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!