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TECH TALK
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THE ROAD AHEAD
The lessons learned from
creating Clients & Profits ASAP, a web-based studio
manager, in 2004 helped its designer, Mark Robillard,
make the My Clients & Profits! X upgrade better.
Lesson #1
- Don’t Reinvent The Wheel “My original idea
for ASAP was to completely rethink the C&P model of
agency management. I spent six months trying to make it
deliberately different, but in the end it didn’t
work better. After months of research, I couldn’t
design a work flow that tracked jobs, costs, and billings
with fewer steps and less complexity. So I had to reorient
my thinking back to the Clients & Profits, not because
it was familiar, but because it was proven to work.”
That same thinking applied to the My C&P! X upgrade.
“Rather than throw out the design, I kept what had
proven to work and focused on improving the areas that
didn’t.”
Lesson #2
- Don’t Overcomplicate The urge to add more and
more features — feature creep — is almost
overpowering for sofware developers. “The ego that
wants to show off your skills sometimes beats up your
common sense, so features get added that don’t add
much value.” At its worst, feature creep causes
decent programs to collapse under its own dead weight,
alienating loyal users who just want the new version to
work better than the old one.
Lesson #3
- Be User-Focused “There just wasn’t any point
to making My C&P! X different just to be different,”
Robillard says. “It had to work better for the creatives
who need to quickly check on jobs, costs, and billings
when they’re out of the office.” The newly
redesigned My C&P! X home page now loads in seconds
and acts like a creative dashboard, showing the job hot
sheet and today’s deadlines. “The page has
menus that work just like C&P X, so the user doesn’t
have to adjust the way they work when they’re on
the road.”
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By Chris
Lawrence
Last Spring, we focused on cleaning up and getting organized. Now
that your shop is a mean lean IT-machine, it’s time to consider
some new technologies.
• Plan for new upgrades The upcoming Clients
& Profits X 10.1 upgrade (planned for 1Q 2007) supports the
MySQL 5.0 Community Edition (previously, they had to purchase the
Pro Certified Server) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.
Both are free, fast, easy to install, and well-supported. SQL databases,
however, definitely require some extra know-how, but they reward
you with better performance, data reliability, and powerful management
tools. Also, the C&P Helpdesk doesn’t offer SQL tech support.
You will need an experienced DBA to configure and maintain your
system.
• Plan for new hardware Hardware manufacturers
are giving IT managers plenty to look forward to (other than exploding
laptop batteries). Steve Jobs announced several new products at
the recent Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
They’ve completed their transition over to Intel chips by
offering the Mac Pro (replaces and looks almost identical to the
Power Mac G5). The standard configuration includes two dual-core
Intel Xeon processors at 2.66GHz
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each. That’s a lot
of speed—far more than C&P needs, to be honest. Most users
will do great with an iMac or Mac Mini, but for the video editor
or Photoshop wizard who needs a new rig anyway, they’ll be
able to enter their timecard at light-speed.
The Xserve also got the Intel treatment with dual 2.0GHz dual-core
Xeon processors. Much like the Mac Pro, it’s far more powerful
than necessary for only hosting a C&P database, but for a shop
in need of a new file server with plenty of power to handle a variety
of server tasks, the new Xserve is a good choice (look for it in
October).
• Keep an eye on Leopard Mac OS X 10.5,
aka Leopard, is planned for release in 2007. It promises a built-in
system backup utility, with typical Apple style, called Time Machine.
A new feature, Spaces, will allow you to have multiple workspaces
going at once. Gone will be the days of a dozen applications open
at once and stacked on top of each other; you’ll be able to
spread them out across several virtual workspaces. This could be
a real benefit for C&P users. The new OS is also optimized for
the new Intel-based Macs, so should run much faster.
Chris Lawrence is Clients & Profits' CIO. |
