I recently read an article by Mary Jo Foley (the ZDNet Microsoft reporter) about Microsoft testing a monthly subscription model for Office. As you might expect, their readers were not too keen on the idea of paying $15/month to use Office. I'm pretty sure if I had to pay for using Office (my company provides my software currently) that I would be looking for cheaper alternatives, but I can't dismiss paying monthly or annual fees for software altogether.

I spent some time working for Sun Microsystems who, at the time (and may still be doing it), charged companies an annual fee based on the number of employees they had when they filed with the feds. They charged what seemed to be very little. I think they charged something like $50/employee/year for unlimited use of any one of their server products or $150/employee/year for unlimited use of their entire server product suite (like 5 or 6 products in the suite). This included all technical support needed by the company. For example, a 100 employee company would have to pay $5000/year to use their messaging server software that includes online e-mail, contact management and calendaring. Now I'm not saying that Sun is the right software or that the price was right, but the model seems attractive to me as a business owner. Paying a low, yearly fee for all use of the software and support makes things very predictable and the price scales up with the size of the company. I forgot to mention that as part of the package Sun would deliver quarterly updates and upgrades to these customers.

So if my company could license MS Office for $100/year/employee and this included phone support and got my company out of the MS upgrade cycle (meaning my company could always be on the latest Office using Microsoft Update and without having to do a huge upgrade migration every couple years) I would probably do it. Maybe the $100 is still too high, but at some price ($10?) it becomes attractive.

I still question the downstream affects that model would have on the software company. Are the benefits of having a recurring revenue stream strong enough to cover the lower prices? Does the motivation for the product team change when they don't have big upgrades to sell? Do costs go down if they can count on every customer being on the latest version of the software? How do they go about making a huge shift in the way the product works like they did with Office 2007?

I have been evaluating WPF/E for add-ins to my company's products. One screen we have been thinking about for a while is a lead pipeline that shows lead stages in a graphical way. Our products leverage IE for the presentation layer and it is tough to do a compelling pipeline with just DHTML.

WPF/E brings a lot to the table. First of all it is very easy to incorporate into our screens, I simply insert the control code and link in the aghost.js file. It also enables us to easily separate the markup from the script. The HTML file orchestrates the screen while the script and XAML reside in separate files. I also like the division of labor. As shown in these screenshots I've coded the pipeline screen as a segmented pipe along the top of the screen. As the developer I just created simple XAML objects that represented the different elements of the pipeline, nothing too fancy. I then hook up my script to control click-thrus and mouse-overs (the second screen shows how the mouse-over affects the pipeline). In production I would then had the XAML source over to a designer and they would take my rudimentary design and create something beautiful from it. They'd send me the updated XAML file and I just insert back into the development tree and everything should still work with changes. In this case I was the designer too, but you should start to see how this should make development easier.

Another thing that I experimented with was trying to use the same XAML objects and provide an entirely different look and feel for the screen. The final screen shot shows how that turned out. This pipeline demo is very simple, but it starts to paint a picture of how WPF and WPF/E can be used in software. I can imagine that things are not quite as simple when more complex functionality is needed. When trying to change the pipeline into a vertical funnel, I did have to adjust some of my code to make it work.

I did try to use Microsoft's new Expression Design application to create the XAML I used in this demo. I designed the circular pipeline segments and exported them as WPF/E XAML code. That sort of worked, but It generated everything as complex paths and was hard to modify by hand. By the time I had finished the demo, I ended up starting from scratch with the XAML objects. Still, the tools are great and they look very promising.  

We're 30 minutes away from the big demo. Our Mission Research/SalesWorks video page has surfaced. They will post a video of the on-stage presentation to that web page when it's available. For us poor soles that were left back at the office, this is our only view of the excitement. I see our JIT marketing team has made some new SalesWorks logos available too.

Today is the big day. At 9:55 PST Charlie and Mary Pat will be going on stage to introduce and demonstrate SalesWorks to an audience of over 700 attendees. We launched our GiftWorks product there a couple years ago and have had a lot of success with it. I think we'll see the same kind of success with SalesWorks.  I will try to summarize some of the press that we get over the next few days.

We've worked with Blodgett Communications for the launch of SalesWorks. Renee Blodgett, the founder of the PR company, has posted an article that illustrates the problem we are trying to solve with SalesWorks...

"Frustrated with the poor user interface and clumsiness of existing contact management solutions like GoldMine and ACT and the fact that I'm not really the right business model to go with a more expensive Salesforce.com online only solution, I'm left without a useful product. Meanwhile, my contacts sit in three apps (Outlook, Filemaker, and GroupMail), since individually, they do not give me the combined functionality I need. Sigh."

I think she's right on with that and it's exactly what we are hearing from the other small businesses we've been talking with.

That's a pretty big statement, but that's what our first SalesWorks article was titled. We'll see how everything pans out with SalesWorks vs. Salesforce.com, but either way I think SalesWorks is going to be a big hit for those small businesses out there that want/need to manage their customer info with ease.

One of the key factors will be cost. From the article...

"The cost is either free or $100 upward, but it's not clear how the cost structure works yet. In any case SalesWorks may well find a niche for businesses who don't want to give up the relative stability and security of a desktop app for contact management, but also want to take advantage of the Web. While Salesforce is a purely browser-based service, SalesWorks is betting on its low cost and desktop app rich interface as ways to differentiate itself."

SalesWorks was launched this morning at Demo '07.

This week our company, Mission Research is launching a cool new product for the SOHO market called SalesWorks. The launch is at DEMO '07 and will be presented on stage. SalesWorks can be easily used to manage contacts and sales leads. It's based on the same platform as our current product GiftWorks which is selling like hotcakes to the small non-profits. More information will be available as the DEMO conference happens so stay tuned. Here's the press release from our web site.

I got a very funny email from a coworker's wife the other day. The email pointed me to the Elf Yourself website which allows you to insert someone's face into a dancing elf (in this case it was Steve's face). Very funny and I went on and forwarded it to several other people.  

A few days later I was talking with Steve about it and how very viral the idea was, however we were both referring to it as the Staple's website. It turns out that it's an Office Max marketing campaign. Nice.

Here are a few links that you may find helpful if you're into web design using CSS. I'm always finding myself searching for the right values for different CSS properties.

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/css-cheat-sheet/ is the one of the two cheat sheets I keep handy. It has a good list of common CSS properties. The other one that I've recently started referring to is http://lesliefranke.com/files/reference/csscheatsheet.html. This one contains both properties and common values.

Visibone also makes a CSS Example Chart that I have yet to find useful, but you may. Visibone actually has a bunch of quick reference sheets for web developers. I have used their JavaScript Quick Reference and that proved to be helpful.

In my previous post I had only been using Expression Blend and wasn't able to figure out how to get it to generate content for WPF/E. It turns out that only Expression Design can export WPF/E compatible content (thanks ADO Guy).

If you download and install Expression Design, you can create vector-based elements to include in your WPF/E-based web pages. Expression Design is very similar to Adobe Illustrator. Once you've completed your design, click on File>Export>XAML. This will prompt you for a filename then it brings up a XAML Export window like the one on the right. If you select the Document Format dropdown you can select the WPF/E format. I've tried a couple simple tests that displayed correctly in WPF/E Pad.

This is a good step and may be all we need, however I was expecting this same type of functionality with all the Expression tools. Is that coming?