The Agile Micro ISV Blog

Home Document Manager featured on Bits du Jour yesterday. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the BdJ site offers a couple of products at a huge discount for a period of 24 hours. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the offer, but when I finally climbed into bed last night, I had come to the conclusion that it was a phenomenally useful experience – perhaps even essential. Every micro ISV and every micro ISV product should go through the Bits du Jour mill at least once.

One of the most fantastic things is the feedback you get from the BdJ netizens. Ordinarily, when a person with a particular problem appears at your site from Google, they are probably looking for an application to help them, with the deliberate emphasis on “an” – it doesn’t matter if it’s your application or someone elses, so if yours doesn’t fit the bill, they hit the back button and move on.

On BdJ, it’s subtly different – because it’s your application on offer, they are looking for your application to solve their problem, and they are not shy about letting you know if there’s an issue or something they don’t like. Listen to the feedback – it’s invaluable.

Bits du Jour is also a great way to stress test your operation, everything from your installation to your store front – if there’s a problem, there’s nothing like a massive increase in traffic to show it up. It’s worth emphasising that using BdJ is not about the money – it’s about getting a bit of money – but mainly it’s about getting a lot of traffic and customers compressed into a 24 hour period.

Some of my observations:

Installation

I use ClickOnce for all my deployment. I like it primarily because it means I can push out updates and have the clients update themselves with no action required on the part of the user. A few users experienced problems with the installation. After digging through some of the issues, I had one persons installation time out. I had one person whose installation was hanging and one who was inexplicably seeing a 404.

• The installation time out was caused by an ultra slow connection from someone in Tanzania. Whilst I have nothing against people in less well connected countries, my focus is inevitably going to be on countries like the UK, US, Canada, Australia etc. I make the tacit assumption that if you’re on my site you’re using broadband.
• The hanging installation was caused by a machine that refused to install the .Net framework. This persisted even when the framework was downloaded straight from Microsoft, so there’s not much I could do about that. I’m not about to start offering support for the .Net framework.
• Didn’t manage to get to the bottom of the 404, noone else was seeing it.

Runtime Errors

• One user was having a problem because the software couldn’t get write permission to a part of his user profile that he absolutely should have access to. The fact he couldn’t did make me wonder how any other software was working, but I sent him a registry patch to move Home Document Manager’s data folder which got him moving.
• Another user installed the app but it wouldn’t start. I’ve not figured this one out yet, but I suspect there will be a wider problem that I can do nothing about.

Activation

When customers make a purchase, they are emailed a serial number which they enter into the app – the app then calls my licensing server and they are sent a license file. This is one of the parts that I was very pleased with. There were no issues with the activation at all.

One person said they weren’t going to buy because I used online activation, but that’s one person in 14 months so I’m not too worried.

Summary

All in all, a very worthwhile experience and very positive feedback from the vast majority of customers. PDF Scan Pro comes on BdJ in around a week, it’s less mature than Home Document Manager, but seems to have had better traction, so we’ll see how that goes.