To:
All WinTOTAL users
From:
David Biggers, Chairman, a la mode, inc.
Re:
Status of Aurora and coming changes
Last Friday, the Aurora update
message from Adam Calvery told you briefly about some of the things we’re doing,
and the update itself should have made much of that apparent. Immediately after
the update, we saw stability improvements in Aurora – as evidenced by the phone
lines and by the support logs we receive daily. The new PDF driver handles much
larger reports without difficulty, the addenda/data issues appear to be cleared
up, and overall the program should appear “tighter” to you. That’s not even
counting the server-side improvements we’ve made in XSites (contacts
especially), Vault, CertMail, and elsewhere.
I know
that’s what you want – action, not e-mails.
You’re getting it. I also know that a lot of you have disagreed with some of
the decisions we’ve made in the past year regarding Aurora and Athena, and I
wanted to let you know that I’m listening, acting on your comments, and indeed,
apologizing for not having handled this better in the first place.
Probably the biggest
disagreement has been the integration of XSites and Aurora. My hope was that a
desktop forms product with an automated, proactive client-facing web site would
help appraisers stave off some competition from highly automated management
companies and AVMs. To do that, everything from ordering to tracking to
management to review had to be able to reach out across the web and stay
coordinated. With our current XSites network being used to order, deliver, and
manage more than 35,000 appraisals a week (headed toward 2 million transactions
this year), and with XSites in use by roughly half of all WinTOTAL shops, I felt
that the time was correct to finally be able to get there. That was the idea at
least.
But, loud and clear, you’ve
told us that you want two distinct areas of products – desktop and web – and
integration not seemingly forced upon you (even if it’s beneficial, which we
understand). You want those products to be rock solid, and most of all, behave
predictably. To the contrary, many of the automated features in the XSites/Aurora
integration are perceived as being too “behind the scenes”, and they’ve been
hampered by enough new-product teething problems that their value in your mind
was diminished.
I agree, I apologize for being
much more dense than I’d like to believe, and I’m changing course to do exactly
what you want. So, here’s what we’re already doing:
-
Billing
and management reporting will be available on the desktop.
We’re taking the management and billing system from your XSites and writing a
virtually identical system to run on your desktop. The web version will still
exist, because only the login security offered by the XSite can prevent your
accounting data from being accessible to everyone in your office. You’ll
always have your choice of both, and can switch back and forth to see the
benefits of each at your own pace. Plus, right now, you can already see lists
of what’s owed to you and by whom right in Aurora’s current Files PowerView,
and print the invoices in seconds. To that we’re also adding customizable
virtual tracking folders, which base their contents on queries. That means
you can instantly create a folder called “Dave’s outstanding invoices for XYZ
Lending”, and it’s always up to date. It’s dirt simple and highly useful.
-
Contacts
issues are being cleaned up.
In order for any billing and tracking system to work reliably – whether on the
desktop or on the web – your contacts database has to have good data. Realize
many of you have textual, unstructured contact data carried many generations
forward in your reports, all the way from the DOS days. We made the mistake
of trying to programmatically adapt to the effects of that during
synchronization between the website and the desktop, and that caused
problems. We’ve already fixed the web databases, purging the messed up
contacts, but that’s only part of the solution. We’ve fought this for years
in different ways, and the fact that we didn’t “bite the bullet” before is one
of the reasons many of you didn’t like Athena’s tracking system (for example,
the text approach prevented sub-accounts, and made it impossible to accurately
handle client branches). Aurora does that correctly already, with structured
contacts once and for all, but very soon it will help you “clean up” your
contacts database quickly and efficiently, and help you not let it
disintegrate into a mess again. (If you talk to people who had always been
diligent with keeping their database “clean”, or people who were new Aurora
users, the billing and tracking issues were virtually non-existent.) Our new
cleanup and prevention tools let you have the best of both worlds – rapid data
entry and proper handling of those “ad hoc” one-off clients like homeowners,
without making you do a lot of extra work up front. This is a huge, huge
issue and it will require your help to eradicate once and for all – you will
have to invest at least a few minutes in “spring cleaning”, because us trying
to do it automatically behind the scenes results in bad guesses. There’s no
better computer than the human brain when it comes to making those decisions.
-
We’re
changing the integration between Aurora and XSites to make it more
understandable, and especially more predictable.
Aurora will no longer operate “behind the scenes” to copy orders to the web
for tracking and management, post appraisal status via the web and e-mail, or
poll the XSite for new orders. It will do it only by you clicking a “Connect”
button, so now you’ll know exactly when, how, and why Aurora is doing anything
related to your XSite. This one simple change will go a long way to making
things better. We found that on some machines, the process of connecting and
synchronizing data would appear to have locked up the PC, even if it wasn’t
actually stuck. In frustration, users would reboot, thinking it had crashed
when it hadn’t.
-
Mapping
is being revamped to work like Athena.
The auto-mapping is more of a headache than it’s worth, and some great
simplicity in Athena’s mapping got thrown out the window. We’re making
mapping work like it did before, with the addition of the good stuff we’ve
added since (like driving directions). And yes, we’re changing the name of
the maps button to something even more radical: “Maps”. All joking aside,
we undermined the power of our “net.X backbone” concept by associating it with
maps exclusively, when in reality it’s the net.X architecture which powers all
the back-and-forth data exchange in both a desktop-to-web and web-to-web
scenario. Maps, census data, status updates, orders, deliveries, etc. all use
the net.X backbone. Calling the maps button exclusively “net.X” was confusing
from many different perspectives. So now it’s just “Maps”, and it works right
too. You’ll see net.X used properly elsewhere.
-
Annoying
bugs in Aurora are being found and squashed.
Just like every prior version of WinTOTAL, it’s impossible to build a complex
Windows-based product that runs on 50,000 or more desktops – each as unique as
a fingerprint – and not have it encounter things which never happened to our
hundreds of beta testers. That being said, it will get a lot better as we
continue implementing the changes noted above. There are unrelated bugs which
are being killed daily – we’re focused squarely on that. Sometimes it’s hard
to tell, when you may see updates and think they’re either new features or
unrelated to things you want changed, but updates are a combination of small
and large things which we bring out as they pass testing. Also, we carefully
track the error logs automatically submitted by WinTOTAL, and not only are the
updates having a profound effect on stability, but now Aurora is actually far
ahead of Athena in terms of likelihood to encounter a crash (I know you’re
skeptical, but it’s true, by a wide margin). Athena may have been out for
five years and considered stable, but it had too many “foundation” issues
which couldn’t be addressed in incremental updates. We didn’t start
developing a completely new version for the fun of it (it’s not fun). We did
it to improve things, and it’s indeed working.
-
The issue
of tech hold times is already being addressed.
We’ve added dozens of techs, with a staff of now over 80 phone technicians
working around the clock to serve you. But you probably don’t care how many
people we have – you care about how quickly you get answers. You want zero
hold times at noon on Monday (our version of “rush hour”). I can’t get there
(yet), but I can get us to do better than we have been. It’s already better,
and we’ve got all hands on deck to help you. And if you’ve been thinking we
“lost our way”, realize that we must have met higher standards than others in
the first place for you to think we “slipped”. Big upgrades like this and
the resultant callback times measured in hours are temporary, but the other
vendors’ policies of not calling you back for days are permanent – because
it’s their culture and always has been. We’re the same we’ve always been too,
but we’re just busy. Give us – the same “us” you’ve always trusted – the
benefit of the doubt on how we handle the spike. We’ve earned that trust just
like you’ve earned the right to vent when you’re mad.
-
And for
those of you who want the transition less stressful and hurried, we’ll happily
support Athena throughout all of 2006.
It really doesn’t matter to us. We don’t make more or less money whether you
use Aurora or Athena, since you pay us annually for upgrades and get
everything as it comes out. Since we aren’t like other vendors who charge
you for a new version, there’s no financial incentive for us to force you to
upgrade. Our only cost is due to training technicians in both versions, and
in supporting things in Athena which Aurora has already improved, but in the
big picture those things are relatively minor. Take your time and move over
when business is slow, or whenever you feel comfortable. We’re also giving
you a “rollback” tool, so you can install and use Aurora, and if you change
your mind, roll back to Athena. You’ll have a lot less pressure and stress.
Give us some time to get these
changes made. Some parts, such as turning off automated integration between
XSites and Aurora, are already being deployed. Others, such as developing an
entirely new desktop version of our billing and tracking system, will take a few
months (it’s not trivial).
Some of you won’t allow us
that time, and I respect that. Appraisers are a prickly lot. I’ve been one,
and I understand. Everyone pushes on you for everything, and many times you
look around and think you’re the only person on the planet who’s not some slimy
salesman, and you often lump us in that category – and yes, we do have to sell
you stuff. But do us all a favor and remember who we really are. We’re the
same company with 300 employees as we were with 30 employees decades ago. We’re
on your side, and many times are the only ones who are. You pay us and we do
what you want. Sometimes we nudge you in a direction you may not like at first,
but it usually winds up being what you want in the long run (look at the Vault,
Mercury, InterFlood, Pocket TOTAL, etc.). It typically takes two years for
those “salesy” ideas to be adopted, but when they are, you get the benefit.
That’s also why we won’t throw
the baby out with the bath water. We have changes to make, but we’ve also
listened to those of you who have begged us to “stay the course” and not just
roll back to Athena’s design to satisfy a desire for less change. (We listened
carefully to all sides at the convention in January, trust me.) That would
address short-term complaints at the expense of long-term benefits. Aurora’s
interface, workflow, core feature set, and overall design are light years ahead
of Athena and the competition. Reports are completed faster, bottom line – but
not the first report, and maybe not even the tenth, if you try to do everything
“the old way”. You can’t have “new” and “the same” simultaneously, so there’s a
learning curve like there is with anything. That part I can’t eliminate – and
shouldn’t, or else you’d just be getting a warmed-over version of Athena.
That’s not what you pay me to do for you. We’ve kept you ahead by pushing the
envelope as long as we’ve been around, and we will fix these issues without
shying away from the overall stance of technology leadership.
But, regardless, you correctly
want what you want, right now, and we oblige. We can meet both the short term
and the long term needs and keep everything in balance, which you may have
thought we forgot. We didn’t, and I hope this candid letter is proof of that.
If you have questions or
comments, I’ve set up a special mailbox called
dave.feedback@alamode.com, which goes to me and me only. I’ll use it to
have my finger on the pulse of what you like and dislike, need and don’t need.
Please feel free to e-mail me at any time on any topic.
On that note, you’ll be
getting an e-mail from me every two weeks. It won’t be a newsletter or a sales
pitch or anything of the sort. It will simply be a candid opportunity for me to
keep you up to date on what’s going on in our products, the company, and the
industry. There are a lot of things happening that I think you need to hear
from me directly, such as our copyright initiatives and our creation of the
Appraisal Advocacy Coalition (www.appraisaladvocacy.org), which is gaining
attention even as it’s being formed. (It’s just down to legalese now on the
formation details, but the point has been made clearly: We’re stepping into the
gap that the organizations have left wide open, and protecting appraisers
through direct political advocacy. I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and
where my clients are.)
Make no mistake however. I’ll
be showing you every week with our updates that no matter what we may be talking
about at any given point, our focus is on improving your productivity by
continuing to make Aurora and its associated peripherals into the very best in
the industry.
Those updates are being
shifted to Fridays, by the way, because it’s the slowest day of the week and it
gives you all weekend to familiarize yourself with any changes. As always,
you’ll have our weekend staff here 24 x 7, and of course it too is beefed up in
case you have questions.
On Thursday you’ll see a
preview in your Appraisal Desktop’s SnapShot page of some of the changes coming
in Friday’s update. It includes a new version of Apex with various bugs fixed,
and a new core forms engine with multiple issues addressed as well. There are
also some substantial interface improvements in the Files PowerView
(consolidating multiple views, streamlining keystrokes and clicks, improving
desktop file tracking and management options), plus simplified client status
updating and much more. We’re continuing to move on both fronts – fixing
anything that’s “broken”, as well as improving workflow and productivity by
adding new tools and options. In the end, both are always needed to reduce your
work effort, and that’s Aurora’s sole objective.
Look for the SnapShot on
Thursday morning, the update on Friday afternoon, and an e-mail from me every
other Wednesday. As always, thanks for your business, and I hope to see you at
our convention in Orlando.
Dave Biggers
Chairman
a la mode, inc.
