The focus is now on the Reporting Tool of ORF 3.0. We already got the tool backbone, most supporting code and now reports are being designed. See below how it looks so far.

The GUI misses lots of functionality, from report generation (the above report has real data from a real client, but it was generated outside of the Reporting Tool) to navigation or printing, but we are closer to the 3.0 release than ever :)

This is the one of the most fun parts of software development. Small cog-wheels like PowerLogs, log preprocessing and reporting code get integrated and the engine slowly starts working. It is noisy, emissions are high, fuel leaks, but it finally works! :)

The Art of Customer Service is a recently published piece of Guy Kawasaki’s excellent “Art of…” series. In his article, he emphasizes the importance of having a great customer service and points out that…

[...]customer service has as much to do with a company’s reputation as sales, marketing, engineering, and finance.[...]

I cannot agree more. Maybe I would even call it an understatement.

Customer service can make or break a company, if the company is not in some kind of monopoly position. My previous ISP, the manufacturer of my previous MP3 player and a couple of other companies lost me for their ignorant and bureaucratic customer
service. I would not hesitate a second to switch my cable TV or telephone provider if there were alternatives, thanks to their poor customer service. On the other hand, I cannot stop recommending products of companies which gave me great customer service experience (well, provided the product works). Surprisingly, a few companies still have not realized that it is always the service sold, even though the product itself is an MP3 player or a software tool.

…spices, at last :) Here at the Vamsoft HQ we have a nice backyard, an ideal place for a sunny mini spice garden. During the long winter (starving for fresh summer basil and tomatoes), I decided to finally utilize the backyard and plant a few of my favorite spices and herbs. The ORF Tech Support guy, Krisztian also liked the idea, so last Thursday we took the seeds, the flower pots, some soil and made our little garden with thyme, origano, basil and rocket/rucola.

I was a bit concerned about planting too early, but this morning I was suprised to see that only in five days the rocket started growing! That means pesto di rucola with fresh gnocchi within 2 weeks! :) No wonder why English calls rucola “rocket”.

Meanwhile, we have relased the 4th development release of ORF, with minor adjustments to the PowerLog format. The PowerLog report preprocessor is nearly complete, it is going to be integrated with the ORF Service in the next few days. The technology research with the embedded Internet Explorer control was successful, so now it is pretty sure that we will use embedded HTML for displaying and printing reports. Also, the decision has been made about the report resolution: it is going be 1 day, which means that the shortest period of time that reporting will handle is one day.