Peeking under the covers of Salesforce’s new Idea(Exchange)

We’re very excited to about announcement of Salesforce’s new idea exchange site, announced during Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote speech at the Dreamforce 06 conference this week. Not just because we power the site, but because with this offering, salesforce has taken the lead once again by redefining what Customer Relationship Management means for enterprise software companies. Although we’ve been using CrispyNews in a similar fashion, Salesforce is the first major enterprise company to take the bold step forward. Others will soon follow.

IdeaExchange allows customers and development teams working on the product an avenue for a dialogue about upcoming features. This is an amazing increase in visibility for both sides, and as an ex-product manager at an enterprise company, I know first-hand how hard it is to get good visibility into your customer’s problems.

Yes, its your job to understand the issues, and yes, you spend alot of time with your customers. However, when coming up with new features for the next release, it has always been a black art. Come feature planning time, you sit down with your list of bugs, second-hand feedback from sales and the anecdotes from the few customers you’ve interacted with to come up w/ the perfect set of features. Its an impossible task, and mostly you’re saved by the fact that your competitors aren’t much better at it.

If you are a customer, suggestions seem to drop into a black hole. “We want this” is usually answered by “I’ll put in an enhancement request”, and that is the last you hear about that.

By turning what used to be a one-way street (‘file an enhancement request!’) into a two-way dialogue between the product team (what do you guys think of this feature?) and the customer (its overkill and we won’t use it), Salesforce is experimenting with a new level of interactivity in the traditional product development cycle. By allowing customers to vote on the features they like the best and discuss–among themselves–what features they like or how it should be different, product teams get a much better understanding of what ranks high in their customer’s priorities.

Perhaps this is how the community-driven concepts popularized by del.icio.us, digg and others on the consumer side will trickle into the enterprise space. As an ex-enterprise product manager I’ll raise my glass to that.

Screeniac makes a screencast for Crispynews

We were browsing the web today and discovered that Molly on Screeniac has done a great walk-through of crispynews. If you want a tour of crispynews, check it out! Its quick, concise and clear.

Yay, the server is back up. =)

It looks like it was just a broken switch. Luckily, the outage was fairly short lived, considering we had to drive quite far to the data center and then to the nearest place where we could buy a switch. Whew….we’re just happy the server is back up.

Sorry, the server is down =(

Our crispynews server is currently down as of 10:23 AM this morning, but we are working hard to get it back up as soon as possible. It seems like we have hardware failure. Hopefully it will be back up after replacing the broken parts. Wish us luck…

Modifications on page views

We’re currently experimenting with how we count page views, in order to combat bot traffic, which has increased lately. You may experience some sudden surges and declines in the stats provided by crispynews because of this.

We hope to have this settled down to a consistent method soon.

Raft of updates

If you’re a site admin, you’ll notice we’ve been quietly streaming out a raft of new items in the admin console. Some things are items you’ve always been asking for. Others…are things which may be useful for you. Check it out and let us know what you think.

FYI: There was a minor outage today for about 7 minutes. The problem is resolved and we’re back online now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Article of the Day: Grampa ventures onto YouTube

Main page redesign

We’ve just launched a few changes to our main page in order to make it more friendly towards casual browsers and not just site starters. In addition, a few backend changes have gone into gear and we’ve been beefing up our infrastructure in order to support enterprise use for the Crispynews platform.

Server hiccup

We had some hardware failure issues earlier last week, but they are now all resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience. We lost a day or so worth of data, but our backup systems made us recoverable. I logged my first overnighter at work and slept 8 hours over 3 days. All to bring you the site!

We’ve done some housecleaning to make sure we’re in better shape for future problems like this. After switching over to SVN from CVS, you can expect a major change in the main page for the site.

Post July 4th New Changes: New infrastructure and a few Overhauls

We have been busy. We’ve changed our infrastructure and the front end.

• Thanks to Cecilia and Kristle, two of our cool interns, we now have a wiki up where we’ve tried to gather some documentation. Please help us keep it up to date!
• We’ve created this blog as a place to keep you up to date on all the feature updates
• Admins forum is now public for anyone to access.
• The Admin Panel for each of the sites has gone through a revamping.
• Your user profile page is overhauled. We will continue beefing it up. We’ll talk more about this at another time.
• We’ve moved over from FastCGI, which is weak sauce, on over to Apache + Mongrel Clusters on the backend. This should have put an end to the mysterious page stalls.
• Vishal, another another member of the cool interns club, has mercilessly hunted down and fixed image scraping hiccups.
• A gaggle of bugs should be fixed.

Hello World

We’ve set up a wiki in order to keep you up to date with the major changes that we put out on the site, and let you know what else is going on with the site.

Hi to all of our site admins and our users!