Mike Coyle’s Weblog

I’m in the process of doing post-production on a 15 minute screencast that provides a walkthrough of ProjectPipe. It should be available on Monday.

I’m using Camtasia Studio, the screencast tool developed by TechSmith. Far and away the most impressive Windows app I’ve used in a while.

When we set out to build ProjectPipe, we were originally looking to bring lightweight nouvelle Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the discipline of agile IT project management. We had some cool demos and prototypes that we shared with a small group of people that we trusted. Nothing earth shattering, but content interesting enough to compel us to spend most of our free time pursuing our vision and ultimately quitting very good full-time jobs to make a run at launching a software startup.

Fast forward to the actual release of ProjectPipe in December, and none of the functionality that we initially prototyped and shopped around to friends and colleagues is present in the user-facing elements of the application. Some is still in the Proof-of-Concept stage, some of it is teed up for future releases, and some of it is leveraged behind the scenes, but none of it is visible to our growing user community.

To a certain degree, we set out to build product A, and ended up shipping product B.

It turns out that this is not all that uncommon. Paul Graham spoke about this phenomena in his presentation at StartupSchool, which he subsequently published in his essay titled Ideas for Startups.

So just as our original product vision evolved, so has our vision of our target market. Originally, there were two profiles that made up our view of our centerpoint customers:

• The “Alpha Dog”, or technical architect/PM that leads corporate IT projects
• The Independent contractor that is often the Project Manager, architect, cook, and bottle washer for smaller projects and/or sidework

It’s recently become evident to us that the feature set of ProjectPipe is also useful to a third market: The (drum roll please) Web 2.0 Startup.

[TODO: Blab about the fact that we’re a startup ourselves, and mention the bit about “eating our own dogfood” for the umpteenth time]

There are a bunch of things in ProjectPipe that we’ve found useful in spinning up our company. Here’s a sampling:

• Most small businesses incorporate some form of To Do List to coordinate their day-to-day activities. ProjectPipe’s Issues tool works nicely for this. It allows you view items either in a flat list or as a hierarchical outline. It also provides assignments and prioritization. Plus, you can also subscribe to a secure RSS feed, so that you’re notified when an item is completed by another team member.
• Subversion is a no-brainer if you have source code that you’re developing as part of your startup. But it also comes in handy for other files that you’d like to work on locally, yet keep synchronized across 2 or more machines. I can see the ad now: Subversion: It’s not just for source code anymore.
• ProjectPipe’s Document Management capabilities allow you to edit documents from within a web browser, or upload existing documents or images. We actually use Subversion for most of our Document Management, since Subversion-managed content is readily accessible offline. But the Document Management tool is still real useful in its own right, and it’s integrated with one of our upcoming collaboration-based features. Stay tuned for more on that topic…
• Lastly, ProjectPipe’s Notes tool is convenient for outline-based notetaking. It’s probably no big secret at this point that we’re huge fans of outlining. While our web-based Notes tool isn’t quite as as fast as a desktop outlining app such as OmniOutliner, it’s more than responsive enough for most uses, unless you’re taking live dictation from the president of the New York Speed Talker’s Society after he shotgunned a Quad Shot Iced Espresso with a Red Bull chaser.The hoisting capability allows you to narrow down your focus to a specific topic while still keeping all of your content in one taggable, RSS-enabled basket.I’ve used the notes tool everywhere from boardrooms to Wi-Fi enabled bookstores. It works quite nicely.

In closing, we’re starting to market ProjectPipe to web startups. We’ve created a new Google Group to support a community of users that are leveraging ProjectPipe for their startups or small businesses. The group is named projectpipe-smallbiz.

If you have any thoughts regarding how you’d like to use ProjectPipe for your startup or small business, please join the Google Group and/or drop me a line at mcoyle@botonomy.com.

Oh, and if you are still looking for that “Killer App” to justify gobs of VC funding for your very own Web 2.0 startup, here’s a veritable treasure trove of ideas.

Venture Chronicles mentions that the current Thin Client debate going on between two columnists (Mark Hall and Frank Hayes) at Computerworld looks like it was ripped from the pages of a 1999 edition.

Both thin and thick client approaches have their relative merits and downsides. At Botonomy, our applications (such as ProjectPipe) are built around a hybrid concept that we call the Right Client Architecture.

Our Right Client approach has three core tenets:

• Make the basic functionality as thin as possible (i.e. browser-based), and provide “Thickness” for a small set of high-value functions or services via local desktop software
• Where possible, leverage existing apps that the user already understands for Thick client capabilities. In many cases, this happens to be Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, Project, etc.)
• Let the user pick the right tool for the job, with the understanding that the user experience will vary by platform

We believe that this is a very compelling vision for computing across heterogeneous platforms (Windows, Macs, Palm, Phones, etc.) because we’re not trying to convince users to trade the rich desktop tools that they’re used to using for crude web-based substitutes, nor are we sitting around waiting until the base model El Cheapo PDA screams like a Cray supercomputer that’s liquid cooled with Red Bull and provides a desktop-like experience in a pocket-size form factor.

We realize that all computing devices are not equal, and that this fundamental capabilities gap will not change anytime soon. Trying to provide user experience parity across diverse platforms is a losing proposition. In that game, the best you can be is mediocre. In our Right Client model, we lay out the options and let the user pick the right tool for the job.

Let’s take the case of managing issues in ProjectPipe. When I’m using a Mac, I can input issues through a web interface. However, if I’m on a Windows PC, I can input issues in an Excel spreadsheet and then, by clicking the “upload” link on the Issues web page, automagically load the issue data from my local spreadsheet to the centralized database.

[In case you’re wondering how it works, ProjectPipe employs a small client program that makes an XMPP (Jabber) connection between your desktop and our server farm. This local client runs in your Windows system tray and allows for seamless yet totally optional desktop integration with the rest of the browser-based application.]

If we wanted a pure-play Thin Client experience that was 100% cross-platform and 100% browser-based, the guy with an existing spreadsheet with a few dozen issues that need to be entered into web form is going to cut-and-paste his way through a very tedious afternoon.

Conversely, if we built ProjectPipe as a Thick Client app in Windows, then the MS Office integration would be a cakewalk, but all of our Mac and Linux users would be out of luck.

We believe that our Right Client approach strikes an attractive and flexible balance between the two extremes. While this approach may not fit some pundits’ view of computing utopia, it keeps the heavy lifting of our applications 95% server-side, while providing a rich desktop integration experience where necessary.

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ProjectPipe.com is officially released as of late this afternoon. After more than three months of beta testing (thanks to all of you that have participated), we’re open for business.

We are offering both free and paid accounts. Check out the Sign Up Page for more information about the various account options that we provide.

Being that this is December 23rd, I hope that you are celebrating Festivus in your own special way. As all devotees of Seinfeld know, Festivus is known for its “Airing of Grievances”, followed by the “Feats of Strength”.

Given that we just launched our product today, I’d like to take a moment to lay out some of the “grievances” that led us to build ProjectPipe, and then talk about the “Feats of Strength” that one can perform with ProjectPipe to impress their friends.

The Airing of Grievances

• Most project management tools aren’t focused on the needs of small, distributed teams
• Even firms that have source code management systems often do not make them available to offsite team members
• If you keep issues, risks, and requirements in discrete MS Office documents, it’s really tough to establish traceability among line items

The Feats of Strength

• Classify your project data using Tags. Even Amazon is getting into tagging. Tags rock.
• Get everyone on the team working off a Subversion source code repository in minutes, even if they’re working from home without VPN access.
• Subscribe to new requirements via RSS
• Establish multi-hop traceability among use cases, requirements, architecture, issues, risks, etc. Then generate diagrams that show the big picture relationships.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get the 6-foot aluminum pole out from the crawlspace.

Burning Questions, The Official FeedBurner Weblog, is running a series of market reports. The first installment is titled Feed for Thought, subititled “How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed.”

They give a pretty nice summarization of the benefits of RSS for non-blog contexts:

Feeds provide three critical benefits to any digital media:

1. A notification mechanism for updates to a specific channel of content
2. The ability to subscribe to content, creating a persistent link between publisher and subscriber
3. A semi-structured version of the content

I do think that the 2007 version of their Venn diagram will show Line-of-Business applications as yet another first-class producer of RSS/Atom feeds.

We have baked RSS feed support into the core of ProjectPipe.com, not because was the pre-AJAX hot thing to do technically, but rather because we firmly believe that syndicating project data will eliminate an entire class of status reporting, report preparation, and much of the other mundane busywork activity that absolutely chokes the productivity (and sometimes the spirit) out of so many project teams.

At Botonomy, it is our mission to help small teams solve large problems. Small teams don’t have the bandwidth to blow cycles going person-to-person gathering raw data for status reports or one-off inquiries. We want to throw software at that problem, and make it easy for the person that needs project information to instantly and easily connect to a reliable source of up-to-the-minute data.

In a nutshell, we see a world where the TPS Report publishes itself.