The Inovis Blog

Back in early September I had the happy experience of attending a Chicago White Sox game at US Cellular field in Chicago for a work related meeting. I lived in Chicago for 10 years from 1987-97 so I called a few old work friends that I hadn’t talked to in at least 10 years to see if they wanted to get together while I was there.  We’re all busy but I realized I should have made more effort to keep in touch with them over the years.You must try and treat past suppliers and vendors like old friends.

Don’t just reach out to them every 4-5 years when you need them for information or an evaluation. Make an effort to stay in touch and keep in regular contact with them even though you may not be currently doing business with them. By keeping in regular touch you will get to know their company roadmap and offerings that will keep you up to date in the industry and might also give you clues to what your competition is doing.  Vendors usually know more than you do about your competition. Give it a fun name like “Connect Club” (or not) and schedule your calendar to call everyone on the list at least every 3 months.

Speaking of competition… Do the same thing with your competition. While I fully understand the nature of keeping a competitive advantage you don’t have to discuss business plans and projects. You can talk about common pains and issues that could be solved with an industry wide platform or standard. Without going into details or how much it is affecting margins you could simply say “we need to get our LTL percentage down” (a problem almost any company will certainly have) to start a discussion on how a common and collaborative effort could fix it for the industry as a whole.

What’s in my MP3 player today? Crazy Joe and the Mad River Outlaws

Vinnie has a great post on The SAP/Oracle version of the Google home page.

Its well worth the click-throughs, especially as they’re free from PPCs.

It’s based on a premise that Google would be using their interface to promote themselves to gain competitive SEO advantage.

It starts with the current barebones Google search query entry form on a field of white. Various enterprise software concepts are added, including Dynpro, Oracle’s SmartClient design principles, PeopleTools, FlexFields, and Lawson Software.

The end result is what we’ve dubbed, the Google Portal Page.

Amazingly, it resembles every other online portal page, reminding us of that proverbial expression that a camel is a horse built by committee. That is, before the mashups.

Before the mashup concept took hold, an online portal entry page, whether personal or enterprise-wide, previewed what some other entity thought would be relevant to our online experience.

This was one of our fundamental driving our Webware release. Keep it really simple and easy. So its just like email.

With the emergence of personal and business mashup applications, the user is allowed to create an appropriate interface, changing it as needed, to create a dashboard view of personal and/or our business community management.

Fortunately Google, with other search engines following their lead, has kept the focus on the user search experience as we’ve evolved from the early days of the AOL portal model.

With iGoogle, our personal mashup page contains or leads to almost every online resource we employ on a daily basis, especially Google reader. Tabs and widgets allow for additional organization, functionality, and especially increased productivity, because that’s our Bottom Line.

image credit: www.webreference.com

Michelle Covey, Inovis’s Product Manager, was kind enough to record a vlog about Inovis Webware when I was in the Irvine, California office a while back. Michelle has been with the company for eight years and has had a big hand in Inovis Webware.

View the press release