Coming Soon: Save your Custom Review Criteria

We’ve been asked several times now if there’s a way to save product review criteria and reuse it for future projects.  We are aware that many of you use standardized criteria lists as a requirement and use this criteria to review hardware and software prior to selecting certain products for purchase.   We are also aware that it’s currently a chore to re-enter this criteria for each project that you create within the ITSO site.  Because of this need, and obvious inconvenience that is created by the application, we are planning to fix it in an upcoming release that will be online shortly.  Until we get this programmed and tested, please hang tight and you’ll soon be able to save custom review criteria for all your projects, saving you a lot of time in the future.

New Feature: Solution Provider Database

Another new addition that we have been working on over the last few months as part of the new Beta release, and is now live on the new site is the Solution Provider database.  The feature is located in the Design Phase along with our vast Hardware and Software database and functions in a very similar manor.  However rather than filtering on specs and technical criteria as the categories mentioned above, the Solution Provider Database allows users to locate partners for their projects by filtering them using the following criteria:

• Certifications
• Alliances
• Geograpic location
• Industry focus
• Services provided 
• Years in business
• and more…

We think this will be a good addition to the site and will compliment the Hardware and Software databases very well as it provides pre-qualified solution providers in one easy look-up location.  
 

We currently have around 300 major SP’s populated in the database but expect to complete our initial goal of 1000 very soon.  We will continue to update and add to the database and will also be looking into allowing users to review and rate SP’s in the future.

 

New Feature: Success Metrics Dashboard

As we launched the new Beta version of ITSO on Monday we also made available a handful of new features.  One of these is a feature we are calling the Success Metrics Dashboard.  

We’re particularly excited about this addition to the ITSO tool set as we feel it truly exploits the value of the ITSO project database by allowing users to see how successful their projects are likely to be based on an aggregate of other ITSO projects performed by your peers.  

To do this we take projects of the same type and size and apply some database magic along with a handful of pretty powerful algorithms to predict the possible success score of your project.  In addition to this technical wizardry we also show neat peer feedback such as: common lessons learned, product categories used in successful projects, things to consider doing differently, likelihood of achieving project objectives, and a great deal more that will to make you stop and think before kicking off your projects.  

Our goal is that this feature will save you the time, money and face that go into less than optimal project results, and we believe that giving you the ability to apply the experience of the masses, you will be on your way to optimizing your IT operations. 

The Success Metrics Dashboard is already being recieved to rave reviews in user acceptance tests and user interviews, and while we feel this feature already has a huge amount to offer, we also know we have only just scratched the surface of it’s potential.  Over the next months we will continue to improve this feature along with many others to bring you a truly exceptional experience.

New ITSO Beta goes live today!

Thanks to the hard work of the ITSO development team and other key contributors the new Beta site is ready to roll.

We’ve greatly enhanced the user experience as well as added a vast array of new features to bring increased value to the ITSO community. Here’s a list of some of the enhancements:

• New homepage design and improved content
• Enhanced UI & improved overall user experience
• Easier to read and print final project reports
• Addition of Success Metrics feature
• Addition of Solution Provider database
• Improved onscreen instructions and instructions interface
• Load time improvements to peer charts and pages in general
• Significantly more Peer Data; now utilizing over 30,000 projects
• Over 200 additional enhancements

I’ll write more about several of these new features over the next week or so as time prevails, until then feel free to take a look at what’s new and send me your thoughts.

New features being tested in Production

As testing is underway this week users of the ITSO site may see some new features popping up in the production environment.  This is a result of so much being done to improve the application in the new release and our need to get things right!  In order to get things right we will, from time to time, be testing new features on the live site.  Some of these features are small and may go unnoticed, others like the Success Metrics project are larger initiatives and if you are lucky enough to get a glimpse you will see that we are working on some pretty exciting things.  In the meantime I have my fingers crossed that everything goes to plan this week.  If you do notice differences to the site please be patient with the functionality, we still have gremlins that we are trying to get out of the system.

ITSO to be Chrome compatible

It’s always great to see new competition come along for commonly used software products as it pushes innovation and makes the world a better place for users.  That’s why we’re excited to see that Google has launched their own web browser to complete with the Firefox’s and IE’s of the world.

The downside however is that web designers and developers now have a new browser to support with it’s own personality when it comes to displaying pages, creating a little more work and forcing new considerations.  Of course the ITSO team is no different and we have been testing the upcoming ITSO release with the new Google Chrome.  The result is we’ve found a handful of minor issues that hinder the display of certain pages and we’ve already been busy fixing them – not that we didn’t already have our hands full!

I’m pleased to announce that our new release will be fully Chrome compatible when we release the next generation beta site next week!  We’re also excited to see what new innovations are in store so we can take advantage of them to improve the ITSO experience of our users.  I am sure that now Google has joined the party the speed of innovation is only set to accelerate!

Testing for the next ITSO release & iGoogle RSS Widget

Since it’s somewhat of a slow news week, given that we are all busy testing the new release of the next generation ITSO beta site, I don’t have all that much to report.  However next week will be our final testing week and shortly thereafter we’ll launch the new codebase, making the site public for all to see…  Watch this space for new feature announcements, there should be a slew of information coming soon.

Since things are slow on the ITSO blog front for now, I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that you can follow ITSO product activities by adding this blog to your iGoogle homepage as an RSS Widget. Doing so will ensure that you’ll never miss a beat.  Click the icon below to add us now.

ITSO Community Statistics Profile

ITSO users can now view basic ITSO community project statistics with the release of the updated ITSO Community Statistics PDF that’s available on the ITSO site as of today.

The PDF highlights the following project statistics to give you a clearer idea of what projects are being conducted by the ITSO user community:

• Project Types by Popularity
• Average Spend by Project Category
• Project Objective Categories by Popularity
• Average Project Budgets
• ITSO User Company Size Distributions
• Typical Project Initiators by Job Title

We look to build these views over time with the development of more interactive projects such as the Project Trends Dashboard and the Peer Data Dashboard.  Both of these projects will allow ITSO users to get deeper insight into the ITSO community to help plan future projects and be better informed about what your industry is doing in IT.   Watch this space for more…

View the ITSO Community Statistics PDF here.