Jun 8

Written by: Matt Abar
6/8/2009 5:52 PM

We just released Beta1. Woo hoo!

I'm reasonably happy with the state of the product. The beta is as clean as we can make it without having any live installations; our bug lists are clean and we only have a small handful of known issues. Mike and I feel that the product is about where Techfi was in its last year in terms of release quality. We're a bit late but we haven't compromised on any of the features or promises we've made over the last year. I think we're well on our way to delivering a next generation portfolio management system.

Our biggest outstanding issue is the speed of the software, mainly loading edit screens. The speed contrast in comparison to Portfolio 2000 (or any other PMS) is somewhat painful... even on fast machines, it will take a few seconds to open an account edit screen. It has to do with FinFolio using a rich object model as opposed to most other PMS systems hitting the database directly. If it's slow for you, don't panic -- we haven't done any optimization yet and we expect the next Beta release to have many speed improvements.

Another unavoidable issue is the quality of the interfaces. We've coded to the custodian specs and have run a variety of different test files from various advisors, but there are still hundreds of mapping issues to uncover. This is where we *really* need help from the Beta testers. I encourage any current Techfi users to convert your Portfolio 2000 database, then start running FinFolio in parallel, importing your daily import files in each one. Let us know immediately when you find problems and we'll turn around fixes quickly, dropping new interface builds as soon as we make the fixes. We've been getting conflicting feedback from the Alpha testers about import speeds so please let us know how fast the imports are compared to your current system.

If you're in the FinFolio Beta group, you can download it here. If you aren't in the Beta group and want to be, please drop me an e-mail. I've talked to numerous people over the last year who wanted to be beta testers and I haven't done a good job of keeping track of them. Just because we talked on the phone and I said I'd put you in the Beta group, don't assume I actually did it. ;-)

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