XAOP RSS Blog Feed

Using timetag.it through Fantastical

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:59:00 GMT

Today I started taking advantage of Fantastical to register my time in timetag.it.

You can buy Fantastical via the Apple Appstore or download a free trial from the Flexibits website to test this setup.
Follow these steps to set up Fantastical for your timetag.it :

You need to configure your timetag.it Google Calendar in the Mac OSX iCal app.
See this forum for more info on this setup.
In the Fantastical preferences, you need to select your timetag calendar as the default calendar.
You are now ready to tag your time via Fantastical.

Activity Based Costing at XAOP

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:00:00 GMT

A brief excerpt from the executive summary of my Vlerick EMC BPM thesis.

Using ABC to design a successful business model

Managing the business becomes easier, less stressful and more profitable.

In a startup company, it is very important to know what comes in and what goes out. Fluctuations in revenue create great pressure on running a tight ship.

We need to be able to manage our costs and apply this information to our strategy and business models. XAOP is still looking for a solid and sustainable business model. Traditional accounting mechanisms do not give us the necessary insight into the real cost of our activities. I have tested Activity Based Costing (ABC) in process and operational management (short term) and also on Business Models for strategy (long term).

In this project we investigated the impact of ABC on a set of different business models that we are experimenting with. XAOP has at least three business models today. The first business model is the software development service, the second (Cloudring) and third (Timetag.it) are product oriented software as a service business models. There is of course an overlap between the different models. Our investment in research can be controlled via ABC and assigned to the correct projects (using a service model or product models).

I learned during the project that ABC is not only valuable for large organizations but that also small software companies like XAOP can benefit from its modern approach to track activity performance with a financial metric.

This work defines the direction that we will take in developing and selling our products and services from a financial perspective for the next two years. This was missing before in our business model and I will highlight the benefits of doing this. But there is also a downside: creating and keeping an ABC model up to date demands a lot of work.

ABC is dependent on gathering data and capturing information on processes and activities in order to give an accurate view. The XAOP ABC application is being run on a dataset of approximately one year’s worth of detailed information. This project has been a catalyst for capturing activities (with Timetag.it) in a more structured way than before.

Cloudringapp is coming soon!

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:36:00 GMT

We are preparing everything for the private beta launch of Cloudringapp.com . We have ± 250 people interested to participate in the private beta test. Our teaser page designed by Sacha Greif was well received on twitter. During the development we learned that it takes a lot of time to get these things done. We’re sorry for making you wait. We worked a lot on the UI to make it as user friendly as possible.

The cloudring app deserves the time to make it a truly great integration platform.
We reduced the scope of the first release and disabled synchronization at the moment to ensure stability.

Thanks for having the patience. Our target release date is 30 June.

TimeTag.it a Belgian Cloud Example

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:15:00 GMT

Timetag.it is an online time-tracking application that allows you to use a regular calendar to enter your activities. It integrates with your existing calendars, so you don't have to learn yet another system or change your habits.

The basic idea of TimeTag.it is that you use hash tags (#project name) to link calendar entries to a project and activities (@activity_name).

The first version of the TimeTag.it application was implemented in a private cloud model on top of Google Calendar. When Google published the story on the official Google Enterprise blog, we decided to redesign our prototype and started testing it using the freemium business model in the cloud.

The Timetag.it application manages XAOP’s project portfolio and our workload, strategy, financial and business plan. It also generates timesheets to invoice our customers on a monthly basis.
It works like this:
We draw up a realistic plan based on our past experience thereby being confident when creating project proposals for our customers. It gives us an insight into our internal processes making them more efficient and enabling us to discuss the figures with our customers. When we start testing an internal optimization project we can measure the impact (before and after). TimeTag.it helps us to capture our past experience and plan our future.

Our Cloud Experience

I would like to share with the Belgian Cloud group the secret ingredient in our cloud experience so that it can fuel a new discussion in the group. Cloud Services like Getsatisfaction, Google calendar, Yammer, New Relic and the Amazon Webservices helped us to deliver a stable and very flexible cloud application.

We received feedback from users via getsatisfaction that helped us to develop the concept beyond XAOP usage. Getsatisfaction is a communication channel with a community based approach that has led to the discovery of new ideas and opportunities.

As security has been a concern in the cloud we redesigned the system in our first release with the cloud in mind and implemented the OAuth mechanism to log on to the Google Platform. The benefit of this is that we don’t store any passwords in our system. In the near future you will be able to reuse your online identity via OpenID from LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

XAOP uses Yammer as an internal communication channel. We decided to experiment with Yammer by using it to send notifications to the team about our activities.

New Relic gives us insight into code usage and helps us optimize performance issues. It is also a valuable source when troubleshooting.

We are big fans of Amazon webservices and have been using the EC2 platform since 2008. We learned a lot hosting this application in the Amazon cloud and are now providing this service to other companies.

New feature : support for other calendars

This brings us to the important release of today : iCal features. We have received requests to make TimeTag.it usable in a more classic business environment, where Exchange still has a big market share. Fortunately Exchange 2010 supports the publishing of ical feeds. The major advantage of using iCal feeds is that you are no longer restricted to TimeTag Google Calendar for data entry. You can use internal calendar systems like Exchange 2010, Lotus Notes or other cloud based iCal supported calendars such as Yahoo Calendar or Windows Live Hotmail Calendar. You can paste your private iCal feeds and synchronize them as well.

You can sign up with your Google account and start your own domain. We are working on authentication via Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.
We recently added features like external user support. This enables XAOP to work and manage a virtual team (such as freelancers and student workers).

The TimeTag.it application is free of charge and our goal is to introduce a premium account when there is sufficient demand for a strategy, financial or a planning module. If you want to use TimeTag.it inhouse, we offer a VMWare appliance(with single sign on and LDAP / Active Directory integration) that allows you to host the application in your own infrastructure with support from XAOP.

If you like our tool, feel free to write a short review in the Google Apps Marketplace, we’d be very grateful ;-) If you are on Twitter, follow Timetag to keep up to date with all new developments!

New timetag.it release

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:29:00 GMT

Last week we released a new version of TimeTag.it.
In case you haven't heard of it before, TimeTag is a free time-tracking tool that enables you to use Google Calendar to enter your time. The idea came from our post on the official Google Enterprise Blog.

Check out the timetag.it blog for more information regarding the new features !

All feedback is welcome !

The XAOP RubyConf X report

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:08:00 GMT

Last week the XAOP team attended the 10th Ruby Conference in New Orleans. After a 17 hour journey from our office in Belgium to the hotel in New Orleans, we were ready for the Ruby event of the year! We were then treated to three days of discussions on Ruby and some keynote speeches from Ruby Gurus - all in the luxurious setting of the Hilton hotel meeting rooms. Besides these informative talks some extra events were organised in the lovely city centre of New Orleans.

The difference between Traits and Modules

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:19:00 GMT

This is my first AskJoeri blogpost, on twitter you can send questions to @askjoeri, which I’ll try to answer on a weekly basis.

The first question was asked by my employer Stijn Van Vreckem. During his RubyConf keynote Matz spoke about adding Traits to Ruby, Stijn wanted to know what the exact difference was between Traits and Modules, since both seem very similar to some extent. After all they seem to fulfill the same purpose, so why invent Traits (or add them to Ruby), when we already can mix in modules in classes. It is true that both are meant to add functionality to classes without having to use multiple inheritance, and both allow adding methods to classes.

TimeTag.it release

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:15:00 GMT

Today XAOP proudly announces the release of their newest product on the web: TimeTag.it.
Timetag.it is an accessible, simple and time saving tool for managing your team performance, using the Google^TM calendar application.

XAOP has been using Google Apps^TM for a couple of years now and recently became a Google Apps Authorized Reseller. But even with a very broad range of applications within the Google Marketplace, we felt something was missing.

Lessons learned migrating SharePoint to Google Docs

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:53:00 GMT

Our colleagues at Renascio recently became Google Apps customers under impulse of XAOP. They now have a user-friendly mail application, but they got so much more. One of these extras is Google Documents for storing files and collaborative document authoring.

One of the problems with migrating your company to a new system is that your legacy data doesn't automatically migrate with you. This is usually one of the big reasons why companies keep using old and outdated systems. While Gmail allows them to fetch their email from their old provider, Google docs does not provide a way to pull in their old documents short of downloading them one by one from their legacy system and uploading them one by one to Google Docs. In the case of Renascio, their legacy system was an online SharePoint.

Deploying Rails 3 on Ruby 1.9.2

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:55:00 GMT

The past two days I've been on a veritable odyssey trying to deploy a Rails 3 application on Ruby 1.9.2, complete with sirens leading me astray with their seductive song and six-headed monsters nearly killing me. It's an adventure alright.

We have been using a home-brewed time management application based on Google Calendar for a while now at XAOP and we are pretty happy with how it works. We decided to rewrite it from scratch in Rails 3. Determined to live on the edge on this one, we built it on top of Ruby 1.9.2 and threw ourselves at its new features such as the new hash syntax.

Two days ago the time had come to deploy a first version. The original application was deployed on Heroku, but Heroku supports neither Ruby 1.9.2 nor Rails 3.0.0 RC. We need the latter for a feature introduced after the fourth beta. The same goes for Engine Yard's cloud platforms. And thus, in a heroic move, we decided to deploy the application ourselves on Amazon EC2. Having done this before, this seemed like a good idea in anticipation of support from Heroku/EY.