KlipBlog

After the exposure his last article on the 3 rules of dashboarding got before Christmas, some media types were eager for more punditry from our leader.

Rather than leave them hanging, Allan came through with some new thinking on why every enterprise wants KPI reporting on the desktop. The Dashboard Spy is the first media outlet to pick up the story. It's called “Drive Adoption and Performance from the Desktop: Innate awareness of performance hinges on unavoidable KPI reporting."

There's a lot of $5 words in that title but give it a read and share your 2 cents on whether or not Allan got it right.

Sometimes even the most exciting desktop dashboarding activity needs a shot of adrenaline to keep things interesting. To that end, the Serence development team turned the computers off for an afternoon and headed for the track. The high-speed karting track that is. Nothing helps to sort out those persistent coding or feature debates among team members like cutting one another off in the corners at 75km/h!

The crew at Top Karting have their own kind of business intelligence system to monitor race speed, lap time, and other variables. After a race you can compare your numbers with other racers. What they really need is a miniature dashboard on their karts so that you monitor those KPIs in real time and take immediate corrective action - like side-swiping the CEO on the straight stretch to slow him down some. Take that Allan!

If you’ve been following the discussion on the KlipFolio forum, you know Jeremy is rolling out fun updates to the personal version of the KlipFolio desktop dashboard. These include new layouts, features that help you find your favourite Klip items, and lots more.

But Serence isn’t just updating the personal dashboard. Jeremy’s changes are working hand in hand with our next release of the enterprise version of KlipFolio. Maybe you’ve already taken a sneak peek at KlipFolio Enterprise 5?

If you like what you see there, we’re also prepping a few short videos to demonstrate the new enterprise features. I’ll post them here when they’re ready to go. We’re pretty stoked about this release because it will help both business people and IT people to get their jobs done.

Business people can use KlipFolio Enterprise 5 as a heads-up display to see, decide, and act on their most important priorities. And they can do it all on the desktop! Likewise, IT folks that are managing ERP or CRM deployments will love KlipFolio Enterprise 5 too. It turns out that a desktop dashboard is a great way to drive adoption of these systems.

Everybody wins.

As we end another action packed year for Serence, we'd like to send big shout-outs to each and every one of you. 2008 already has some announcements right around the corner, and as always we're looking to tackle a massive wish-list of goodies for KlipFolio. So keep an eye on your inbox.

Happy holidays and all the best to our KlipFolio users and customers!
From the entire team at Serence.

We've updated the support section of KlipFolio.com with a brand new help system. Check it out.

Rather than update the reference manual style of the previous user guide, we've moved to more of an FAQ structure. Questions are now based around tasks, and these tasks are logically organized into groups. Each answer includes links to related questions and answers, too.

In addition, we've beefed up the search interface to make it easier to find the answers you're looking for.

Got comments? Couldn't find what you were looking for? Let us know.

If you've ever wondered about the future of dashboards and desktops, we've got an article for you to read. And the gang over at Dashboard Insight, a new portal all about dashboards, seems to agree. After a number of conversations around the office about how human decision-makers are the final constraint on successful dashboard deployments, Allan had to write it all down.

We liked the sound of it so much we shared them with Dashboard Insight and they made it their feature article. Give it a quick read and let us know what you think. He even suggests a few rules of thumb that all point towards desktop dashboards over other implementations. The acquisition frenzy in the business intelligence market over the last few months supports some of what he has to say. Is he crazy or is he on to something?

There are about 250 folks here at the Widget Summit, a two day conference for companies that are building, syndicating, tracking, and monetizing Widgets.

I was on the the enterprise widget panel (a new addition to this year's conference) yesterday morning with Jeff Ragusa from Google Apps Solutions.

Jeff spoke about their over-arching web-based platform for search, e-mail, and portals. I focused on our real-world successes; customers who are deriving value from a desktop dashboard within the enterprise. It was great to be able to talk about our customers (Lufthansa, PNC, EMC, and IBM) and their deployment of our product.

Some of the questions we received were: "How do third party data sources help deploy widgets within the enterprise?" While Google said that enterprise is interested in adding third-party data, our experience suggests a different answer. In our experience, when the IT group deploys a dashboard, they are laser focused on getting their internal business data on the employee's desktops, and their data alone. In fact, they want a product they can completely lockdown, manage the deployment, and keep everything within the firewall.

I ended up chatting with quite a few companies afterwards about widgets in the enterprise, and the message was the same: download and try KlipFolio yourselves. It's easy to get your data into the product and, when you want to deploy it, we have a product called KlipFolio Enterprise that can help.

Here are some themes we saw at the conference:

There are companies springing up to support the widget vendors.
Last year there were just the widget vendors, this year there are companies that are springing up to service the widget vendors. Specifically, tracking widgets and managing ads in widgets.

No one seems to be making much money yet.
The business models for widgets (i.e. companies that are in the business of building widgets) are still being worked out. It's early days as developers move from stand-alone widget platforms to integrate with social networks.

Enterprise is still early days.
There was lots of interest in our panel session, but not many companies had started using widgets in the enterprise yet. Yet many of them could see the value of having a dashboard and alerting platform.

Widget providers are starting to go vertical.
The gydget platform was focused just on the entertainment space.

Facebook is making a big impact.
Over half the web-based widget providers talked about their experience creating widgets for FaceBook. Two comapnies that were seeing big update were rockyou.com and slide.com .

The success with FaceBook APIs are being replicated across the social networks
Many folks commented they are seeing (or expect to see) the other social networks open their platform.


Fred

It turns out desktop dashboard dreams do come true. After participating in the first ever Widgets Live show in San Francisco last year (thank you Niall Kennedy , Om Malik), it is now an annual event and Serence is headed back to Shaky Town for Widget Summit on October 15-16, ‘07.

We're so excited, we can barely keep our APIs straight, because we can geek out with all the other desktop widget vendors, share our latest news about KlipFolio dashboard for SugarCRM with the widget press, and hopefully enjoy more fantastic sushi.

This year our own Fred Dixon is part of the widgets in the enterprise panel where we can talk performance management, bi dashboards, and key performance indicators with our peers and some startup called Google . Areas like executive dashboards and employee alerts are increasingly hot topics that we hope to discuss with other industry insiders.

From last year we remember rows of frothing media people blogging their hearts out at the show. If you’re one of them, or you’re just headed to the show for fun, drop Fred a line with our handy contact form. Maybe you can share some gyoza or spider crab afterwards.

Regards,

Brian