AJAX type-ahead Lookup fields

As of this weekend's release all Lookup fields (including User selection fields, Location, Department and Function lookups) now allow you to type the name of the record you are looking for with auto-suggested matches appearing in a popup below the field:

Most users may be familiar with this type of behavior when typing an email address into GMail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook. In Rollbase suggestions will first appear after you enter your third character and the list will continue to narrow as you enter more characters.

This enhancement was identified some time back as important for speed and ease of use. While you can still click on the lookup icon to invoke a selector dialog for navigating records in a more traditional and manual fashion, the ability to choose between these navigation methods based on the situation at hand is something we've been looking forward to rolling out.

(We are currently in the process of adding this functionality to all functions in Rollbase where selection of one or more email recipients is involved.)

Rollbase featured in IEEE Computer Magazine, GigaOm, etc

Last month I had a great conversation with George Lawton, author of Developing Software Online with Platform-as-a-Service Technologies (6MB PDF). His article was just published in the June issue of the IEEE Computer Magazine and highlights Rollbase among a few other PaaS offerings from Salesforce, Google and Intuit.

While we have not yet advertised or marketed Rollbase in any way beyond our launch event in February, Rollbase has been receiving a bit more media attention lately as one of a handful of vendors taking on the challenge of PaaS. e.g. GigaOm Refresh the Net: Do You Know What Kind of Cloud You’re Using? More importantly we are delighted with how much we've accomplished on the R&D front in the past 11 months, and hope to be shifting some energy toward the sales & marketing front in Q3 around the corner.

As the IEEE article mentions, Rollbase is now being used to manage business data and processes such as investment deal flow. However, it's also being used by a number of other paying customers for a variety of things ranging from university enrollment, bus permit management, mortgage client management, accounting client checklists, etc -- all involving deep knowledge of particular domains we know very little about here at Rollbase. This is great initial validation of the PaaS vision and a living example of the Long Tail of Software. But as David Linthicum mentions toward the end of the writeup, "smaller players might succeed by focusing on the core needs of narrow markets." Our partner strategy as well as our direct go-to-market strategy will likely reflect this sentiment as we move toward completion of the beta period. We look forward to a time when we can take a step back from core platform R&D to think about whether Rollbase might be suitable for the creation of applications in one or more domains that we happen to know well here internally, such as vertical-specific CRM or HR.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for more platform feature announcements such as dynamic type-ahead lookup fields (AJAX), dynamic grid edit (AJAX), sequential and parallel approval processes, and a lot more in the queue. The Rollbase Lab is buzzing...

Organization Management: Enabling Small, Medium and Large-scale Implementations

As a Rollbase user you may have noticed that four new Object definitions have recently appeared in your account: Location, Department, Function and Group. In addition, as of last week a new Organization Management application has been published to the Application Directory to provide a simple way to manage these new features.

The Location, Department and Function objects are somewhat special new objects in Rollbase. Not only do they allow you full control over fields, pages, views, workflow, etc (as with any other object definition in Rollbase), they also come with special hierarchical view components providing an easy way to visualize the structure of any sized organization -- whether you are managing a small business are a global company with over 10,000 employees.

By enabling the new "Organization" attribute in any of your object definitions, you can assign data records to specific positions in any of these hierarchies. This in turn determines who can access these records based on what Groups your users are assigned to.

The Group object is also a new object definition with some unique capabilities, the most important of which is its capability to restrict specific portions of the Location, Department and Function hierarchies that a set of users can have access to.

For example you might create different Groups for Sales Managers in US, Canada, APAC, EMEA, etc. While users assigned to these Groups may have the same Role and User-specific permissions, they will only be able to access data associated with different portions of the hierarchies based on their Group asignments.

Each user can be assigned to any number of Groups (you will now see a new "Groups" picklist associated with your User object definition for this purpose). In this way you can model complex organizational structures and leverage these structures to segment data access for tens, hundreds and even thousands of users in an intuitive, scalable, and easy to manage way. The below screenshot shows an example hierarchy of Functions in a fictitious organization:

 It is helpful to think of Groups as a way to restrict access to any Rollbase data for a particular set of users before any Role and User specific permissions are applied. With these additions there are now several layers of permission management available to enable very simple as well as more sophisticated, larger-scale Rollbase implementations.

All of this functionality is now available to every Rollbase user and has been automatically added to your account using our new Managed Applications capabilities. For any users wishing to explore this further, we recommend installing the Organization Management application into your account.

Managed Applications and On-Demand Rollbacks

While most features and enhancements we announce here are targeted toward end-users, today we're taking a break from this to share information about two new  back-end features designed to help us manage Rollbase in anticipation of scaling to large numbers of customers.

Managed Applications

For typical multitenant SaaS vendors, upgrades are straightforward and usually involve schema and code changes that are not customer-specific. The ease, speed and relative transparency with which these upgrades can be accomplished is one of the primary benefits of the SaaS model, and is something we deal with every weekend when we upgrade the Rollbase platform.

A more significant challenge we have as a PaaS company is the distribution of upgrades for specific Rollbase applications to customers who have installed earlier versions of those applications, since this must be done without compromising any customer-specific customizations or configuration changes. Because all Rollbase applications are defined entirely at the metadata level, application upgrades involve manipulation of customer data itself, albeit metadata, which is entirely different from a typical SaaS platform upgrade (i.e. code and schema changes).

Recently we developed a feature that lets our support team push new versions of applications out to the entire customer base by adding any new metadata (objects, tabs, portals and their components) without updating existing components the customer may have modified. In this way Rollbase now has the capability to push application updates out in a non-intrusive manner to any customers who have previously installed those apps. Furthermore, application upgrades can be executed while Rollbase is running, requiring zero system downtime.

Today this new "Push Updates" feature was successfully put to the test when we updated the default "Rollbase" application every customer receives by default with their account. As a Rollbase administrator you will now see new fields added to your User object along with the following new Objects in your account: Location, Department, Function and Group. (We'll discuss the purpose of these new objects in an upcoming post regarding the new Organization Management application now available in the Application Directory).

On-Demand Rollbacks

Another challenge that affects pure multitenant SaaS environments such as Rollbase is customer-specific backup restorations. In a traditional software environment, or a SaaS environment where each customer has their own dedicated database, rolling a customer back to a previous point in time is a straight-forward database restoration process.

However, in a pure multi-tenant environment, a simple database restore is not an option. Doing so would also move all other customers sharing that database back to the same point in time. To address this we developed a mechanism for automatically storing rolling backups of individual customer data on a regular basis (a frequency which can be customized based on an individual customer's preference). These backups can be retrieved, unpacked and restored into the production environment in a purely automated fashion. Given this new feature, our support team can now restore customers to any available point in time using our back-end Rollbase user interface without requiring any IT intervention. As with managed updates, restores can be executed while Rollbase is running, requiring zero system downtime.

Whats next?

In addition to the new Organization Management application for larger-scale deployments, stay tuned for more information about the new Grid Component for dynamic spreadsheet-style creation and editing of multiple related records from a single detail page, as well as the addition of sequential and parallel email-based approval processes built into workflows.

New User Interface

This weekend we released the new Rollbase user interface, our third major UI redesign, based on both user feedback and a study of usage patterns. As shown in the screenshots below you will notice a more streamlined and clean layout that also brings back white-spacing some early users missed from the original 2007 UI:

As an Administrator you will notice notice small orange buttons and links at the top of your screen. These are quick ways to access administrative features in the Setup area to reduce the number of clicks and page loads required to access a particular configuration screen.

In addition Rollbase now allows selection from a number of CSS themes. In your Setup > Administration Setup > Account Settings page, you will find several new stylesheets you can choose from representing silver, brown (default), blue, red, orange, yellow, green, cyan and purple. Below is another screenshot showing Rollbase using the blue theme:

If there is another set of colors you'd like to see Rollbase support, let us know by submitting an Idea and we'll work it into our development queue.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for a major new feature announcement enabling large-scale deployments with hundreds and even thousands of users. Our upcoming "Organization Management" application provides a very flexible way to meet the needs of much larger organizations.