Beta testers wanted!

We have been super busy working on a few new projects for the ITSO site recently and are feeling good about our general direction for the current Beta site, however we are looking for your input also.  We need additional beta testers to assist us in the ongoing testing of the site and to help us test new concepts, projects and ideas.

If you are interested and would like to become a part of our beta test group please get in touch here.

Update on ITSO Development Activity

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the ITSO blog, but now the holiday celebrations are well behind us it’s back to work as usual for the ITSO development team, and it’s no surprise that the new year brings with it new projects.  One of the reasons it’s been quiet around here of late is because we have been working on drafting the specs for the new product selection and research area in the IT Solution Optimizer.  We have known that this section has needed a large scale upgrade for a long time but we have always had other fires to fight, but now it’s time to finally tackle it.  The initial plans are shaping up to be encouraging and we are expecting to combine product selection with some pretty cool peer data intelligence to add even more insight for the IT project manager when deciding what products to select for any given project type.  If the project gets a final sign-off I expect a beta version within the next 2-3 months.

I’ll provide updates and we move forward and if any of you would like to take part in user interviews to help us guide this project forward with your real world experience please get in touch, we would love to hear from you.

Happy Holidays from the ITSO Team!

Happy Holidays from the IT Solution Optimizer development and operations team!  We are very greatful for your continued use of the ITSO site and wish you all a very Happy Holiday season and a prosperous New Year.  

We look forward to bringing you even more enhancements in 2009 and can’t wait to unleash our first Version 1.0, finally coming out of Beta. 

All the best from us all here in Portland, Or. and please remember to have a safe and happy holiday season.

IT Solution Optimizer Tour on Vimeo

I posted earlier about our new ITSO demo video on the ITSolutionOptimizer.com site but now we have opted to publish it on Vimeo so users can share and embed it to their hearts content.  Posting it on Vimeo also takes the load off our servers and maintains bandwidth for use of the application.

Check it out:

ITSO Site Video Tour

We have finally put together a video tour of the ITSO product to help new and perspective users get a better understanding of what the site does and how it can help in the development of your IT projects.  We tried as well as we could to make the video as streamlined as possible so it’s certainly no “all incompasing” overview of the entire ITSO feature set, but we hope it adds to the understanding of the product.  

Unfortunately even though we’ve tried to streamline the video and intentially only briefly touch on most of the sites features, the video is still over 15 minutes long, so you may want to throw some popcorn in the microwave before hitting play on this one….

Here’s the video if you are interested in checking it out.

Looking for your Feedback

We’ve been doing a lot of work recently on iterative builds to make the ITSO site better; we’ve been adding features, fixing usability issues and bugs, and making performance enhancements.  However, all of this work means nothing without you, the ITSO user.  So we’re looking for your feedback on the latest changes of the site, we also want to hear about what you think would make the site better for you.  To send your feedback directly to the development team click on this link.

We look forward to hearing you opinions.

Research Content Enhancements

We’ve recently made the some pretty significant upgrades to the Content Research feature within the Design Phase of the ITSO project process.  The Content Research library allows you to search the web using a set of predefined context based search teams that are based on the product category that you’re working in at the time.  

You can use the Content Research library to search for product information, web content, whitepapers and other helpful project related information.  Once you have located content you may access it directly or store it for future reading in your Content Clipboard, a storage repository within your ITSO project.  The content is then accessible to all project users and is also located in your Final Project Report.  

The recent enhancements should make the content more relevant and ultimately help you further optimize your IT projects!

Simplified Sign-Up

OK, so this may not be exactly news worthy for existing ITSO users, but something we’ve been working to improve over time is the sign-up experience.  The result is that we have been able to significantly decrease the sign-up process from 3 pages, to only 6 required fields.  The upside here for existing users is that the initiative to simplify the site in other areas will continue throughout the site so that we can further improve the experience and continue to make the site efficient in what it does for you.

Update on the last week of activities

Things may seem to have appeared quiet around here for the last week or so.  The ITSO team have been hunkering down planning for the next major release of the site, as well as catching up on the less exciting aspects of our work such as documentation and process improvement.   

However, we haven’t stopped working on the current version of the site.  We have been slowly rolling out some minor enhancements such as the new timeline phase improvements that now allows for the much requested “Create Custom Milestone” feature.  This does exactly what it sounds like it should do; it allows users to add an infinite number of custom milestones to their project in addition to the phases that are required.  The results are compiled into the Final Project Report as well as available via the site by the way of a nicely laid out Gantt chart allowing you and your team to visualize your projects timeline.  

We expect we may build on to this area in the future allowing the addition of such things like; iCalendar export to Outlook, email notifications, upcoming and past due alerts and appending team members to milestones.  These features will be decided on as part of the next release and I will share a partial list of what we expect to build soon hopefully.

New Build Making It’s Debut Today

The latest build that was announced earlier this week will finally make it’s debut at the end of the day today.  We’ve been busy testing the new features (see a full list in the post below) and we’re now ready to release them into the wild.  We expect, as always, there may be teething problems, but based on the testing conducted this week we’re confident that the new changes and additions will add considerable value to the existing site for our users.  

Check back later today to see the new build live around 5:00 p.m. PST.