At CODA we’ve been closely following the recent announcements from Steve Jobs to make the iPhone a groundbreaking mobile device for the enterprise. As development on CODA 2go continues we can see huge benefits for customers by exploiting the strengths of both force.com as a platform and the iPhone as an advanced mobile client. Apple would seem to have addressed the major obstacles that have prevented iPhone adoption in the Enterprise and, if that’s the case, we can take advantage of the rich, full browser capabilities that is core functionality of the device.

So how does this apply to the world of financial accounting? Read the rest of this entry »

If you are familiar with our project through previous blogs you will be aware that the term “Velocity” in the Agile methodology refers to how many points of work the team can get
through in a given sprint. The higher the value, the more deliverable is the sprint. The easiest way to increase this as you would imagine is additional team members, however process improvement and increased effectiveness within the team can also help. Thus I am pleased to say that due to some new tooling around the Force.com Metadata API (part of the Development as a Service feature set) we been able to add an additional point to our sprints!

Not to be out done by Salesforce we’ve had a go at developing some of our own tooling. In doing so we have now added another form of Velocity to the sprint! This is in the form of the co-incidentally named Apache Velocity templating tool. Although it is still early days, through building our own set of Velocity templates we have started to reduce the amount of repetitive and ‘boiler plate’ coding we have been performing. Which does also reduce the possibility of errors, and as such improves quality.  To integrate Force.com into Apache Velocity, we have used an open source tool named Force Velocity.

Stephen, one of our developers, has developed a template that generates an Apex class that provides the same functionality as the DescribeSObject API call not currently available in Apex Code at present. Gareth, our Help author is also interested in understanding if it can help reduce duplication in the online help when field information is documented.

So who knows - maybe in a future blog we will start to see how Apache Velocity is impacting our own sprint Velocity in very real way!

A vital part of any application, especially a business app that will be used by many different people of different capabilities and background, is the Help system. CODA prides itself on its online, context-sensitive Help functionality for its on-premise applications, so we were determined to produce the same if not better for CODA 2go on the Force.com platform.

Gareth, from our award winning Technical Documentation team, tells how we did it… Read the rest of this entry »

As the launch of CODA 2go, slated for Dreamforce Europe in early May, approches, we are now growing up the ‘go to market’ team by recruiting a dedicated team of sales, marketing and web professionals to cope with market demand.

CODA’s new international accounting system, CODA 2go, will provide companies of all sizes with financials on demand built natively and hosted on the salesforce.com platform and fully integrated with the market-leading CRM (customer relationship management) system . Early interest has been massive, particularly from existing salesforce.com users.

The new recruits will join a dedicated team within CODA focusing on the on-demand market. The extreme flexibility of the design of CODA 2go will enable it to address the accounting system needs of a huge range of customers – from those with just tens of employees to those with tens of thousands.

The first release of CODA 2go, built on Force.com, salesforce.com’s Platform-as-a-Service, will address the end-to-end sales invoicing process. It enables users to create an invoice from within the CRM software at the click of a button and post the transaction to their sales ledger, simplifying the sales process. Users will be able to turn sales orders in their Salesforce CRM applications into cash more efficiently, manage customer accounts better and reduce working capital requirements

We’ve started demoing the early product with internal and external people, and this week (5th/6th March) we’re going to be showing it to a global team of Salesforce executives in San Francisco, which is really exciting. The more we do this, the more we highlight how powerful this application is going to be, and also what benefits we’ve gained from being on the Force.com platform.

For example, in building our on-premise application release, Neon, we developed a new workflow system from scratch – and to be honest our development team did a really awesome job. But on Force.com, we just had to plug CODA 2go into the existing workflow that comes with the platform.

It’s a similar story with reporting – instead of having to build a reporting tool or data dictionaries into standard BI-type tools, they are already there with the platform. So that way we’ve saved loads of time and been able to focus more on getting the fundamental design right, and on meeting the challenges inherent with building a finance application in a SaaS world, instead of just a CRM…