I’m happy and sad about this session. I LOVE having the Roadmap session starting a conference off on the right foot. On the other hand, not a big fan of a conference starting on a Sunday. Blows a whole weekend and there are some people to whom taking Sunday as a day of rest/worship is still important.
The speakers are Don Prodehl (VP Research & Development) Darryl Hopkins (Director R&D/ Product Manager), and Craig Dellorso (Chief Customer Officer).
Notes:
- Themes this past year
- Accounting enhancements
- Framework/Foundation/UI
- API/eWeb/Widgets
- iWeb UI/div-table-based forms
- Process Changes:
- Mid-year Feature Pack release (basically optional point release)
- Service Packs with potential functionality
- More collaboration between Professional Services, R&D and Support
- Going for a more modern looking App and more functionality in baseline
- Christine Delorenzo is the new Product Manager for Accounting. (Much needed and she seems to have a decent background for the position)
- Avectra2013 release is due in April
- Avectra2012 release was delayed due to various factors: feature creep, not cutting Quality Assurance (QA)
- Avectra2013 feature pack will be in August
- Avectra2014 is slated for January, target month for future releases
- Lots of features in April 2013 release
- Improved A-Score, including rolling member activities to their organizations
- Taxes on all product types
- More Payment gateways and tokens
- Auto-create interest codes based on actions (useful for AIIM)
- Enhance Outlook 2010 plugin now supports 64-bit and will sync tasks and assignments into Outlooks and close them (need to attend that session)
- Events budgeting and payables
- More marketing opt-in and opt-out management through xWeb. Improves integrations with 3rd party applications (like Marketo)
- Mobile eWeb and HTML5
- eWeb Google Analytics integration
- Improved form designer in the Toolkit, supports dynamic forms to handle mobile form factors
- .NET 4.5, SQL Server 2012, jQuery updates, Bootstap, GLYPHIcons
- xWeb has added RESTful as well as SOAP, including resource designer in Toolkit
- Individual Designations, Table-based and not free-form, order by rank
- More Communications Preferences
- Consolidated notes for one person into one place
- [Note: Demo showing redesign of iWeb (cool) and eWeb (nice but we don’t use)]
- Working on a login from Facebook in eWeb for members, may not be part of 2013
- Looking at OAuth and SAML (very happy to hear both of those, especially SAML)
- Auto-redirect from desktop to mobile when site is viewed on mobile, when the page exists, maybe in the 2014 release
- IdeaStarter being brought into netFORUM: CrowdFunding (funds, time, resources, and connections). widget based that can be incorporated into existing website
- Roadmap, 2014 and Beyond
- Enable hooks for more extensibility
- Web Widgets built on RESTful web services
- Query designer UI imporovements
- Tax and FedEx integration
- Want to create a full complement of RESTful services to build new eWeb version not in 2014 (very important. Must do to be mature platform)
Next step is the 1st-time attendee reception. Thinking I’ll drop off my laptop in the room first. After that, my next post will be tomorrow.
All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.
All statements about the future of Avectra products and strategy are subject to change at any time due to a large variety of factors.
