For consultants whose office can be anywhere from a coffee shop to behind a steering wheel, tracking time and expenses is a hassle. Yet accurately tracking billable hours and expenses is the only way to ensure that you get compensated for your time and reimbursed for expenses.
With this in mind, Avalinx (the company I work for) set out to capitalize on our own consulting experience by building xWorkForce.com, an application that catered both to consultants tracking their time/expenses, and clients receiving the services.
When Version 1.0 of xWorkForce.com was released, Avalinx (www.avalinx.com) hoped its intuitive interface would help consultants to quickly populate the system, tracking billable hours and expenses in nearly real-time from any Internet connection. xWorkForce.com's on-demand technology, which was built on .NET 1.1, was designed to help companies with limited technology resources capitalize on sophisticated applications without managing or maintaining any hardware or software. The service was also designed to let customers track consultants' time, providing a glimpse of how their consultant's time was being used.
Among other features, the system provided a database, business logic, AJAX-based calendar, chat tools, and enhanced security. Unfortunately, we soon discovered our technology was also limited in a number of ways and didn't provide the type of experience we envisioned during development.
One of the early challenges we faced was deciding on which architecture to use as the product's foundation—a fat-client Windows application or web-based solution. We wanted to build a product with the look and feel of a client-side, feature-rich application, but without limiting it to a specific platform and forcing us to push out service packs and support multiple versions. While past efforts at building web-based solutions did not produce good results, we did like the cross-platform and no-download aspects of the web architecture. We ultimately decided this was the best solution for xWorkForce.com development.
Our decision to move to a web architecture was also based on the growing market for services delivered over the Web. Initially designed for small- to medium-size organizations to reduce expenses on software investments, on-demand applications have grown in popularity, in large part due to the effort of the CRM, financial management, and lifecycle management industry segments. Both small shops and large enterprises value lower costs and a variety of available applications, as well as the fact that overburdened IT staffs have fewer applications to manage. In fact, according to industry experts, the on-demand software market is estimated to grow at 20 percent per year through 2010 and is currently estimated at $13 billion. While in growth mode, web applications still have their challenges, not the least of which is the reliance on the Internet—if the Web goes down, so does access to applications.
In addition to relying on the Internet, web applications often suffer from inefficient client/server protocols, and long roundtrips to the server make business strength applications unbearable to users over long periods of time. Traditional web applications generally lack user-friendly features standard in desktop environments, and web apps have been plagued by poor performance and update issues. For Avalinx to be successful with xWorkForce.com, we had to put the user experience on a pedestal.
Unfortunately, Version 1.0 did not create the unique user experience that would persuade customers to use the application. We found that navigating through the application was not always intuitive, and we knew that it was going to be a barrier for customers as well. During the initial development of xWorkForce.com, we tried to create a unique rich web application, but Version 1.0 looked like any other web application, and we weren't satisfied that we had accomplished our objectives.
