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!

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.

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

 

I can drill down to view an invoice (below left) or credit note (below right) for that account:

I can view the list of reports (below left) and then select and view an Aged Debt report (below right):

 

The great thing as a developer is that we inherited this capability by virtue of developing on the Force.com platform. Simple as that! We didn’t have to write a new user interface for each mobile device we want to support, which means we can focus on delivering the rich accounting functionality ‘behind the scenes’ that CODA is famous for. It is this combination of platform and accounting knowledge that will give the users the best possible experience.

This is exciting stuff, especially in the world of accounting!

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!

 

 

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…

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’!

 

CODA 2go is the first project CODA has run using the Agile methodology Scrum.  It’s a very different approach to the more traditional Waterfall model of software development often adopted at CODA.

 

The Scrum team itself is a multi-disciplinary team made up of designers, developers, testers, automated testers and documenters all working in close proximity.  We have some very skilled people and a strong sense of ownership and team-working which really helps to drive the construction forward.  The team as a whole, headed up by the Scrum master, make decisions on a day to day basis to make sure we can deliver what we’ve signed up to do.

 

It’s been quite a learning curve and a big adjustment to the way we work but I think the benefits really show.  We were able to show off the end to end process of invoice generation through to printing at the end of the third sprint without the use of smoke and mirrors!  The process somewhat de-risks a project by providing software early and iteratively.  By giving it almost immediate visibility to the product owners the direction of the project can be continually reviewed and altered to meet the business needs.

 

We’re now 12 sprints in and we’ve designed, written, tested and documented some first class software and I think we can be proud of what we’ve achieved.

 

Tony Scott, Software Developer, CODA 2go. 8^th May 2008.

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!