Many people ask me about the roadmap of various products, although usually it happens in informal discussions. And this is not the only question, I got many of them about how we design things, what I believe to be hot next year and so on. Although these are the questions one could ask over a few drinks, the answers are quite complicated (and they require more drinks than I can take). 🙂
Many of you already noticed it yesterday, although we did not announced it formally. As promised, we have updated our demo server with Automation. You can access Automation in VoipNow (left menu).
VoipNow 2.0.3 was released, this is the first news. There are many bug fixes and also several interesting new features also. The next version of VoipNow will be 2.0.4, which is a minor release that will include VoipNow Automation. Speaking of Automation it is still not releasable, but we are making progresses with every day passed. The next major version of VoipNow will be VoipNow 2.1.0 and it’s scheduled for end of Q4 2009.
I am constantly monitoring our Help Desk tickets. I am looking for improvement ideas, common mistakes (for example if many people make the same mistake, we must change something in the product) and generally anything that can improve our products and services.
That’s why I was able to discover some surprising things, one of the most important in my perspective being related to our customer’s education related to production systems management. I will discuss about VoipNow, because it’s more complex, but everything below can be considered best practice (in my opinion, of course).
For the past weeks the blog has been quiet. We didn’t want to shut it down or reduce it to silence, but we have worked a LOT. We’ve worked on many levels – not only on product development, but also on related things that will help sustain our company’s development. Many changes were based on your feedback, thank you for sending them to us. You will see a lot of interesting stuff in the next period 🙂
With VoipNow 2.0.2 we are focused on fixing bugs that were discovered on VoipNow 2 branch and that could not have been solved on VoipNow 2.0.1 due to various reasons (usually due to major impact). We also improved system performance and improved interoperability.
Short answer: We don’t know. As a first reaction a customer might say “How stupid can you be to don’t know when are you going to release a product update?“.
Long answer: the fact that we do not know is actually positive.
This message is for all VoipNow 2 beta testers and generally for anyone that had an input regarding VoipNow 2. In the VoipNow 2 beta session we got over 2,000 subscribers. According to our records, more than 45% installed the product, which is quite good. Based on their feedback we discovered two critical bugs – thank you! In the past two months many people saw VoipNow 2 and they really liked the product. Actually, the fact that we didn’t receive much criticism is quite disturbing, so please go ahead, tell us also about the bad things. We are listening.
I don’t think so. Only that the last Google employees I discussed with in the past four months had the same answer to a pretty common question “Do you enjoy working for Google?”. Maybe Google has a policy – “Don’t tell anyone about your work!”, but such a policy does not explain the answer “Yes, it’s very nice, there are a lot of benefits”. When I asked about benefits, not even one mention thing was related to the work. I expected at least one answer like: “I like what I do” or “I like working with smart people” or “I want to get involved in something that will charge the world”. Nope, only medical insurance, on-site meals, kindergarten, bonuses … If these guys were teached to say nothing about their work, I don’t think it’s a smart corporate move. If they don’t fell like it worth to mention the work they do there, than a bigger issue. In any case, it’s Google’s problem. What do you think?
Several days ago we released VoipNow 2 Beta. You can register and download beta here. The received feedback, judged on the number of received bugs is good. We gathered only four bugs till now from beta testers (we got no critical bug). VoipNow 2 changes some of the perceptions about Unified Communications systems.