We are very excited as we start to get feedback from our early adopters who are helping us to ensure that the functionality and useability of CODA 2go meets their business requirements. The application is being tested by a number of carefully selected companies in the UK and US. We have been talking with these companies for some months and based on specific criteria around their type of business and their needs, we have released the application to them.

CyberSafe is one example. As a security software vendor, they have a requirement for an application which supports their software sales, by producing invoices from quotations so they don’t have to keep rekeying the information into Sage.

Talking to Tim Alsop, Technical Director of CyberSafe this morning, so far CODA 2go seems a great fit. Initial feedback from Tim is really going to help us to maximize the useability of the application for those people who are used to the Salesforce way of working. Tim has made some really interesting points around where functionality should be situated on the page so that Salesforce users will recognize it immediately. These sorts of comments are really going to ensure that the application is totally intuitive and therefore quick to learn, which is obviously extremely important to a busy finance department. We’re looking forward to more feedback!

Great excitement here at CODA over recent weeks as the first version of CODA 2go has now been provisioned to the first early adopters.  This is the result of considerable effort from both the CODA and salesforce.com development teams to get this automated process working smoothly, so congratulations to all those involved in this landmark event. 

The earlier adopters receive a fully packaged version of ‘Order to Cash’ application provisioned into their own dedicated test environment via the trialforce facility from salesforce.com. 

The trial includes:
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- The complete V1 ‘Order to Cash’ application running 100% natively on force.com and integrated ‘out of the box’ with salesforce Account, Opportunity and Product objects.
- Comprehensive supporting user documentation and help systems to guide users through their exploration and testing of the application.
- Pre-populated test data including sample Chart of Accounts, Invoices, Credit Notes, Receipts, Journals and Reports so users can instantly explore the application without any additional setup.
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We’re now working closely with these early adopters to gather their feedback and prepare for general availability.

On the day that the new 3G iPhone finally launches in the UK, I thought it would be fun to show that we have got CODA 2go running not just on an iPhone (see previous post) but also now on a Blackberry.

Here you can see a view of a customer account, and then the menu of actions available to the me:

 

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A commentator to one of our recent posts, Getting Agile, asked for more perspective on our development time frame and resources. Following our statement that we have had a team of 14 people working for over 6 months to get CODA 2go product released, he stated that “This is the same sort of time frame I would expect from a ‘traditional’ approach and/or like one based upon .NET. This may be agile but it is not what I would call rapid.”

I think a definition of ‘team’ and the product we are creating will provide some depth to the high level answer I gave at recent Tour de Force events:

At least 14 people have ‘worked on’ CODA 2go. This team consists of Product Management, Architects, Functional and Tecchnical Designers, Programmers, Automated Test Engineers, Testing Engineers, Documentation and Marketing. If you add in legal and corporate representatives, the team would rise above that. However, the core scrum team actually producing the product itself consists of 9 people (5 programmers, 3 testers and 1 on documentation). Other individuals are working on this project as well as others.

Not forgetting, of course, that the accounting knowledge and design brought to bear by the team builds on nearly 30 years of intellectual property represented by CODA. We are a 600 person, 14 country organization, part of the 5th largest midrange software author globally, Unit 4 Agresso.

In the 6 months, the team has created an all new, multi-company, multi-lingual, multi-currency accounting service on Force.com. Not only is it seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but it has an extensive workflow engine, deployment to mobile clients (check out the demos running on BlackBerry and iPhone) and many other advanced features. The application has been stress tested, carries full automated regression testing for future releases and we have created and documented pattern based coding  and best practices for developing on Force.com.

I believe that the benefits we have obtained and the speed of delivery are far more than agile, they are revolutionary.

At the same time as the application has been developed, the extended team has been part of the creation of the business model for Platform as a Service (PaaS) with Salesforce.com as well as creating the legal and operational framework around delivering applications in a PaaS environment.

There are many things that an international application developer like CODA will not cut corners on. Right from the design through the coding and testing and having a full time documenter on the project. What we have created and will continue to build, on is a fully scaleable, unified international accounting solution. I really don’t think you will find many world class business applications built in such an aggressive timescale.

Following on from our post on CODA 2go and Google Apps integration, one of the opportunities I’m excited about is taking the ability to securely pull and push data from force.com into a Google Gadget and combine that with the ability to easily push Gadgets into the iGoogle Portal. 

 

The result would be an already widely used and accepted ‘home page’ that could also include key metrics and reports from back office systems.   Here’s an example of key financial information pushed to iGoogle via Gadgets with data sourced from CODA 2go on force.com .  This is all because we’ll have access to data in a ‘mash-up enabled’ environment.  Exciting stuff!

 

 

Following the recent launch of the Salesforce and Google Apps offerings, we have prototyped our own CODA 2go-specific Google Apps integration! This has been built using a Google Gadget, Apex code and Visualforce and the result has got us and everyone we demonstrated it to at Dreamforce very excited about the possibilities this proof of concept opens up.

Our experience of producing finance software over decades is that accountants love manipulating transactions in spreadsheets! The success of our on-premise CODA-XL product (which extends Microsoft Excel) has been outstanding, with virtually all customer organisations adopting it enthusiastically. Now in the on-demand world we have produced an equivalent solution that uses Google Spreadsheets and Force.com.

The initial prototype can be used to perform a Cost Allocation over extracted transaction details from the CODA 2go product. The user can then apportion new values by editing the cells used by formulas in the spreadsheet; we then post back the results in the form of a journal back into CODA 2go from within the Google Spreadsheet user interface via a Visualforce-powered Google Gadget!

The feedback from prospects, analysts and the guys at Salesforce has proved that this is yet another feature we can offer with CODA 2go that will keep the accountants smiling…

Nearly a week after the official launch of CODA 2go and we’ve been furiously processing the piles of enquiries that we got from Dreamforce in London. If you were one of those who spoke to us you should have had some sort of response from us by now, but if you haven’t please bear with us… we really were inundated…

Meanwhile, we’ve also been enjoying widespread press coverage after the event. It’s been overwhelming, in particular the positive nature of the feedback from analysts and journalists alike is something I’ve certainly never experienced before. Seems most commentators think we’ve made a smart move building on Force.com, and the salesforce.com user community seems to agree.

Highlights include some great pieces by well-known industry bloggers Dennis Howlett (here and here) and and Phil Wainwright, who penned an fairly meaty analysis of the financial implications of Platform as a service…

Other coverage included this, this and this.

We even rattled the ‘gorilla’ in the SMB accounting market, Sage, who responded to a query about CODA 2go from Accountancy Age that CODA ‘didn’t have any brand presence in the SMB space’. All we can say is, ‘keep up the complacency, Sage’!

Well, we did it… CODA’s first totally new finance system for around 15 years was unveiled at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in London on Wednesday. Jeremy Roche from CODA joined salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on stage during the keynote to talk about CODA 2go, the first accounting system to be developed on the Force.com platform, and demo the new application.

Demonstrating software live in front of 2500 people is always a risk, and sure enough the first click of a button produced an error message none of us had seen before. Our development team, watching back in Harrogate via the web, told us later their collective hearts stopped for a moment when that happened! However, turns out that that a glitch in the internet connection had taken the web browser off-line momentarily… so Steve Fisher on keyboards just had to refresh the browser and we were off and running.

The audience was certainly ‘wowed’ by the new offering - the CODA stand was mobbed for the rest of the two-day event. As we’d predicted, the salesforce.com community is hungry for a finance system that works seamlessly with their CRM.

We are currently working with beta partners, but when the solution goes on general release in the coming weeks we’re expecting a considerable amount of uptake. Watch this space, as they say!

Just one day now to the official unveiling of CODA 2go, at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce Europe event in London. Apparently registration broke the 2000 barrier some days ago so there will literally be standing room only when CODA’s CEO Jeremy Roche joins salesforce.com’s boss Marc Benioff on stage.

Jeremy will show some highlights of the ‘opportunity to cash’ process of CODA 2go, and discuss the product strategy and detail of pricing and availability. Shortly afterwards there will be a breakout where delegates can see the product in more detail.

We are briefing press all day today and tomorrow, so watch out for coverage around the world. Well know tech blogger Dennis Howlett got a preview last week and was highly positive - see his commentary on US site ZDnet or his own site, Accman pro.

We’ll blog more news over the next few days…