Google Apps Suffering From Feature Creep?
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Interesting that there's tons of features, yet the usability is suffering.
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That's always how I have felt about it. Way too much "stuff".
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Remind you of any apps? LOL
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@scottalanmiller said:
Remind you of any apps? LOL
Nope, not at all LMAO. Although I read some reassuring things the other day from Chief. Just waiting to see if something comes of it.
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@Bill-Kindle said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Remind you of any apps? LOL
Nope, not at all LMAO. Although I read some reassuring things the other day from Chief. Just waiting to see if something comes of it.
Same old things being rehashed over and over. The marketing is strong, the results are weak.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Bill-Kindle said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Remind you of any apps? LOL
Nope, not at all LMAO. Although I read some reassuring things the other day from Chief. Just waiting to see if something comes of it.
Same old things being rehashed over and over. The marketing is strong, the results are weak.
Well this came from an open letter of sorts that had a lot of active users sign onto, it got traction pretty quick and was a result of some stuff that happened and was discussed at length in London a few weeks back. Longest response from Scott I have seen in a LONG time.
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direct link to reply I'm talking about.
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/post/3359784
And if you can't read / access what was said:
"*Simon,
I wanted to personally thank you for taking the time to write up your thoughts. I know you’re busy and have a day job (I saw your presentation at SpiceWorld) and it means a lot to us that you’d make the time to pull together this feedback, vet it with this group and get it in front of us. Frankly, in most communities this would never happen - the users would just get frustrated and bail. Speaking for all four founders, it is exactly this relationship that makes Spiceworks special for all of us - so thank you.
Because of this we take this kind of feedback very seriously. I co-opted our weekly executive team meeting yesterday and we discussed your letter at length. While sobering to hear, the team thought your points were thoughtful, accurate and fair. Frankly, it was probably a much needed wake up call for all of us. It surfaced some areas where we have dropped the ball over the last of year and need to make some changes.
First and foremost, we’re not doing a good job of communicating our overall product strategy and product roadmap. We do have an explicit product strategy and development plan in place, but if you don’t know what it is I bet its pretty hard for you to get a sense of where we’re headed and if we’ll address your needs. Now just to be clear, I’m not saying you’ll get everything you want or that you’ll even agree with our strategy & plan - to Darren’s comment there are lots of competing priorities in our business and we have to juggle them all to keep the company growing and success. But we can be much more transparent with you about what that strategy is, our product priorities, and explicitly what’s going to be in upcoming releases. This way you can plan and make decisions about what’s coming in the future.
Secondly, we just flat dropped the ball on prioritizing some of the features requests made in the community. While some of these are tough and would be a major engineering effort (i.e. external DMBS support), others like the local KB storage are much easier and should have been done by now. We try to strike a balance between incremental feature enhancements and new features to forge new ground (i.e. Profiles & Projects, Monitoring App & Start Page), but clearly we don’t always get it right. In hindsight, in 2013 we got the mix wrong, to your point we erred too much on the side of “bright shinny objects” as you say.
Ok, enough of the mea-culpa, what are we going to do differently? Here’s the action plan we put in place coming out of our e-staff meeting yesterday:
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In the next week to 10 days I want to get a blog post out to the entire community that outlines our product strategy, major areas of investment and introduces some of the concepts I’ve outlined below. The goal here is to give you all a better understanding of what we’re trying to do and why, as well as visibility into exactly what we’re building in each release
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Establish a dedicated Release Page in the community for each of the major development areas in Spiceworks. These will be owned by the project leads and they will be responsible for communicating the features of upcoming releases as well as gather feedback for future releases. The goal here is to give you a more direct channel into that functional area so you can get a better sense of what’s coming and why. This will take us a couple of weeks to get set up but here is the list of areas and individuals who’ll be responsible for each:
Jackie Gross: Inventory, Advisors and 3rd Party plug-ins.
Brian Gugliemetti: Help Desk, KB & Purchasing
Eric Shank: Product Search, Selectors, and Catalogs
David Babbitt: Network Monitor (new app)
Kevin Schell: 3rd Party Integrations (i.e. MDM) and Vendor / Product Pages
Tabrez Syed: Profiles, Projects, Start Page & general Community infrastructure
- Immediately revisit our priorities for the releases being planned for the remainder of the year. I’ve asked the team to take a look at the top features requests in each of the areas above and figure out which features are doable in the time frame we have in front of us. Our goal is get you some of these features asap. Again, this does not mean you’ll get everything you want - but at least now you’ll be able to see what’s coming in the next release so they’ll be no surprises.
That said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t commit to something right out of the gate. I’m happy to say that your post made quite the impact on Francis. He immediately offered up a resource from his infrastructure team to help knock a few of the high profile features off the list. So with that, we’re committing to have the following out later this year, ideally in beta form at SpiceWorld Austin (end of Sept). Here are the three he committed to:
• Client Portal Password for sites with no AD
• Local Storage for KB Articles
• Scheduling of Reports
We’ll obviously shoot for more than this, but I wanted to let you know we were serious about taking action on this right away so I asked the team for a short list that we could commit to now.
At Spiceworks we’re big believers in taking risks, its how we got to where we are today. But to take risks you have to be prepared to fail and learn from your mistakes. That means admitting you made a mistake, fixing it, hopefully learning from it - and moving on. Well here we are, 8 years into Spiceworks and we’re still proving we can make mistakes with the best of them. Thank you for helping us learn another important lesson. I can’t promise we won’t make more new mistakes in the future, just that we’ll do our best to not make this one again.
Thanks for caring enough to tell us what you honestly think. It makes Spiceworks what it is today.
- Scott
Edited May 28, 2014 at 11:25 AM*"
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@Bill-Kindle But it's all stuff that's been major complaints since day one. The ship doesn't turn after six or seven years. We'll see, but I'm long past the point of trusting the software.
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I hoped this would be an interesting thread on Google Apps, but it turns out to be another Spiceworks slag-fest
For me, there's an open source feel about Google Apps, with all the third-party scripts available as well as a pretty powerful API that let's you write your own applications. I've spent some time on this trying to get our ERP application to update jobs on Google Maps Coordinate, with limited success. There's a good site here https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ where you can see what API features are available with all of Google's products. I find it all a bit of a mess and the documentation is pretty limited. There's an assumption that you have a high degree of competency already when developing Google apps, which I don't have as I'm not a web developer and have no prior experience of OAuth. I think I'm in far too deep trying to develop Google Maps Coordinate, but if you're a professional developer I imagine Google app development is a lot of fun.
Does O365 have similar?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I hoped this would be an interesting thread on Google Apps, but it turns out to be another Spiceworks slag-fest
I meant it in no way to be that. It was merely a side conversation. I've just used the app almost from day one and still pretty attached to it because it works 80% of the way I need it to, there's just that 20% that could use a little TLC.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
For me, there's an open source feel about Google Apps, with all the third-party scripts available as well as a pretty powerful API that let's you write your own applications. I've spent some time on this trying to get our ERP application to update jobs on Google Maps Coordinate, with limited success. There's a good site here https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ where you can see what API features are available with all of Google's products. I find it all a bit of a mess and the documentation is pretty limited. **There's an assumption that you have a high degree of competency already when developing Google apps, which I don't have as I'm not a web developer and have no prior experience of OAuth. **I think I'm in far too deep trying to develop Google Maps Coordinate, but if you're a professional developer I imagine Google app development is a lot of fun.
Does O365 have similar?
That's one problem I ran into during an Android app dev course I took last year, there's a lot of assumption made and very little good documentation. The documentation that does exist is either done with outdated tools / methods or someone decides to use a higher level tool to complete it, but say no more than "Here's the module / api." without a explanation of what exactly it's doing. I did alright for using mostly the MIT app inventor but found that even to be frustrating at times because there were modules that were never documented properly.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I hoped this would be an interesting thread on Google Apps, but it turns out to be another Spiceworks slag-fest
For me, there's an open source feel about Google Apps, with all the third-party scripts available as well as a pretty powerful API that let's you write your own applications. I've spent some time on this trying to get our ERP application to update jobs on Google Maps Coordinate, with limited success. There's a good site here https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ where you can see what API features are available with all of Google's products. I find it all a bit of a mess and the documentation is pretty limited. There's an assumption that you have a high degree of competency already when developing Google apps, which I don't have as I'm not a web developer and have no prior experience of OAuth. I think I'm in far too deep trying to develop Google Maps Coordinate, but if you're a professional developer I imagine Google app development is a lot of fun.
Does O365 have similar?
Office 365 uses ADFS, which has an SDK available for it, if you want applications with true SSO. Otherwise, the clients are your typical Outlook, Lync, Excel, etc, so most of the addons would be targeted towards them. SharePoint Designer's available for SharePoint. Since Office 365 includes PowerShell, it can be used as a tie-in for third-party administrative solutions.
