Happy Thanksgiving!
I'm writing this from Las Vegas, we flew in last night and are visiting my wife's family for the weekend. The last couple days at work were fun; the software has gelled and we can finally play around with it, moving from screen to screen, simulating actual advisor work flows. In my own experience, and in the couple demos I did yesterday, the coolest feature seems to be the Process Manager, which runs things like reports and imports in the background. It's an obvious next step for PMS technology, and I hadn't realized how well it would demo. It scored the highest on the important "Oohs and Ahhs" scale.
In my personal work habits, I'm a big believer in uninterrupted work-flow. I'm easily distracted and if I have to wait on something for more than five seconds, the urge to browse the web or check e-mail becomes overwhelming.
I recently upgraded to a faster machine because Visual Studio was taking more than a couple seconds to compile. My coding style is that I like to compile and check my work fairly often. I'll work for five minutes, compile for a couple seconds, check the new feature for 20 seconds, then repeat.
So when my compiles started taking more than a few seconds, my mind would wander, and all of a sudden, my work flow changed. I would work for five minutes, compile for 15 seconds, get bored, check Drudge Report, read an article about the economy collapsing, check on my compile which finished a long time ago, check the new feature for 60 seconds, repeat.
With FinFolio, we've done our best to eliminate the work flow pauses that you typically see with PMS software. With Portfolio 2000, your work-flow probably went something like this. Kick off the Schwab download, get your morning cup of coffee, import the Schwab files, read the Journal while the files import, import your pricing feed, troubleshoot any Schwab data issues, print a quarterly report for your client meeting that afternoon, have another cup of coffee while the report prints.
With FinFolio, the process manager takes the tasks that used to lock up the software, and throws them on a background thread so you can keep working. You can throw multiple things at it and it queues them, only working on a couple at a time. Your old P2K workflow will now look something like this. Kick off the Schwab and Internet pricing downloads simultaneously, while they run in the background, print a report, which also runs in the background. As the Schwab files import, you'll see any data problems pop up on your errors/alerts screen and you can troubleshoot them while the process manager continues working on the imports and printing.
We'll actually be releasing the "November Alpha" on Monday, December 1st, since that's the first day the entire team is back from Thanksgiving. This release only has the FinFolio Desktop--we ran into some issues with the WPF dual web development that we couldn't burn through in time. But I'm happy we'll finally have something out there. In retrospect, I would have devloped the UI much earlier in the development process.
Keep your expectations low for the alpha. It's very fragile and only has a few working screens. We probably wouldn't release it yet, except that we adhere to Agile development methods, where one of the cornerstones of the technique is to have working software that we release often to our stakeholders (users). It's important to get feedback on the product while there's till time to make changes. I'm also excited to finally have something to demo to all the firms who have been patiently waiting for the last year.
Something else about the FinFolio web version--we're not just dragging our feet because of technology snags. Microsoft recently announced their cloud computing initiative and started previewing their Web Office products. I'm still getting my arms around it, and there's a good chance it will affect our own web development strategy.
(above) Microsoft Word for the Web
Have a nice holiday!