Please meet a creative team, which brings you ProtoShare. Blake Johnson, Josh Chaney and Peter Uchytil tell us what collaborative prototyping is about, discuss advantages of pure HTML/CSS+Javascript solution, hint on iPhone app coming and future ProtoShare roadmap, give advice on how to select the right wireframing tool and much more.

Audio interview has a lot of bonus content packed!

Sasha Kovaliov (SK): Would you please introduce yourself and tell us in several words what ProtoShare is about?
Blake Johnson (BJ): Hi, my name is Blake Johnson, Vice President of Business Development and co-founder of Site9 company.
Josh Chaney (JC): I’m Josh Chaney, Managing Director of ProtoShare. ProtoShare is a collaborative web-based prototyping tool for web sites and web apps. And the keyword is here “collaborative”, it really facilitates the whole discussion not only on the prototyping base but throughout all the development process from brainstorming, wireframing, design work, and even on the actual build phase.
Peter Uchytil (PU):  My name is Peter Uchytil, Product Manager. With ProtoShare we’re enabling discussion around the project so you could make sure that you’re building correct things.
BJ: We came from different backgrounds of Site9 which is a parent company of ProtoShare. We started as a web development company ourselves back in 1999, 10 years ago, and we did database-driven complex websites up till 2005 when we had developed a platform which we deployed ourselves, we called it “Launch Platform” and it helped to expedite interactive development. We decided to market that to get some venture capital and become a software company. We found some success, however, part of problem was it had a CMS built-in and a lot of larger companies wanted to have their own CMS solution. Our product also had some prototyping aspects built-in that a lot of people liked. So in 2008, last year, we broke out the prototyping aspect, and decided to make a SaaS application. That’s the short story how we came out with ProtoShare.

SK: ProtoShare is more a web development-centric solution, what are the modern tools of a web developer and what is the role of ProtoShare in this toolset?
BJ: If you get the tool you will see that it’s not just for web developers, it’s also for project managers, and art directors because you can review a creative concept online, project managers can come in and monitor where the project is, information architects can build out the prototypes, and stakeholders can be invited (management, marketing, clients) and participate in the dialog.
JC: There are really 2 parts of ProtoShare: the review process which is extremely simple, created for stakeholders, who don’t have time to learn the product (the number of reviewers is unlimited), and the developer’s part.
PU: A modern web developer certainly plays several roles nowadays and in larger organization these roles are going to be distributed among several people: user experience, design, information architecture, site structure, building the site itself. All those different roles can be fulfilled by a single person in a lot of cases or a couple of people, and ProtoShare addresses all those different roles.
You also can keep the client in the same system for other activities, for example for email campaign to review the message. If you need to look why the decision was made you also can go back to the history of the project and find relevant records, and we think it’s a great advantage.

SK: We are talking a lot about collaboration today. How does ProtoShare team collaborate with their users and gets their feedback for further development?
BJ: We’re on Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and Youtube, and we do all the social media things that we can do, we monitor searches and anything about wireframing and prototyping. We gather feedback from all the users of the product, and a lot of the current features we have due to the feedback we have from the customers.
PU: When ProtoShare was still in beta we did usability testing. From the day one we were trying to get users’ and community feedback for better product design.

SK: You’ve just mentioned that you’re one of the oldest wireframing web app. Web is changing constantly – what emerging and existing trends do think influence the process of wireframing and prototyping and how do you reflect them in ProtoShare?
PU: The trends in wireframing right now are all about “doing more with less”, things that let you save money, make sure you can move the project forward. Tools become easier to use and access, which is especially important for customers. Regarding web trends in general we’re not really chasing the trends, because that’s the way to stay behind them. If you’re trying to build your own wireframing application you can do very sophisticated web actions, but then the problem is that you are going to spend a lot of time working with it. It’s a really a hard place to play. We think that we did tools so that people can describe the behaviors that they want on the web site and push the project forward.
BJ: If we were in any trend right now, which we mentioned earlier, our product does fit well with agile project development philosophy, rapid prototyping, and involving users.

SK: Peter, here I hear it again “more is less”. A lot of online applications are getting really popular because you don’t have to install or upgrade anything, just go to the web page and you have your working application. However, a lot of people nowadays still prefer to have an offline application. Do you think that you’re going to make an offline version of ProtoShare?
JC: Earlier we had it on our roadmap. Right now we’re a web-based application and to make it offline requires serious development work. We wouldn’t like to spend development time on those features instead of building a more sophisticated product and reaching more customers.
BJ: Technologies are emerging, they are still immature, the idea is awesome, and we have a request for that. But you have to be careful with this trade-off between online and desktop apps.
PU: I think that it’s also something that people are getting more and more comfortable with: online apps and cloud computing. Web developers and design agencies are going to be early adopters of the whole cloud methodology so it seems like a good fit for us.
JC: Before developing an offline application we may to prefer to develop iPhone version to allow reviewers to comment on wireframes.

SK: Being a totally online application has limitations on browsers. As we checked yesterday the browsers that are supported right now: Firefox, IE, and Safari. Do you plan to support any other browsers (e.g. Opera, Chrome)?
PU: There are 2 sides of ProtoShare:  for developers and for reviewers, and review side is sort of client-facing and there are no any browser limitations. The reason we haven’t done extensive testing in Opera, for example, is simple: we take into account market numbers too. Each browser that we have in testing rally increases testing time, so if we are going to support it will take a lot of efforts. Unfortunately, there are still browser differences between PC and Mac. Our long-term goal is to have 4 browsers support for everything as soon as it’s viable to do: we have limited resources. For example IE’s and Firefox’s Javascript is just one huge difference. Our customer base of web designers use primarily Firefox and that makes a lot of sense to develop with Firefox in mind, making sure that review can be handled in all the browsers.

SK: At the very beginning you mentioned that your product is built in CSS/Html/JavaScript. If you have built it in Flash or Flex it would work in all the browsers.  Why did you make that choice?

PU: The original technology is based on other product “Launch” and at that time it was Html/Flash hybrid application. We pulled Flash out and left HTML, we really feel that the html nature of ProtoShare allows us to do things that others don’t do or just can’t do easily. For example, we can use CSS to do the styling of components, and we were told that web developers just love that. It takes a little work to get there, but if you’re an advanced user this is not a problem.
BJ: We can reveal what we’re planning for our next release: we call it html sand-box.
PU: It will allow users to extend ProtoShare in any way they want. If they want to support a certain component they don’t have to wait us to build it, they can build it themselves. And that’s not kind of thing you can get from Flash-based application.

SK: Are there any other innovations which are coming with the new version?
BJ: We’ve just had a release but we’re planning to improve review and project management aspects of application, to make the processes more robust and suitable for larger companies.
JC: With the last release ProtoShare 3.5 (August 23^rd, 2009) we’re really facilitating collaboration throughout the whole web development process.
http://www.protoshare.com/ProtoShare-Benefits/

SK: Here is a bit tricky question. There are so many players popping up in the wireframe apps market. You’re not a new player here. Can you give any tips to our readers how to select the best wireframe application for their needs?
JC:  The reason that you build a prototype is that you so can get feedback and start a discussion so you can make refinements during prototyping phase, rather than doing rework at the backend, which makes it more expensive.  When it comes to choosing the right tool everybody has different needs so I’m not saying that one tool can fit everyone. But my only suggestion would be, when evaluating these tools ask yourself some questions: am I creating a prototype to generate a discussion and gather feedback,  is access easy for my stakeholders at all the points of the process, what this tool offers now, what’s its potential for future.

SK: Guys, thanks for the great interview and ideas you’ve shared with our readers. Protoshare is truly and amazing product, and we are sure you’ll make it even better!

Related posts:

1. Wireframe, Collaborate and PM with iPlotz
2. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind
3. Diving in Prototyping with Axure

The next interview in our Wireframing Marathon is held with Mark Vernon, the owner and founder of iPlotz. Mark’s latest app has very quickly attracted many users by providing not only online wireframing and prototyping possibilities, but also project management part. Mark shares his vision on a perfect wireframing solution and ways to build one, hints that there is a new long-awaited feature to be launched in several weeks.
CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Mark, could you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us what iPlotz is in one sentence?
Mark Vernon (MV): I’m the founder of iplotz.com , which offers both an online and offline wireframing and prototyping application.

CHH: You started iPlotz development a year+ ago as internal tool? Even at that time there were some other mature competitors in wireframing e.g. Axure. How did you define your niche and whether has your vision changed since you’ve started?
MV: There were a couple of products out there like Axure and Omnigraffle but these were desktop apps, not suitable for online collaboration which I wanted to use between our USA office and our offshore developers. Since then the vision hasn’t changed too much, just adding features as users ask for them.

CHH: In January after 2 weeks of launch you reduced the subscription price. Price changes always cause negative feedback: when they go down, the older subscribers don’t like that they have paid more.  Tell us about your experience with pricing tactics.
MV: At that point we didn’t have any paying subscribers so that wasn’t an issue – I don’t think we need to change pricing now, but if we ever do, we would always offer a refund to existing users, or some other method of compensation.

CHH: iPlotz supports a lot of languages including Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew, which broadens your audience.  Who are you main targets geographically?
MV: As always, the USA is the biggest market, but for offshoring many developers are in China, Russia etc, and it makes sense for them to be using local variations. It’s very easy for us to add new languages, so no point in limiting our market geographically.

CHH: Since you’re updating iPlotz with new features on a regular basis as well as fixing bugs, QA questions pops in mind.  How effective is bug hunting done by your clients? Is in-house testing more efficient?
MV: It will always be a mix of clients finding bugs and us tracking them down. Users have so many different ways of doing things, that unexpected bugs are found. However, we are working a lot more on finding and fixing bugs before release of each update. This means the updates may come less often.

CHH: iPlotz is designed as a tool for making lives of web designers and developers easy. So far none of the solutions on the market can respond to the need of converting graphic wireframes into HTML/CSS mock-up to test complicated interactions.  Do you have such a feature on a to-do list?
MV: We have been working the last 2 months on HTML export, and this can be seen on our staging server at http://iplotz.com/staging/ – Should be released in the next couple of weeks. We have also started to make components interactive to improve the prototyping within the application itself.

CHH: Your competitors are trying to hit the enterprise market with hosted versions of their tools, integration connectors, etc. How do you see an iPlotz’s users in a year: who they are and how iPlotz helps in their work?
MV: We are finding a lot of companies with 5 or more users signing up, which makes sense since that follows our own profile as users. Now, we are currently creating a complete project management web app to go with the AIR app, so that companies can manage workflow better. As more and more work gets done remotely or between different offices, we want to create the tools and sites to help manage it all.

CHH: iPlotz has reached the semi-finals of ‘The Best of RIA 2009′. Our congratulations! Did you employ any special tricks to achieve such a great result, or is it simply users’ tribute to a great product?
MV: I’ll claim the 5th amendment on that… :) Suffice to say, it was fun to participate and the end result was extra traffic and more people using the product.

CHH: iPlotz is on twitter and several other social media resources. How do these tools help iPlotz? What is primary usage of social media? Is it a decent lead-generation source?
MV: Twitter allows us to keep a real time view of what people think of iPlotz, and we also keep en eye on search keywords to track competitors and user needs/questions. As long as you are helping users and not spamming them, it’s a fairly good lead generation tool.

CHH: Investments: Are you going to attract massive investments for the further development of iPlotz? Can you share the new features we can expect?
MV: We don’t need massive investment, but in any case I am the source of any financing. After the next release we’ll be concentrating on the project management features and usability features of the actual application. Anything more will be as a response to user requests.

CHH: Mark, thanks for the answers and we look forward to see iPlotz evolving into an ultimate prototyping solution!

Related posts:

1. Wireframing Dialogue with ProtoShare
2. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind
3. Diving in Prototyping with Axure

Today we are discussing prototyping with Xavier Renom, CEO and co-founder of Justinmind. The company is quite different from our previous participants – Justinmind Prototyper is a  desktop solution only. Bundled with a comprehensive set of features makes it a great tool for pros. Xavier shares his vision on wireframing market, hints that online version is to come soon, and tells some intriguing user-experience stories.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Please briefly introduce yourself and your product Justinmind.
Xavier Renom (XR): Xavier Renom, CEO and co-founder of Justinmind.
Justinmind Prototyper is a productivity tool that allows the prototyping, simulation and validation of applications and websites. It covers the entire process, from the navigation flowchart creation to the usability testing, as it allows creation of fully functional simulations.
In a nutshell: you can visualize and test your web application before you code it. This way, you’ll minimize changes on later stages and risks involved.

CHH: Only a couple of years ago wireframing tools were associated with pen and paper, Visio or PowerPoint at the maximum. Could you tell us more about the evolution of Justinmind from its very first concept till today?
XR: Justinmind started as a software development company, founded by two engineers. During its initial phase, we discovered that using a high-fidelity simulation, it was possible to reduce time and re-work in project development, so we started the development of Justinmind Prototyper.
Our products allow the creation of hi-fi wireframes, and then simulate the application, with advanced features such as data behaviour, conditional events and templates.
Justinmind Prototyper is not just wireframing software, it also allows stronger and more powerful prototyping. We intend to provide a software that allows people to visualize their concepts before long coding phases, and have it all documented before building the real software or a website.
Besides, it is intended to help visualize the changes during application development projects.

CHH: Justinmind is desktop software. A lot of your competitors offer online versions of their solutions. Is there a particular reason why JP sticks to desktop or are you planning on releasing a web-based version as well?
XR: Most of the web competitors allow you to just design a mockup or a wireframe, but not much more. Justinmind Prototyper is a full drag&drop tool for rapid prototyping and we believe that a desktop environment is perfect for productivity tools … by the moment.
On the other hand, sharing and validating prototypes online is very important. That’s why we are about to launch Justinmind On-Demand, which is a platform where a user can share, test and annotate a prototype without additional installations.

CHH: Who stands behind Justinmind? Please tell us more about your team and your inspirers?
XR: Justinmind is a Barcelona-based spin-off from Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña. It was founded by Xavier Renom and Pablo González, and is backed up by venture capital. Today, it’s composed by a team of engineers, researchers and a marketing and selling team.

CHH: Please describe your typical clients/users. Is there a dominant geographical market? If yes, why?
XR: We have government, banks, insurance, small IT consulting companies and several UX designers around the world. Nowadays our bigger clients are in Europe, but we’re selling online to the whole world. It’s impressive the amount of users we get from India.
We have some distribution partners around the world, and our potential marketing is not restricted geographically.

CHH: Justinmind is a powerful prototyping tool with an extensive set of features. Do you have statistics on their usage: most used, least used, etc.?
XR: It always depends on the client and/or project being done. Big enterprises need and use the Requirement Management features, personalized documentation and the capabilities of data management. UX designers are more interested in dynamic interactions, events and simulation.

CHH: Taking into account your vast experience on the market, do you have any plans for going into the niche for individuals with light version of the product for a lower price or even for free? Why or why not?
XR: We received some feedback from users about this. We cannot say we won’t do that, and if too many users were interested in a version without datamasters or business logic prototyping (just for drawing wireframes), we’ll think about it.
Nowadays we’re working full time trying to improve our main product, Justinmind Prototyper.

CHH: JP covers full cycle of prototyping making it time-consuming to start using it right away. How do you assist JP newbies? What is an ordinary implementation phase duration?
XR: We think it’s very important to help users to understand better our tools and the powerful of application prototyping. We have a support portal, with people always willing to help and assist our users, that’s not just marketing talk. We have people to be online talking to consumers, solving problems and generating tutorials. Our blog’s main objective is to talk, solve questions and give some usage tips.
Besides, we offer training courses for customers, and try to use internet to leverage the help for our customers.
For our users or future users that have any problems or doubts:
http://support.justinmind.com
http://www.justinmind.com/blog
The implementation phase duration depends on the customer. It can take just hours for small companies with small teams and easy development process, and 2-3 days for a large company with complex development processes and methodologies.

CHH: How do you differ from your competitors and what innovations have JP brought to the market?
XR: Justinmind Prototyper has features competitors still don’t have, and some that were copied soon after launching.
Most of our competitors allow you to simply draw wireframes. Justinmind Prototyper is meant to be a full working suite. You draw the Navigation Flowchart, create the screens, manage requirements, and generate documentation for final production, with all the elements interconnected via drag and drop.

• Bi-directional drag and drop – you can link objects, comments or requirements dragging them both ways around;
• Templates, which can be imported and exported;
• Instant simulation without the use of a browser;
• MS Word document generation customization.

CHH: How easily can JP be integrated in the business process of a particular company? Can you describe a usual case-study?
XR: It is possible to go from idea to full simulation of software or a website using only Justinmind Prototyper. Justinmind recommends adapting our Agile Prototyping Methodology to the business processes of a particular company.
As for usage, some corporate clients use it to prototype applications and create their own product libraries. Software companies use it to simulate future products, and even it was used in a pre-sales stage for a client of ours.
There’s the case of Innoget, in which an entrepreneur had the idea of a portal, but he was a biologist. So he used JP to create the whole portal to explain to investors and programmers what exactly he wanted, after a 2-hour crash course!

CHH: You’ve contacted us via twitter yourself. This means you have a great monitoring net. Do you have any tricks you can share with other readers on brand monitoring?
XR: We intend to use the tools offered to contact and provide a better service to our users. We started twittering, blogging and contacting bloggers, because it’s a more simple and honest way to approach and reach them.
We hired a copywriter who is an information junkie and is always testing websites and tools for tracking what’s happening online, via twitter or blogs. A good feed reader and the ability to fine-tune it are a must.

CHH: How successful is social media as a channel for generating new clients? What is your experience in the social internet field?
XR: Nowadays, it’s a great tool for engaging into conversation with our customers, and it helps to know what really users want and expect from our software. And, of course, it is very helpful. We acquired great insights from some blog posts and some encouraging tweets.

CHH: Xavier, thank you for a great interview. You’ve done a great job with Justinmind and we wish you to stay on track and remain an example of a great functional wireframing solution!

Our readers, companies and we would love to hear the questions you have or share your praise to your favorite wireframing products!

Related posts:

1. Wireframing Dialogue with ProtoShare
2. Wireframe, Collaborate and PM with iPlotz
3. Ultimate Wireframing Toolbox (updated)

Please meet HotGloo – the youngest player on the market of wireframing applications. Wolf Becvar, Marketing and Communications with HotGloo, will tell short, but inspiring story of HotGloo. Innovations, focus on pro-users, future pricing plans, unique features, agile development based on users’ feedback and much more in this interview.
Tip: the audio recording has some bonus material inside.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Could you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us what HotGloo is?
Wolf Dieter Becvar (WD): Hi, my name is Wolf and for the last six months I have been responsible for all  HotGloo communication and marketing. I work together with Hannes, who is the godfather of HotGloo and in charge of programming of the app, and Michi (in charge of the HotGloo screen design). It actually started as a diploma thesis at the FH for Media Computer Science in Wedel, Hamburg and was realized back in HotGloo with the support of superReal (Neue Medien GmbH), where Michi and I are employed.

Basically, HotGloo is a web-based wireframe application. A tool to create conceptual interactive prototypes of a website in an early project development stage.

CHH: You position yourself as “designed by IAs for IAs”: what tools did you use before releasing your own product? What innovations does HotGloo introduce in comparison to these tools?
WD: We started off using Keynote, then we switched to Axure, then we tried new stuff  like Protoshare, but these tools didn’t feel right for us. Don‘t get me wrong, they are nice, they have tons of functions but they all lack usability. They just don‘t have this look & feel experience we wanted. At the time, Hannes was writing small apps for superReal and the idea was born to finally build our own wireframe app.

First thing we had in mind was that our app had to be web-based and it had to be smart. The era of downloading and upgrading has hopefully passed – web-based is a lot simpler. You don‘t have to worry about updates, hard drive space, compatibility troubles, program crashes and so on. We knew web-based alone wouldn‘t be very innovative, plus a bunch of other mockup apps were launched that time. We sat together to think up something that could be used as a key feature that we thought all the other apps lack.  Ironically, we were put our ideas into a Mindmeister map and bang there it was – INTERACTIVITY & REALTIME COLLABORATION. I admit we are still working on RC, because that‘s a tough one, but the great thing about it is that you don‘t have to export your wireframes, you just invite the people you want to collaborate with or clients who can review the  workflow – in realtime.

CHH:  What will be the pricing plan for HotGloo services and when do you plan to launch fee-based subscriptions? Maybe, you have an innovative revenue generation scheme in mind?
WD: We have been talking a lot about the pricing system lately. We are currently thinking about monthly subscriptions with different plans. There will be a demo or 30 day real free trial. Maybe we will come up with something completely different, who knows? All that I can say for now is that HotGloo will stay in beta for the next two months.

CHH: An extremely predictable question, but it has to be asked: web service vs. standalone application, how do you see the market evolution?
It seems that the market was heading towards web-based services long before most of us even noticed. First thing I remember is friends using Gmail, not in the Mail client but web-based. Hard disc space is getting less relevant. Even operating systems are downsizing, it seems that there is a big movement towards “Less is More”. Plus most machines are constantly online nowadays. The technology has come so far that RIAs are being developed, which have the same functional range as standalone applications and the same look and feel. Why download a software, the whole installation hassle plus annoying updates. You don‘t have to download, upload, upgrade, downgrade, save, delete, there is nothing to worry about! You are start using HotGloo the next day and surprise, we‘ve updated it whilst you were sleeping.

CHH:  What are your expectations on the number of users after the first year of launch? Why should they try you, and what will make them stick with HotGloo?
WD: That is hard to predict, we don‘t calculate like that, we are not accountants. We program and design stuff we would love to use and we take a close look at our beta tester feedback. Why you should give HotGloo a try is because we are not a big software company, we are just a bunch of guys having fun creating something we love to use. We listen, reply and take action. If someone suggests a good idea, we implement it.  And it turns out that most of our users have a similar background, they are designers, programmers, IA`s, UX, project managers – all people we are working with every single day.

CHH: Right now it looks like anyone with no experience in UX design can jump-start using HotGloo. However, it’s designed to be used by professional IAs with high demands and sufficient expertise. How will HotGloo match their expectations as a primary target audience?
WD: To get started, we decided to arm HotGloo with basic elements which are intuitive to operate. We are in a constant feedback loop with our users and try to make HotGloo better every single day. Lately we have been getting questions about the HTML export of HotGloo pages. If there is someone out there who wants to build a plug-in we are happy to let them. We are not going to do it ourselves, because at the moment it‘s not the direction we want to take. Plus I think we would bore ourselves to death.

CHH: What are your plans for further service/product development: low-fidelity, interactivity and demonstrations, high fidelity, site maps and flow charts, full product life cycle? What niche is right for HotGloo?
WD: At the moment I would say HotGloo is perfect for low fidelity wireframing – highly interactive to create a fully functional & conceptual prototype. We will see what the future holds and we don‘t want to commit ourselves to a specific niche. We don‘t want to exclude the possibility that in the future you can also create high fidelity prototypes, picture use case scenarios in order to display complex workflows even more effectively and easier.

CHH: Besides your beta users feedback you have strong competitors, whose ideas and paths you can use.  What is your strategy: follow and offer service at a lower price or innovate?
WD: As I mentioned before, we built HotGloo primarily because there were no applications living up to our expectations. We don‘t want to follow, we want to innovate. This does not mean that HotGloo will be a high priced application.

CHH: Being a relatively new brand, HotGloo’s brand visibility is quite low. How do you plan to use social media tools for promotion and gaining visibility?
WD: We have quite a lot of confidence in word of mouth marketing. We try to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, our company blog, Friendfeed, content related blogs, and searching for reviewers etc. We don‘t have a lot of financial marketing capital, so we are using every channel we can find. And it‘s working we have about 3000 users betatesting HotGloo, and this number is constantly growing. We are also planning to expand our expertise, travel to usability conferences and talk about our experiences, getting in touch with people.

CHH: Congratulations! HotGloo scored surprisingly high in ‘The Best of RIA 2009′ for a just-launched application. What’s the secret?
WD: Thank you!  We are work hard, constantly improve and we have high expectations towards design & usability, plus we are small, we can adapt very fast.

CHH: Wolf, thanks for the great interview and we are looking forward to meet again in a year to see how well you are doing!

You’ve got more questions to HotGloo’s agile team? Ask them now.

Related posts:

1. Wireframe, Collaborate and PM with iPlotz
2. Diving in Prototyping with Axure
3. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind

Today we feature an interview with Stephane Carrez – head of Planzone’s R&D Department and Architect. Stephane will tell us about Planzone’s ambitions and plans for the near future, how the team works, what social media tools Planzone is using and how the company managed to become a success on a crowded market in a year.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
Stephane Carrez (SC): Gladly! My name is Stephane Carrez, I am head of Planzone R&D team and architect of Planzone.

CHH: Stephane, in several words, what is Planzone about?
SC: Planzone is about creating an easy-to-use online collaborative workspace, where all project data is centralized and can be shared amongst the project team. Through the internet, this workspace is accessible to all parties no matter the time, location or language. In short, Planzone is the perfect Internet application for a comprehensive “Management by Project” approach to group activities. It is easy to use and to learn, without the need to be an expert project manager to be proficient. We also chose to deliver our solution as a SaaS (Software As a Service) application because we don’t want our users to have to install and maintain a piece of software before they can get to work.

CHH: How did you manage in such a short time starting only a year ago, to be more competitive than your mature rivals like Basecamp for example?
SC: In its time, Basecamp had set a standard in terms of usability and simplicity. We absolutely loved it at first sight but we rapidly grew frustrated by its limitations. The focus of Planzone is more towards being productive by providing the right combination of tools to manage multiple projects with different groups. Since our experience and references in this domain are different to Basecamp, it is hard to make a comparison. We run our own race.

CHH: Nowadays project management goes together with document management, collaboration and many other activities. How do you solve the dilemma – either to provide a simple project management tool or extend its functional scope, but make it heavier?
SC: Our focus lies in the synergy between project management and collaboration. Every feature in Planzone is analyzed in terms of customer relevance, complexity, and expected usability. One of our goals is to keep Planzone as easy and accessible as possible, while using the standard Internet infrastructure. This results in higher accessibility, efficiency and adherence.

CHH: FLEX and Silverlight applications seem to be the next generation of applications. Will Planzone have a desktop version via AIR engine or a similar solution?
SC: FLEX and Silverlight are amazing technologies we follow closely. We will probably integrate some FLEX components in our service for example to have interactive multi-project reports. In the short term however, we have no plans for the development of a desktop application. The ability to work “offline” on project data could be an important feature so we keep that option open.
We have a very open architecture and the Planzone API is a component that could be used for implementing such a desktop application. In fact, with our API, anybody could write such application (although it could be complex).

CHH: Palnzone is developed by project management pros with outstanding background in software projects. Does Planzone fit the description of «best of all» for IT businesses?
SC: IT departments, IT services companies and R&D organisations are a big part of our traditional client base. These customers often require specific functionalities to run their processes and manage their businesses. Besides functional depth, these customers require first-class product usability to facilitate adoption with their staff. Satisfying these different requirements is one of our strengths.
However, Planzone goes beyond the specific needs of IT businesses. In fact, Planzone is used by all sorts of organizations, from marketing and sales agencies to headhunters, venture capitalists, construction firms, relief organisations, government agencies, universities, students, churches…
Planzone usage really flourishes, when different departments within any organisation decide to work in a true transverse manner, while being capable to include outside parties in their projects processes. This is project collaboration inside and outside the enterprise firewall.
For example, imagine the business development team of a large retail chain in charge of opening new stores. They need to collaborate seamlessly and efficiently with their financial, HR, sales and marketing departments while connecting with external consultants, agencies and suppliers at the same time. When you can collaborate on projects “inside and outside the firewall”, it is a beautiful form of efficiency.

CHH: Who is a leading the project developer? What kind of crucial skills one must have for making the product successful? What is the role of users’ feedback?
SC: One key objective for Planzone was to create, test and launch new product functionalities in a very short time-frame. We also wanted to involve our R&D team beyond their usual responsibilities and have them take full ownership of their work by participating actively in our product roadmap. For these reasons, we adopted an Agile development methodology. We have a very flat structure in our R&D departments and developers are working in teams on specific subjects.
In order to make the product successful, you have to manage a delicate balance between marketing and sales investments, your R&D roadmap and what evolutions you perceive in the marketplace. You constantly have to ask yourself: are we creating value for our customers and does it make sense for our target market? The only way to know this is to constantly work with your customers and get their feedback.

CHH: Have you thought on integrating Planzone into big platforms? You have your own API, so it seems like a great natural next step.
SC: We agree. We are releasing the Planzone API gradually. The latest development has been the Firefox plugin, where one can access the personal to-do list instantly. We are also working on new add-ons and our goal is to have a full API released before Q2 2010.
Integrating Planzone into big platforms is possible but before we need to see a real customer need.

CHH: Has been SaaS model successful for planzone? Do you think this approach will change in the near future? If yes, what’s coming?
SC: The SaaS model has been extremely successful for Planzone. From a user perspective, this is an almost perfect model:
No upfront costs. Cheaper to adopt and manage than offline software;
No hardware to buy or manage;
Easier to use because of the internet infrastructure;
Software is always up-to-date.

CHH: Augeo Software, the company which is the owner of the Planzone solution also markets Augeo5, an enterprise project and portfolio management software. Do they compete in some way in the market?
SC: We had many debates in our company whether Planzone would compete or not with Augeo5, our enterprise product. Both products play in very different market segments and their delivery model is also different. Planzone is a pure SaaS product while Augeo5 is sold like any other traditional software. Augeo5 is also installed on client’s premises while Planzone is hosted in secured data centers.
We concluded that both our Planzone and Augeo5 products would benefit from each other. One key reason Planzone has been successful from the start is due to our extended market knowledge coming from our experience with Augeo5. Conversely, Augeo5 is also taking advantage of innovative technologies we developed for Planzone.
In the end, our customers will decide if our two products compete with each other. They seem to agree with our dual approach though. In fact we have now several customers that are using both Planzone and Augeo5 in their organization.

CHH: Everybody is going mobile now. Does Planzone have plans to step into this direction?
SC: Yes. We have noticed the market trend of instant real-time information to everyone concerned. We are developing mobile solutions for Planzone. It is one example of how we play into new evolutions.

CHH: How do social media tools help you in your everyday work? What tools would you advise everyone to use?
Popular tools in Planzone are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and various messengers. While there are benefits to having company-wide chat possibilities, there is a danger of losing focus and using these tools in a compulsive manner. I guess it really depends case-by-case on the person, function and company.
CHH: You are using Twitter and several other social networks to promote Planzone. Are these tools productive?
SC: A lot of these tools’ productivity is creating awareness and brand recognition. Often it is hard to quantify how much effect they exactly have, since a lot of their effect is psychological.
The way I see it, these tools are free, take almost no time to use and give visibility to the service. That’s why we support them.

CHH: What is your product path for the coming years?
SC: Key elements that define our product path are: client feedback, technological and market evolutions, product flexibility and general ease of use. Many of our customers are “always on” meaning they want to access their project information and communicate with their team members almost at anytime, from anywhere and using many different devices. We are conducting several initiatives to support this kind of nomadic work style. Today, our work does not stop at the office door and we need to take these evolutions into account.

CHH: What are your ambitions on number of subscribers for 2009?
SC: We worked on Planzone for two years before launching in June 2008. Our software company has been publishing Project and Portfolio Management software for over 18 years. We have the unique luxury of a motivated and international client base that gives us an enormous amount of input. We combined all of this with our passion for new technology and our desire to reinvent ourselves. The result is Planzone – a product we are very proud of.
Our growth strategy should be viewed in the context of the Internet, where people have a near-perfect market information about products, prices and user satisfaction. Therefore, more than focusing on an absolute number of subscribers, our goal is to make an increased number of people from very different backgrounds understand how much they can benefit from using Planzone in their business or personal life and have them spread the word.
Excited and happy users result in an exponential growth – especially on the Internet. Today, we have over 8′000 users and we expect to double that in a few months.

CHH: Stephane, thank you a lot for the interview! Such a great product on the market as Planzone has a lot of potential. We are sure you will achieve a double of subscribers in a few months and will meet the coming year with a new great set of features and even more possibilities for your customers.

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