Just a courtesy update on what’s going on at the House of Monkey: This weekend we are rolling out an upgrade version 2.1 which has some significant changes in it that you might want to be aware of:

• Import/Export functionality for the entire database. We are exporting data in an XML-based format and allowing direct import. So if something in the database isn’t quite up to your liking and you wish to adjust it you’ll be able to with any XML editor available.
• Reporting. The new reporting engine is online and provides Executive Report, Open Support Request Summary, Support Request Detail Summary, Billable Time Summary and Employee Timesheet Summary. These are designed with business in mind, not a braindead paper killer in mind. Each is intended for a specific purpose and specific personnel - some are for clients, some are for you, some are for your workers and some are for the accountant. These templates are granular and FAST so you can opt to select anything you want included in the report at the time it is rendered - and the speed at which it renders them is pretty phenomenal too.
• Accounting. Revised accounting to allow for granular ticket billing. This way if a ticket is spread over multiple billing periods it’s updates can be billed over multiple invoices. Good for projects or people that want to get paid NOW. Accounting also brings the timesheet summary (so you know how much to pay your staff and your contractors)
• Upgraded E-mail Connector. Email connector now allows for the full communication through email only without logging into the portal at all. You’d have to be suicidal to enable this but it was demanded a lot so here it is.

Bug fixes: rounding functions now work properly, email notifications have been fixed as well as the time zone mess. Issues with the disable user functions have been fixed as well as a service creation system.

Next on the schedule is the web service API and enhancements to calendars and tasks in the portal. We are still looking for the invoice syntax for Office Accounting to enable direct imports of accounting data into Office Accounting. If anyone has that available please let me know.

P.S. We are down to the last 200 portals to activate, so if you aren’t in this you will be in over the weekend.

Just a heads up, we’ve put Google’s new Chrome Browser through it’s paces and according to everyone that has checked so far, all Shockey Monkey functions work and render properly. The RMM component was not tested as it requires ActiveX but that’s not generally available to the public either. Ditto for OWN as well as ExchangeDefender.

Our official policy at Own Web Now Corp is that we do not, under any circumstances, support any beta software. So this one is very much YMMV case, if you like it use it - as far as we can tell it works.

Gotta hand it to Google, it’s fast. Almost feels faster than Safari.

Now, back to uninstall it…

I feel like Bart Simpson trying to lie about why his homework isn’t ready to turn in.

I have been working pretty hard on the reports tab of Shockey Monkey and bug fixes all day. The good news is that all the outstanding bugs have been fixed, including the unreported ones I found while fixing other bugs. So great news there.

On the other hand, reports didn’t play out as well. I got them done, but I’ve been told by everyone that has looked at them so far that they are “weak” at best and “totally unpresentable to any client, even pro-bono” at worst. This came from the people that actually like me and are using the product for free so it’s hard to discount that kind of comment. Bah. I’m redoing the style sheets and formatting a little to make it seem like less of a pile of junk, I will update you on the progress tomorrow night.

P.S. The email connector bugs have been shaken out, you can now do 100% of your support via email if you choose to without ever logging into the portal. The billing exports have also been fractionalized allowing you to bill the support request granularly per-request, so if a ticket is split between multiple billing periods it can be broken up over multiple invoices. The executive report and other metric-bearing reports are also getting printable charts, the implementation of which I am not 100% certain off but will be after the morning meeting.

Monday is Labor Day, but it’s also the first of the month.

And first of the month brings the new upgrade to Shockey Monkey as I’ve pretty much committed the team to doing monthly updates to all the bugs and new features. As we’re actually about to allow people to give us money and sponsor the project we also need to kick up the production quality a bit. So starting this Monday, big new feature is reports:

Just a teaser post of course, I’ll show some more in depth stuff on Monday/Tuesday.

Funny thing about Shockey Monkey reporting, I have received a ton of kicks in the balls and bitching over the “missing” reports but only one person (and I’ll name her: Amy Babinchak) has stepped up with the mockups and drawings and sample data to stick into the said reports. If you want to see things in the software folks you’ve got to draw them up and recommend them in. Just saying “I want reports” doesn’t cut it, you have to contribute something meaningful for the entire community to benefit.

Monday 1st, see ya. Have a wonderful weekend.

After over two years in production, design and testing… The “When it’s done” just became “Done.“

v2 has been in use at Own Web Now for a while and the underlying framework is being used to power all our upcoming projects. So naturally the amount of work that went into making sure this was rock solid was quite large.

The wait is.. over. If you’re on the list, you’ll get a welcome email today. You will be on it by the end of the weekend. No more wait lists, no more queue, no more “coming soon” - we will have thousands of you in the queue online today.

Oh, did I mention that it’s free? Yeah, it’s free for our partners. Will remain free till 3.0. To find out more about that and the signup come back in a few days when we launch the new SM web site. The names on our new list of “friends” will surprise you.

Now back to the celebratory Mountain Dew!

Most of you remember the Howard Cunningham feature in Shockey Monkey. Howard is a good friend from DC (Macro LLC) and always full of great ideas about the time value of money and getting the most out of your monkeys.

Last year at the Microsoft WPC keynote by Kevin Turner, or as will now go down in infamy as the “infrastructure flush heard around the world”, it became clear that for OWN to compete in the new world we need to be better, quicker and more standardized than the other guys chasing ads.

That means as a service company, we had to adopt ITIL and really drive down how we define the process of service delivery (you can read about that in my book). But I’m not just writing it to make Karl rich, it really is a blueprint to a service delivery model that you’re going to have to play by or go extinct.

When I looked at how we go from where we were, to where we need to be, I knew that my biggest value is in the time my people spend to render services. We needed something spectacular, quick and as fast as we are. We need to be as responsive to situations as IM. So here is what you know so far:

Nice inline components that slide in and out of view when they are needed. No screen clutter, no massive refreshes, no popup windows, no wasted resource anywhere.

But then we throw Howard Cunninham into it.

Every ticket listing has an AJAX info bubble which you can roll over to see the last few updates. The rows get highlighted when they are updated between your page refreshes, and we can quickly act on them by previewing and tagging them.

Nothing like taking less than 5 seconds to review 3 tickets.

But let’s say that a support request update is something quick.

Something simple. Like “Did you reboot?”, “Whats the password”, “Have you tried this?”

Should a user be forced to load up an entire new page with all the assemblies, control panels and a page with more options than what they use to launch the f’n shuttle into the space?

What if it’s just a oneliner update, that shouldn’t use up extra resources, shouldn’t take up more bandwidth, should just be on demand and quick?

You’ve quessed it. Hit the Q for Howard Cunningham Quick Update!

Type in your update:

Quick options to make the support request update not send more email, not show up in the customer view or even close it out completely.

Update ticket. Done.

We can do this all day, no time wasted, no resources wasted. I feel like my computer has a little stroke every time I touch Outlook - now I don’t have to rely on Outlook. Heck, I don’t even have to rely on a computer, I can do this from the back of a data center, from a Kiosk, from an iPhone.

But don’t you worry about… No, I got AuthAnvil integrated baby. Oh, you give your customers Administrator password to a bucket of indians not even fit to work for PSS phone shields?

That is my differentiating factor. Enterprise software, enterprise infrastructure, talented staff in the new world and not a pile of monkeys with some degenerate CRM doing the needful and learning English one kb guess at a time. The world is changing, this is what I’m doing to remain on the top.

Consolidate yourself out of business… or Take the red pill, stay in wonderland, and I’ll show you how deep the monkey hole goes.

Where do you want to go today?

Ever wonder what happens at intersection of stupidity and far too much spare time?

People always ask me why I named the product Shockey Monkey. To some the title is downright offensive! Truth is, over the course of the workday people forget to read and need to be shocked back into the correct behavior. When I decided to write Shockey Monkey I didn’t just need a tool to streamline operations, I needed a system that fixed stupid with every fiber of its being.

I have a dream.. brothers and sisters.. that one day my staff will read the screen and not need me to sit around and manage them. Until that day, bzzzzt.

So what’s the general problem we have when working on tickets in an unmanaged scenario? We often ask who is working on the ticket. During the day as requests are coming in fast and furious and people are running back and forth across multiple offices/shifts it’s hard for one person to manage the entire operation. In my mind, the support team should work as a “team” and tag the requests as they go along.

That way, you know who is working on what and you don’t double up the effort.

So, welcome the Tag feature to Shockey Monkey. Right on the update ticket header you will see a new Checkbox, AJAX enabled and all. Just hit it if you want to tag the support request or start typing in the box below and it will automatically do it for you!

Here is what it looks like after the support request gets tagged.

Now, let’s say you’re opening a support request, how do you know if anyone is working on it? Well, if the Tag checkbox is there, you’re the first one with the right to take a crack at it. If it’s tagged by someone else you will see the warning, in this case red Alert: Tagged by Vlad Mazek.

This is where the bzzt shock really comes into Shockey Monkey. Let’s say you aren’t reading the screen. The moment you click on the textarea to try and update the support request the giant hand of Vlad reaches down from the sky with a tazer in one hand and shocks you into reading the screen.

Bzzt! You’ve been shocked!

I had even thought of adding a disable string to the action chain but decided against it in case the tag was made by someone who just left for the day or had something far more urgent come up.

Now you may ask…

But Vlad, why not just take away the ability to update the ticket if someone else tagged it?

You don’t work with people, do you?

Here is what happens when you take people’s ability to do something: They keep on clicking on it, refreshing the page, checking the battery in their keyboard, adjusting the wireless keyboard sensor.. everything but reading the damn screen. They might even open up Communicator or email/call and ask about it and then I’d have to rip their f’n head off and beat them to the point that they can only move their hand around enough to read braile encoding that says why don’t you read the f’n screen you idiot politely explain to them how the “tag” feature works.

So Karl, yes you can hire the right people. Yes, you can develop the standard for your people to follow. But if you don’t have a taser to enforce the standards and practices in realtime and fall back to personally standing over their shoulder or obsessively beating down monkeys only after they have made a mistake, buddy, you’re going to run out of people.

Karl’s process and Vlad’s adaptive learning… the new era in IT monkey accountability. Tag it before you work it. Read or be shocked.

I have a few days to kill before we officially start selling Shockey Monkey v2 (waiting on Windows Mobile application to be completely bugless) and I figured I’d sit down and work on Shockey Monkey performance a little.

Good news. No page under Shockey Monkey requires more than 1 second to render, with most actually rendered in under 0.3 seconds.

The network utilization is a whole different story unfortunately. You see, all the pretty AJAX interface and usability functionality comes at a cost. Roughly 400 Kb worth of uncompressed Javascript type of a cost. To give you an idea of why this is a problem: imagine refreshing the support request display give times. You would have downloaded 2 Mb worth of Javascript. Not good at all.

So one of my tasks this weekend was to figure out a way to reduce that burden. The first problem was that of multiple requests. Between my own and third party Javascript I had eight Javascript files, meaning eight requests to the web server. Since IE and Firefox only use a maximum of two requests to the server this meant that the browser would request, load, request, load, request, load… and make you pull your hair as you watched the loading bar bounce around.

I first started with trying to combine my Javascript on the fly which resulted in a learning experience that packed Javascript code cannot be combined. FMR.

I finally ended up uncompressing all of my Javascript and minifying it in a single Javascript file. Here is the before:

Notice it took nearly a second for the combined request to pull down all my Javascript files. But with minification and a single script:

Notice that after minification and consolidation the Javascript library has gone from over 400 uncompressed, to 340 compressed, down to 142 compressed and minified! The total download and render time from nearly a second down to 1/5th of a second! If I put my marketing hat on, that’s 500% improvement!

So a page with 168 support requests, live code and effects including autocomplete and all the other good stuff is yours in 2.38 seconds.

I have two items remaining in the to do list. First, enable gzip compression on the server even more. Second, find out why Javascript is not being cached. Currently I am trying to cache Javascript code at 1 month:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 1 month”
</IfModule>

But not making it very far with that one, yes the module is loaded and available.

As far as the iPhone is concerned - app works flawlessly over Safari even the visual effects are all there. As for release, any day now folks…

For the past two days I have been working on hacking OWN support, or to put it more specifically, trying to do proactive technical support for questions you haven’t asked yet.

While this problem is easily fixed by saying “RTFM” we find that doesn’t reflect too well on our customer satisfaction. Saying it politely doesn’t work either “Could you please, please, please read the documentation?” and the bloat of trying to reach people in the way that they expect the information to be presented is starting to grow. There are videos, whitepapers, frequently asked questions, blog posts, wikis.. the reality behind this approach (as disorganized as it may seem) is that it’s as such by design because both of our customers that read the documentation don’t actually read it but scan the page for the content they are looking for. So jamming everything in a single place, single location leads to information overload and effective shutdown of the nervous system which then leads to a support request anyhow. While we have built a templated response system of canned responses, its pretty demotivating for the support staff to work on problems that have already been solved a thousand times. It also reflects very poorly on my organization because it kills the problem solving skills:

“If you don’t feel stupider by the end of the day you aren’t doing your job.” -Vlad Mazek, June 12th, 2008

Who would want to work under those circumstances? It takes me about 10 minutes to get back to the complex things I generally work on after I’ve had to explain to someone how the Internet works in their lingo and technical competence. And people ask why OWN doesn’t do retail work or answer sales calls - it’s a filtering mechanism folks - it separates people that can read and click on things from the people that need the following:

DRaaS

I am calling it Documentation Reading as a Service. Basically once a new order is processed by Shockey Monkey the system will look to see if this is the first order of this type. If it is, the system will generate an appointment request in the partner account managers system and shoot a copy to the customer as well to negotiate a time for DRaaS to be rendered. In addition to the email coming out with all the documentation, FAQs, PDFs and other filler nobody will ever read, we’ll now have an appointment for the OWN drone to call the client and render DRaaS:

OWN: Hi, this is _____ from Own Web Now, you just signed up for ____ and I wanted to give you a call and thank you for your business.

Client: Wow, you’re not an Indian?

OWN: Thank you very much so kindly. Now listen, I wanted to give you a ring and introduce myself and just go over a few things with the service that might save you a lot of time and a lot of grief as you go along. Do you have maybe 3 minutes?

Client: No, but I know you’re going to call me back so I’d rather talk to you now than dodge the callerid for the next month. Shoot.

OWN: Ok, so you signed up for ___. Now just like with all of our products, the support is free and unlimited, you can open as many tickets as you want and we’ll respond within two hours. If its urgent you can set a higher priority for a few $ more and we’ll work on it immediately. Now, I see that you got _______ service, are you familiar with it?

Client: Yes, I’ve been in IT for 200 years, actually Pascal stole my idea for a calculator and the queen saw right through him when he tried to show it off.

OWN: Wow, that is fantastic! Amazing story. Ok, well, I won’t take up too much of your time, just remember when you’re doing ______ - read the entire FAQ title section in a hyper exciting voice.

Client: (God, I hope she didn’t call my toll free number)

OWN: So thats pretty much it, you’re now an expert at ______.

The big idea with DRaaS is to answer the support questions we know we’re going to get and also give them an idea of how the whole system works so that they at least have a starting point when it comes to documentation. When people see a 30 page document they do what every 8 year old does - there are no pictures in this book! So if the DRaaS gives them a jumping point to at least realize how the system works they can look up details on their own. You can read more about it in my upcoming book, DRaaS Encyclopedia, available as a preorder at $49.99; Just one page, for the busy professional on the go! But since you’re reading my blog I am going to give it to you for free:

The other aspect hidden behind DRaaS is that it sets expectations right away. If we’re about to lose a customer because they didn’t know what they were getting into or they sold something we don’t make its probably better for both of us to pull out before we end up in a nightmare scenario of trying to do something custom (expensive) and both losing.

Jokes aside…

Looking at the statistics, it’s painfully obvious that most support requests are not just originated out of the clients ignorance but our own inability to communicate and set the expectations. The documentation sucks because the clients don’t read it and expect it in both encyclopedia that can be Googled and the short FAQ form that they will not comprehend because they have 101 level understanding of the underlying concepts which are supposed to be answered by the documentation originated by the dude that wrote the software and was translated into plain English by someone that drank too much in college. It’s a cycle of incompetence in which everyone loses money - we answer questions over and over again, client base is frustrated that it has to ask them to begin with, the end customer is getting billed for it all along and nobody gets to prosper because the system is broken by design.

I’m sure people would love using our software far more if they didn’t have to learn how to use it first.

Let’s hope DRaaS can fix that. I’ll give you an update a few months from now and let you know how it goes. If someone can think of a better name than DRaaS please post it in the comments.

Now off to monster.com to find someone with a sultry voice that men and women would want to listen to.

One of the most challenging tasks in running Own Web Now is the information sharing. While we’ve really worked hard to get together with our partners on a number of fronts in terms of activity and service notification, our ability to offer the documentation and knowhow is still lacking mostly because it sucks internally as much as it sucks externally. We have no fewer than four places in which we keep our KB data (between SharePoint, internal blog, www.ownwebnow.com/help support wiki and our development PF). Having this KB data out there in a way that people could count on would save a ton of support requests if we could just update our documents in the same location. So:

Enter Monkey Knowledge Base

I shot a 5 minute video to explain this to you.

What is hilarious about this is that it took less than two hours to develop the feature and tie it into all the other systems we currently use. Features:

• Organization-wide knowledge base accessible through the portal
• Company restrictions, allowing you to mark certain KB articles as private to a given company if you’ve written specific documentation for them
• Rich HTML KB article editor, which allows cut and paste from Microsoft Word
• RSS feed for external syndication with your public web site, SharePoint
• Support ticket to Knowledge Base article conversion is a one checkbox click process.

And it’s fully integrated into the portal so its in a place where your clients are already logging in to review invoices, pay bills, request support, manage contacts.

What I didn’t say, and what you’ll have to read between the lines for, is what we can do if features like this are doable in less than two hours. If all the clients are used to this portal, which now includes free integrated email-to-ticket creation and updates, and it’s already used to order, bill and report for services, what more could it possibly do in the hands of Own Web Now?

Keeping it simple… So everyone can figure it out. By the way, there is another cool way to keep up with Shockey Monkey, check out our Twitter page at www.twitter.com/shockeymonkey