The Agile Micro ISV Blog

It’s been about 10 months since Home Document Manager made the transition from project to product. Looking back on those 10 months I can level a couple of criticisms at myself; the main one is that I haven’t iterated aggressively enough. The other is that I’ve ignored some customer feedback because it didn’t gel with my vision of where I wanted Home Document Manager to go.

Something happened in the last month that has injected a bit of pace into my development. I started considering a closely related, although entirely seperate product. Where HDM is a desktop document management tool, the new product was an advanced PDF Viewer/Editor/Annotator.

Part of the dance that micro ISV‘ers do when conceiving a new product is to evaluate competition, see what they do, see what they don’t do, see if they alleviate the particular pain that you’re trying address, and why, or why not. In short, we try to find our Unique Selling Proposition. I looked closely at a number of big names in the document imaging and PDF worlds, products like Acrobat Professional, Abbyy Finereader and the like. Not only did I find my USP within minutes, I’ve found a wealth of new user interface ideas and major bits of functionality that would slot right in to Home Document Manager.

I’m already a decent way through coding for the new product and have had so many a-ha moments for version 2 of HDM too.

Choosing WPF was a mistake. I love WPF. I work for Microsoft writing WPF. But for this particular project, it was the wrong call. The new project I’m writing uses Windows Forms. It’s been a while since I did WinForms, but my WPF experience is illuminating my UI architecting in new ways. I also really don’t miss the WPF cold start times. I’m certainly more productive using WPF, but let’s face it, in the B2C world, your customers really don’t care about that. Version 2 of HDM will use WinForms.

I haven’t paid enough attention to minimising the clicks my users have to go through in order to perform common tasks. This was immediately apparent when reviewing the competition for my new product, so version 2 of  HDM will have a much improved UI.

The deployment mechanism I use for HDM (ClickOnce) has its advantages. I can update end user installs easily, but serious B2B is a struggle because of the lack of Proxy support in ClickOnce. I also fell into the self signed ClickOnce bootstrapper trap, which effectively brought iterations of version 1 of HDM to a premature end. Bog standard installers from hereon-in.

One of the things I have to consider is whether or not to bring two such closely related products under the same umbrella on the same website. This has obvious advantages for marketing and SEO, they are both paperless/PDF/document related products.

A lot to mull over, but for me, speccing and developing a second complimentary/related product seems to be a good thing so far. I know the arguments about laser-like focus for micro ISVs, and I’m hoping that I’m not stumbling into a heffalump trap. But having two related products, particularly on the same website, should add credibility, and the 2 products can also have a beneficial effect on each other. Time will tell.

p.s. I’m writing this on Christmas day only because I’m standing in the kitchen with our latest edition (Eli Benjamin, 6 weeks old) strapped to my chest while I wait for the turkey to cook. Happy Christmas everyone.