To:        All WinTOTAL users
From:    Dave Biggers, Chairman
RE:       Opening up WinTOTAL’s sketch options, and our new “R&D Labs”

When we integrated WinSketch many years ago, and then when we switched to Apex as a preferred vendor in 2002, many of you felt (legitimately) forced to use a sketch product not of your choosing.  In fact, my status messages to all of you earlier this year generated more negative responses regarding our Apex integration than any other area of Aurora.  As the year continued, it was clear that frustration regarding Apex issues was mounting, with many users wondering why we hadn’t fixed Apex bugs (we couldn’t) or why we had required you to buy Apex in the first place.  But we listened.  We did what you asked.  And we found a solution which should meet everyone’s needs.

Our new Google-style open integration platform allows any sketch vendor to be completely integrated with WinTOTAL.  If you’ve ever seen Google Maps, Google Earth, or Google Desktop, you know they’re integrated with thousands of systems, large and small, across the globe.  Google did that by publishing an “Application Programming Interface”, or API, and then letting technology vendors simply click a few links to get the documentation and begin integrating.  Each integrated vendor chooses how they develop, price, support, upgrade, and deliver their product, without Google’s involvement.  That’s exactly what our Vendor Integration Platform, or VIP, enables anyone to do in our product line.

With VIP, others will be able to easily build “add-ons” to all of our products, not just WinTOTAL.  We’ll still provide in-house solutions where appropriate, so our products are the same hassle-free “one stop shop” as always.  But now you’ll have choices beyond what we offer ourselves, with a variety of enhancements written by other companies.  And it’s not limited to sketching.

Think about some of the possibilities. For example, some of you want direct integrations with MLS and county records vendors, nationally and on a single-county basis.  VIP will let those vendors integrate their data into WinTOTAL as tightly as we could ourselves, with no hurdles at all.  Or, right now, those of you who are required to use ACI’s Lighthouse product deal with daily formatting problems and retyping of data since it integrates via a “back door” using old file formats.  VIP will allow ACI to import WinTOTAL’s complete appraisal file (with your permission of course), perfectly formatted and ready to transmit.  Best of all, ACI will be just a couple of clicks away from getting started on the solution.  The Vault is another good example.  You’ll be able to choose where the Vault stores your files, using any of the common storage services.  And of course, there’s the biggest area of requests for more choice:  Sketching.

Under our new system, WinTOTAL will let you pick any sketcher you want, and even have multiple sketchers linked into WinTOTAL at one time.  It’s an open system, so with half of all the appraisers in the country as potential clients, the various sketch vendors will indeed compete for your business.  That’s of course a very good thing. You’ll be able to “shop” various vendors instead of having any one of them enjoy a virtual monopoly inside WinTOTAL.  Plus, you’ll get expert support from their staff and developers directly, and your complaints, bug reports, suggestions, etc. will be “felt” more clearly by those vendors – because they’ll know that you can choose an alternative sketcher if your requests fall on deaf ears.

It’s important to emphasize that all the sketch vendors have absolutely identical integration opportunities using the exact same process and methods, on the exact same terms.  We welcome any and all vendors, and indeed, multiple vendors are already busy integrating via VIP as we speak.  (On that note, if you know of any smaller vendors we missed outside the “main three”, just tell them to visit our VIP signup page at www.alamode.com/vip.  They can be up and running very quickly, with technical documentation available online immediately.  And if you know of other non-sketch vendors who may want to integrate with WinTOTAL, have them do the same.)

Let me be crystal clear:  Those of you who are happy using your current Apex/WinTOTAL setup don’t have to do a thing.  You don’t have to buy anything, install anything, or change anything.  You don’t need an upgrade to your existing Apex to make it work under the new VIP system.  Your current copy of Apex will work with WinTOTAL exactly as it does now. If you’re happy drawing sketches as you do now, then excellent.  You pay nothing and have to do nothing.

But for those who want other sketching options, you can also now consider two new VIP-enabled products:  RapidSketch or AreaSketch (the evolution of WinSketch).  You can learn more right now about Utilant Software’s RapidSketch product at their product website (www.rapidsketch.com), and you can visit FieldNotes to consider their AreaSketch tool as well (www.areasketch.com).  After the VIP system rolls out “live” the first week of November, you’ll be able to learn about, download, and potentially try out any VIP sketch product directly from the VIP Marketplace pages right inside WinTOTAL itself.

We’re confident you’ll be very happy with having more choices inside WinTOTAL and our entire product line.  It’s simply one small part of our efforts to do exactly what you want, even though there are so many of you that “what you want” isn’t one single thing.  The open VIP approach is the only way for there to be a “win” for everyone involved – we get out of the role of deciding what gets integrated and what doesn’t, vendors get access to the huge installed base of a la mode clients, and you get more choices with more competitive pricing and features while still staying inside the environment you’ve grown accustomed to over the years.

You’ll be receiving more specific sketch information in the next couple of weeks from Adam Calvery, who heads up our appraisal products (you see e-mails from Adam with every WinTOTAL update). For now, we simply wanted you to have an overview of VIP and where we’re headed on sketching.

Don’t confuse this with beta testing or anything like that.  Beta testers help us test pre-release versions of production software before it gets released to the general public.  But in the R&D Labs, we’ll be working on truly revolutionary products and ideas, not just evolutionary improvements, and we want practicing appraisers with a penchant for grand ideas and a thirst for cool technology to be a direct part of the company’s efforts.  The products we’ll showcase in the R&D Labs will be available for download, but they’ll be free and for the purpose of generating feedback and ideas as the general public sees them – sort of like seeing concept cars at an auto show, except you get to actually drive them too.

The Labs will allow us to work on leading edge stuff to satisfy the techo-driven appraisers (and to help position the overall industry to stave off future threats), without taking our people off of the day-to-day tasks geared at satisfying your daily formfilling and production needs.  (We already run many projects in parallel with large teams of developers on separate products, but this will make the R&D part even more independent.)

There are many new areas of opportunity – from wireless connectivity to voice control to data and signature security to field data gathering using Ultra-Mobile PCs – and the Lab will ensure that cool new ideas see the light of day and garner your input as well, long before they mature into production-level tools.  Like any laboratory, we’re sure some ideas will never get to the production stage at all. But they’ll stimulate other ideas which will. That’s always been our approach – cutting edge ideas years ahead of our competitors – but now we’re just formalizing it and involving you more in the early idea-generation stages.

So, if you consider yourself a visionary when it comes to appraising and technology, and you’d like to be regularly published in the trade press and speaking about coming technologies, come talk to us.  It’s a salaried research position, but we want you to still work as an appraiser every week – so that a clear focus on practicality is always present even in far-flung ideas.  Some travel is involved, as you’ll be at company-sponsored appraiser gatherings in various cities in order to maintain direct contact with the widest variety of users and ideas as possible.  If you’re interested, send your resume´, cover letter, and ideas of how you’d approach the position, directly to us at labs@alamode.com.

We’ll be rolling out an a la mode R&D Labs website as the project spools up, where you can learn more, download and play with early research versions, and keep up to date on our advanced projects.  We’ll also be alternating an R&D Labs newsletter with our current general newsletter, so you get a mix of both subjects.  Keep your eyes and ears open for both, and if you want to come onboard as a Research Fellow, don’t forget to tell us.

That’s it for today.  There are a few more “big items” coming in the next couple of months, so you’ll start hearing from me a bit more again as the year winds down.  That should be no surprise.  It’s been an exciting year overall, as we’ve massaged Aurora into a stronger system based on your feedback – and it’s paid off handsomely.  You’ve responded by enabling us to grow in both number of users and revenue compared to last year, which few believed possible given the early negative press regarding Aurora.  But in reality, the total number of active WinTOTAL users continues to climb (we know that conclusively from our street map server statistics), and the portion allocated to Aurora is over two thirds and growing every week – yet, tech calls are lower than last year when the “old, stable” Athena was the only version.

So, in spite of its newness and working out the early kinks, Aurora is more solid, does more things, and generates fewer calls than Athena, even though it’s used by substantially more people than Athena.  The feedback we’re getting these days seems to support that, and that’s our goal.  We hope you’ve seen the strides we’ve made not only in Aurora, but across our entire product line – and there’s more to come, focused not only helping you fulfill appraisal orders more efficiently, but also on generating new lines of business as opportunities emerge in markets returning to normal.

Stay tuned. And as always, thanks for your business.

Dave Biggers
Chairman
a la mode, inc.