We currently have a ProWorkflow Affiliate Program that can pay a fixed fee for a referral to sale and many people are already receiving referral fees for putting Affiliate banners and links on their sites (that convert to sale).

How does it work?

So basically, you would put a link or ad on your website. You tell a customer or friend to click that link/ad to visit our website. From there we track it all so if they sign up for an account we know you referred them.

Click here to read about the specifics of the Affiliate commission structure. The program has built in reporting and notification (shown below) so you can see the traffic you’re sending and what’s converting into a ProWorkflow sale!

How do I signup & get the Ad/Link for my site?

Follow the instructions below to get setup. It’s worth doing to get a kickback for referring people to the ProWorkflow solution. If you get a cheque in the post it’ll help with the office social fund!

STEP 1.

Visit the Affiliate Sign Up page and enter your details to become a ProWorkflow affiliate.

Note: There’s an option lower down the form to ‘Refer a Friend’. If you do this you’ll clip the ticket on their commissions!

STEP 2.

Visit the Affiliates Area and you’ll see a welcome screen. Look at the links on the top menu. The links are: Reports, Creatives & Settings.

• Reports
  Displays reporting about traffics, clicks, impressions, click-thru ratios etc. The reports also show commission and payment history.

• Creatives
  

  Here you can grab the code for the banners and links that you want to put on your website. Just copy the code!

• Settings
  Your account settings. You can update your address and contact details, payment currency etc.

STEP 3.

Click on the ‘Creatives’ link at the top. Here you can access creative material for both banner ads and text links.

To add a Text Link to your website…
Click ‘Text Ads’ then the available text ads will appear below. Click the one you want to add to your website and you’ll be shown the code.

Note: We recommend adding both the Text Link shown below and a banner ad as well. The more the better!

To add a Banner Ad to your website…
Click ‘Banners’ then the available text ads will appear below. Click the one you want to add to your website and you’ll be shown the code.

STEP 4.

Add the code to your website and you’ll see the text link or banner ad appear. The link to ProWorkflow includes your Affilate ID. For example:

http://www.proworkflow.com/?kbid=XXXX&m=10

When people click the text link or banner ad from your website we track the traffic and lead, and if they sign up you receive a commission (in accordance to the terms).

Let me sign up!

Find out more about the ProWorkflow Affiliate Program and sign up today. You could be earning some good dollars from referring leads, or just from the traffic on your website!

Contact us if you have any questions…

‘As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday, and employees will receive their cards in two weeks.’
(This was the winning quote from Fred Dales, Microsoft Corp in Redmond WA )

‘What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter.’
(Lykes Lines Shipping)

‘E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business.’
(Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)

‘This project is so important we can’t let things that are more important interfere with it.’
(Advertising/ Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)

‘Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule.’
(Plant Manager, Delco Corporation)

‘No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We’ve been working on it for months. Now go act busy for a few weeks and I’ll let you know when it’s time to tell them.’
(R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/ 3M Corp)

Quote from the Boss: ‘Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say.’
(Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)

My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said,’That would be better for me.’
(Shipping executive, FTD Florists)

‘We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.’
(Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)

All our SaaS servers are located at the LayeredTech/Fastservers data center in Chicago. They have given us 6-7 years of solid performance with plenty of available staff for onsite 24/7 support at all times.

I get asked regularly why I don’t use New Zealand based hosting providers for our global SaaS company. The reason is simple.

I’m yet to find one in New Zealand that actually takes it seriously, has full onsite 24/7 support and a level of transparent communication at least similar to most US data centers."

I  want to see:

• Multiple support staff onsite 24/7
• Redundancy that works
• Clear open communication with customers

What I’ve seen often (and lately) is:

• Staff go home at 5:30 and monitor remotely
• Redundancy that fails
• Lack of / confusing communication with customers

So what caused this blog post?

Most NZ techo’s would be aware that a few days ago that a data center had major issues with an infrastructure failure that resulted in about 24hrs of complete downtime.

I believe this affected many thousands of websites and a massive amount of email. A few of our non-related websites and email are through a well known New Zealand based hosting provider.

The outage came at a time we were dealing with some important issues and due to the lack of email our company had to pull all nighters calling customers and monitoring our DB based backup support system.

We run a 24/7 SaaS model with US customers awake while NZ sleeps which is why we need to know our servers have onsite support. If they go down, companies literally stop working. We don’t host websites, our SaaS app is a core business system for many thousands of users globally.

To re-iterate, the letter below is not from our Server provider in the US, it’s from a hosting provider here in NZ we just use for email and some small websites. During the outage, this company was very non-communicative with it’s customers. people were freaking out, didn’t know what was happening and they were also trashing the provider on Twitter and other places.

New Zealand hosting providers I’ve talked to and worked with seem to forget a basic fact that a large number of people and companies actually work late, through the night or have global user bases. Even if they do know this, a comment below shows that they seem to put less priority on issues occurring ‘Outside of work hours’ in New Zealand.

Read the letter below we received AFTER the massive outage with little communication through the event. In comparison, our other server provider had some issues lately and updated their status page regularly so customers knew what was happening.

The part that really brassed me off was the part that said:

“During more sociably acceptable hours…” they contacted help to source hardware. So thousands of people, companies and websites suffer whilst they have their breakfast waiting for the ‘shop’ to open.

In addition, their phones and support numbers weren’t accessible, the website was down and they weren’t being transparent or communicative on Twitter. Customers were mostly in the dark. At the very least they should have a blog or status website hosted separate from their facility to keep customers updated.

In contrast, the data center company we deal with in the US store replacement hardware onsite for almost everything needed in case of emergency. They also have a separately hosted Status website for updating customers.

Where was the risk analysis?

When designing the data center, did anyone ask the question “What happens if our firewalls fail?”

Take this as a lesson. Kiwi hosting providers and data centers really need to lift their game if they want global software co’s to host here.

• Tip 1. Don’t go home at 5:30
• Tip 2. Keep customers informed
• Tip 3. Have a status/blog site independently hosted
• Tip 4. Use ‘people language’ not ‘Geekspeak’ (We’re not all techos’)
• Tip 5. Keep replacement hardware/software onsite for key services

That’s the rant for the day – time to get back to dealing with the email backlog.

PS: I’m not angry, just a little frustrated and being totally honest here about how NZ providers need to lift their game.

Dear Customer,

Following Tuesday night’s reported outage (21.30-24.00) which was attributed to a core switch intermission failure, last night the same symptoms occurred (commencing 19.30). Clearly this highlighted that the corrective action of the previous night i.e. the replacement of both core switches deferred the issue rather than provided a permanent resolution.

Last night the fault was again identified by our network management software and the team reassembled consisting of the CTO, Sys-Admins and management. The issue was immediately escalated to our external maintenance support teams (CheckPoint firewall provider and hardware provider) as is standard practice for an outage of this significance. This identified that the fault appeared to be within the Checkpoint firewall clustering software (dual redundancy).

With the assistance of Checkpoint engineers the decision was made to split the firewall cluster and run them as individual stand alone units to resurrect the network. This appeared to temporarily solve the issue at 00.15. For context the firewall servers are running at 15-20% whilst not clustered i.e. with very low levels of utilisation for the spec of the equipment.

At 02.45 the network failed again. The team were still on-site monitoring the network. Our firewall maintenance providers were again called who arranged for patches to be downloaded. At 05.10 the patches were installed and the firewall management server reconfigured to accommodate the patch upgrade. This did not provide a permanent fix.

During more sociably acceptable hours we reached out to our friends in XXXX to help source checkpoint firewall hardware and to provide ‘men on the ground’ to help support our technical team that had worked through the night. In addition to this a decision was taken to move some core applications to the old network (ASA) that was still functioning as was not reliant on the check point firewalls. These include XXXXXXX.co.nz, Email (inbound and outbound) and XXXXXXX.co.nz. However the core network was re-established without the need to deploy this second network with the core applications migrated.

Low level analysis with the assistance of Checkpoint engineers in the USA identified high volumes of fragmented packets originating from one of our shared virtual hosting servers to be the root cause of the issue. These packets were flooding the firewalls and causing the outage.  The source of these packets was identified and blocked at 13:50. The checkpoint firewalls then returned to normal service which finally brought the network back on line at approximately 14:00 hours.

Like all hosting companies, we do not exercise strict control over the content that customers upload to their websites.  It appears that one customer site was compromised, which in turn caused the flood of malformed packets to the firewalls.  Our internal network analysis software did not identify these packets as they were not ‘standard’ TCP/IP traffic.

In order to prevent this level of disruption in future we intend to move all shared virtual hosting customers behind a separate firewall that is isolated from the rest of our networks.  This will ensure that should there be any re-occurrence the offending server is quarantined, and does not cause the kind of outage we have just experienced.

We do sincerely apologise for this outage. These problems are extraordinarily difficult to diagnose, and we are grateful for the assistance provided by CheckPoint engineers in the USA, and local XXXXX network engineers who have complemented the efforts of our own technical team.

Should you require a more technical update, please contact XXXXXX our CTO  or please contact me on my email or directly on my cell (xxx xxxx xxxx).

Once again our apologies for this critical issue and thank you for your continued support.

About The Author:
Julian Stone is the CEO of ProActive Software, developers and creators of the leading web based project management software http://www.proworkflow.com

PS: Not all are like this – some are great, but most web design companies have at least a few clients like this.   Enjoy!!

About The Author:
Julian Stone is the CEO of ProActive Software, developers and creators of the leading web based project management software http://www.proworkflow.com.

No huge scoping documents, documentation, peer reviews, industry research, tight visuals or anything! No large teams of usability experts or developers – just two hardworking bootstrappers (working remotely from each other) with a loose idea, a few pencil sketches, and understanding partners who let us work all hours to turn the idea into what is now the ProWorkflow project management solution. A world class tool managing huge amounts of customer info globally.

We’re now a tight team managing critical info daily for thousands of people worldwide. They depend on us to deliver results daily and we do. They expect the solution to work reliably daily and it does. We deliver the goods and have done for years.

Below are some of the original design sketches sent to Alan to work on. We just communicated lots, built the app and then started to build a business!

Now we have:

• Thousands of users globally
• 629,022 projects created
• 2,620,234 tasks created
• 9,349,890 hours tracked
• $301,762,038 has been invoiced through ProWorkflow
  (Note: these are from live accounts and don’t include trials)
• An awesome team in 2x offices
• A pile of servers
• An iPhone App (One of the top in our industry)
• Time Tracking Widget
• Integration with Xero, QuickBooks and Kashflow
• 3x plans for different account sizes
• Support, Help site, Videos, Blog etc
• A professional and robust API
• Most backend systems we have built and automated (including multicurrency recurring account billing)

This post should also be a little encouragement to people that you can build a world class solution and business from nothing. We did this with no debt or funding – only sweat equity! Just some smarts and hard work.
.

Collaboration Concept:

The basic idea behind ProWorkflow is that Staff, Clients, and Contractors can login to one place, see their work and all work on the same page. Essentially all working on the same project together.

The ProWorkflow tool makes sure all the permissions are under control so people only see what they need to see and can only access what they need to access.

We manage project in 2 screens when most other solutions take up to 10+ screens to do the same thing! Here’s a few of my early sketches to figure our our core process/permissions model.

The first Visuals!

Below are some of the very first ProWorkflow visuals as supplied to Alan (Cofounder) to develop.

Job (Project) Page:

This is the original ‘Projects Page’. Pretty loose visual, but it’s quite funny seeing that we used to have the navigation on the right. It’s all a heap more professional and powerful now.

Job (Project) Details:

In the original version you would expand the Job to see the details. Nowadays we click through to a new ‘Project Details Page’. This old version was pretty basic.

Timesheet Page:

This is still pretty much the same concept so I think it must be time to rethink this page using some new technology available.

Contacts Page:

This has been extended somewhat…

Notes Page:

Pretty simple really. Not much to say here…

Calendar Page:
And my all time favourite development visual – the ‘Calendar page’. Brilliant! The developer (Alan) must have loved me for sending this brief. I think developers must have great patience at times to put up with designers like me  ;-).  Sheeesh!

I’ll see what else we can find in the cupboard from the ‘early days’ that can be blogged. Possibly real screenshots of version 1.0?

I do realise that not everyone hangs on everything I have to say, but for those out these who leap out of bed in the morning just to hear my thoughts on things, here’s your very own “Julian101 iPhone app!”

Keep me in your pocket! Show me to your friends (and followers)! And let me keep you updated with my latest ramblings! I’ll be sharing thoughts on business, design, creativity and to be honest, whatever comes to mind!

Download Now!

Am I right in assuming that monthly…

• 200,000,000 downloads p/m x 1/4 = 50,000,000 paid downloads
• 50,000,000 paid downloads x Av $2.59 = $129,500,000 Income
• $129,500,000 x 70% = $90,650,000 Income to Developers
• $90,650,000 Income to Developers / 28,000 Developers equals…
• Total: $3,237 per Developer
• = $38,850 per year!

I’m not going to make any conclusions here but am keen to hear what other people think of this. Is that level of average revenue enticing enough to make writing iPhone App’s worthwhile? Would you quit your development job yet to develop iPhone apps?

Remember I’m talking here about average apps, not the odd successful iPhone apps that sell millions… Like this, this and this.

Awesome! After about 6 months hard work and testing, the ProWorkflow native iPhone app is now live and available in the iPhone App Store!

I’m really proud of our ProWorkflow team and the dev team at Curious Media. Curious Media are PWF customers that developed the app in conjunction with the PWF guys. They all put in solid effort to plan, design, develop, test and document this app.

The iPhone app will add some awesome value to our user base and extend the ProWorkflow application’s use past the desktop to anywhere people are connected! This is a first release so we’ll be looking for feedback to develop the solution further.

Although there was significant cost to develop, we have decided to make this app free so it’s easy to download and deploy for all ProWorkflow users and their staff.

Richard has added an iPhone App section to our Help Center to help users get the iPhone app up and running.

Make sure you spread the word! Tell your workmates, friends, colleagues, business contacts, clients, contractors and anyone you can think of!

Download Now!

Article: http://tinyurl.com/yg8ujyd

The economic stimulus assistance injected into major industrial countries to counter the effects of a global recession shone a spotlight on the need to rebuild their infrastructures, reports CRM Buyer.

The need to manage such public works investments efficiently has generated a huge potential market for project management software and related services. Even without the stimulus packages, worldwide spending on such projects is truly eye-popping, making the market for PM systems similarly astounding.

"Current estimates are that $12 trillion per year is spent on fixed capital projects worldwide, representing 20% of global product," J LeRoy Ward, executive vice-president of ESI International, told CRM Buyer.

Many software and SaaS co’s are concerned about competition, but not us. We’ve always believed there’s enough market size for project management software globally to allow for many strong players in the marketplace all with different aproaches.

We’ll continue to improve our world class project management software, http://www.ProWorkflow.com and keep delivering great value to our users! Over time we should get our fair slice of the pie!

Software Review:

“Like all good online project management software, ProWorkflow manages projects and tasks assigned to users. Where ProWorkflow is set apart from its competition is in the extra features: time management, reports, invoicing, quote management and customizable settings.

ProWorkflow is marketed as having been designed with customer feedback, and it shows. The interface is streamlined and arranged in such a way that what users actually use is readily available. Other, less-often used features are kept a few clicks away.

We were especially impressed with the dashboard that users see upon login: a comprehensive view of tasks and projects that managed not to feel cluttered. The calendar on the left-hand side menu is a nice touch.

For managers, it is even possible to see the dashboard for another user, so that he or she can have a bird’s eye view of the user’s workload. But team management in ProWorkflow goes further than that: we were impressed with the staff workload report, which shows, for each user, how many hours are scheduled. It can even be broken by project and tasks. This makes it easy to see when a resource is overscheduled.

Yet another impressive feature is the invoicing module. As staff log in their time and expenses for each task and project, ProWorkflow builds a “bill” for the client. Then, within a few clicks, a professional-looking invoice can be built, that includes everything from staff hours and billed rates, to other expenses. Invoices are fully customizable.

ProWorkflow is chockfull of details that show they really listened to their customers:

• Multiple Tasks can be edited all at once in a grid.
• Email alerts are detailed and can be adapted to the company’s needs.
• The basic look and feel of the system can also easily be changed without having to contract work from ProWorkflow’s developers.
• Project managers can leverage a search feature that includes clients on top of the usual parameters.

Pricing is also simple at ProWorkflow: users pay for file space and staff logins. Tasks and projects are not limited. This is a welcome change from other systems that charge per project.

Overall, ProWorkflow is a highly flexible system that will benefit organizations big and small, without a steep learning curve, both on the user and the administrator sides.”