it.

For now, feel free to comment on this blog or send me a e-mail/tweet if you have any questions. We will soon be reorganizing our forums and will have a new home to discuss billing related ideas.

Here is the link: http://soapware-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/SWBillingWalkThru.wmv

Billing goes Alpha!!!

As of this week SOAPware's Standard Billing product has moved into the Alpha phase. What this means is that we are at the end of scheduled new development/coding. We have achieved all of the goals we set out to achieve and are now moving forward with the next phase in the project.

So what does Alpha really mean? What we mean by Alpha is that we are moving into a stage where we start preparing the application to be used by users outside of the company. It's where we start pulling everything together and make a number of very important decisions about the product. It's where we ramp up our documentation and support to make sure the proper foundation is there for the release. And of course, the most important aspect is that we continue to test and resolve issues that are found.

One of the most frequent questions we get here at SOAPware is when will users be able to install and use/test our new billing system. The Alpha phase isn't a good time to do that for many reasons, but the following phase (Beta) is. Once we move into the Beta phase we will start a closed Beta program and progress form there.

Let's take a moment and look at our schedule. Back in March I blogged about the Billing Release Schedule and talked a bit about dates etc. For SOAPware Standard Billing we said in the Winter of 2009. I'm happy to say that we are still very much on track to releasing this Winter.

To be more specific, I would like to move from the Alpha phase to the Beta phase in early September. Once we are in beta things become a bit more unpredictable. User feedback will certainly drive the process from there and will help determine just how close we are to release. So, let's all hope for a smooth Beta so that we can get this out there for everybody to use!

New Features in Scheduling...

A month or so ago I blogged about the new outlining functionality that we will introduce in Scheduling once our Standard Billing package is released. I wanted to spend this month talking towards another new feature in Scheduling that I'm sure many of you will be excited about.

When we originally wrote Scheduling we tried to keep it as basic and affordable as possible. This simplicity has helped Scheduling become one of the more popular products we have sold here at SOAPware. That simplicity though has also proven to be inadequate for sites dealing with larger volumes of appointments. With the Standard Billing release, we plan to address some of those issues.

Starting with Standard Billing, Scheduling will now be able to notify all clients of changes occurring on the Schedule. This change allows all clients to update their view automatically without requiring the user to refresh the screen. What this means is that at any given time, the Schedule that you seen on the screen is an accurate representation of your appointments.

I plan to demo this soon in a video that will hopefully be released in a couple weeks. If you would like to be notified when that video is released, please follow this blog or follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/SOAPWynne