As a small company that has experienced tremendous growth over the last couple of years we’ve had to come up with innovative ways to manage our expanding team. Inspiration struck after reading Panic’s post about their status board. When I saw that, I immediately knew we needed something along those lines. Although it took some convincing to get other folks on board, I saw value in easily answering questions that come up almost every day: “What is our tech support email load today?,” “What new bugs reports or feature requests are coming in?,” “How are our sales?,” “What is the Twitterverse saying about us?,” and of course, “What’s the weather like in your neck of the woods?” Before we made our status board we had access to those various bits of information, but it was by no means aggregated. So this is what our status board does.
The status board is interactive. For listed bugs and feature requests, I can click (or tap) on them and be taken to the appropriate place in our bug tracking software; Twitter mentions take you to Twitter and so on. The page also has different views. One each for “Owner,” “Manager,” “Support,” and one devoted just to “Email.” Access and permissions are controlled through our LDAP server and allows our web guy to customize it for different needs. We’ve also optimized the layout for viewing on iPad. The “Email” view has some great graphics:
We haven’t yet added a calendar module, but that should be pretty straightforward since we are now using a shared Google calendar. Since we need historical email stats we have a script that examines the exim logs and stores the relevant info a database. The weather comes from Weather Underground and the sales module comes from our own database for our web store. I can imagine that we will probably be adding a module for LiveChat in the future.
One thing to note: this has not taken away resources for iBank and iBank for iPad, nor iBiz. Our web guy, Jon, does all of this. Speaking of iBank for iPad, we are making good progress and I’m very excited about the app. Once some of the views get a little more polish we will be able to show some screenshots and talk about how we aggregate data.
Happy Holidays.
Ian
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That is pretty cool… with some tweaking I am sure something like that could be marketable to small/medium sized businesses. Always enjoy reading the blog… just wish there were more posts/updates. Have a good Christmas.
Thanks for the update. Happy Holidays.
Just got an email from Quicken. It states that Quicken Mac 2007 will be compatible with Lion by this Spring. Questions: Can iBank compete,and do we believe Intuit will follow through?
That is certainly cool… why oh why isn’t the iBank interface as clean and beautiful as that, especially in the visual data area?
Unfortunately, Intuit seems to have the most complete Mac financial software available. As much as I dislike Intuit, if they deliver an ancient Quicken that continues to work, they’ll probably keep me as a customer because other software companies haven’t delivered something that meets my needs. The sad thing is they’ll probably charge everyone $70 for a 5-year-old application with zero improvements or bug fixes and we’ll be forced to “upgrade” if we still want to do online downloads and bill pay.
Intuit will probably deliver, but they’ll deliver the minimum possible to extract $70 annually and the sad thing is I’ll probably pay it because my only other viable choice is to put Windows and Parallels on my Mac and run Quicken for Windows.
Hi,
That panel is pretty snazzy! And it’s chock full o’ good business info. I could use something like that just for my life!
Best wishes for the Holidays to all the team. Here’s to your future!
Adèle
Hi. I trust you’ll excuse my evident bias, as I handle IGG’s marketing. But to answer Donna’s question above (“Can iBank compete with Quicken?”), I’d like to say: it already does. As to whether Intuit will follow through on Lion compatibility? I presume they will, but they’ll be patching a five-year-old app – next year – to work on this year’s OS X. iBank 4 is Lion-ready now, and has been since 10.7 was released.
Scott,
The fact is, I really want iBank to succeed.
Some have stated that Intuit is just “rejiggering a 5 yr old app and including parts of rosetta to make it work under Lion”. I say so what? I’m still using Quicken Mac 2005 and it literally does EVERYTHING I need. There were no upgrades to 2006 or 2007 that added much value – the upgrades were just another way for Intuit to extract more dollars from existing customers so I never upgraded until forced to do do. I have 22 years worth of data including lots of investment transactions and have no problems with any of it. I cannot get the reports I need, the correct investment tracking, and global searching from iBank. And the clunky data entry is still a major problem.
My point is, if the Lion compatible Quicken works before iBank fixes its many bugs and issues I can finally give up on entering my data twice. I truly want iBank to work because Quicken forced folks to buy an upgrade every third year without adding much of anything new, but if the features that people have been requesting in iBank for a very long time (sometimes more than 2 years), don’t get implemented before this Spring, I will be reluctantly jumping back to Intuit much as I hate the thought.
Donna,
Your post is so eerie, because it sounds exactly like MY situation! I have been doing double data-entry between Quicken and iBank for the last 3 months, and iBank has a looooong way to go to catch up to Quicken.
It’s such a shame that IGG Software is spending all of their time on this silly iPad app, instead of actually working on iBank by FIXING THE HUNDREDS OF BUGS and adding the DOZENS OF MISSING FEATURES in iBank!
It’s so disheartening that neither IGG Software nor Intuit listens to their customers and takes their input seriously! I don’t recall any IGG Software customers asking for an iPad version of iBank, but I do recall hundreds of customers asking for missing features implemented & bugs fixed.
We are all between a rock and a hard place here. Not sure whether I’m going to stick with Quicken or switch to iBank. Quicken is certainly the vastly superior product at this point, but can Intuit actually deliver on their promise of a Lion-compatible Quicken??
No requests for an iPad app??? You have got to be joking. A quick look at the forum shows it is a popular request and has been for some time. I for one, can’t wait for it. There are also things in iBank that need to be added and improved. But for right now, I think the iBank family is by far the best thing going for Mac financial software. As I’m sure IGG and every other company knows, if something better comes along, people will leave. So cut them a break and quit expecting them to design software that is customized to exactly what you want. Accept iBank, make suggestions and constructive criticism, and wait for improvements, or go complain to Intuit and see where that gets you, or write your own apps and see if people leave iBank for you.
I am curious how iBank for iPad is intended to integrate with the other iBank products. Today I use iBank on the Mac as the repository for all my financial transactions. I have iBank Mobile that I use when I travel to record transactions on the road. Each has its unique role and they work together well. I don’t see how the iPad version fits in. It seems too full featured to be limited to entering transactions while traveling. While it may be as full featured as the desktop version, I don’t see how it can be used to export transactions to Excel for analysis or how to keep backup copies of my precious financial data. The notion of having a version of my data that is complete and full featured that I can easily carry with me has an appeal, but I see few instances in which I would actually need that.
Curious what others think.
Sorry can’t consider a mobile app until the basic desktop product handles certain things better, including a number of investment transactions and especially corporate spinoffs, where Quicken easily handles the necessary tax-basis adjustments, but iBank just fails. I have switched from Quicken to iBank but unless these issues are dealt with, I’ll switch back if Intuit ever replaces the Quicken Mac 2007 app with something like what *their* users have been telling them they need. Won’t even consider an iBank mobile app until this settles out.