When I tell people what I do here as Senior Software Design Engineer at Palo Alto Software, I sometimes get the glazed eye look when I explain that I make business planning software. Unless you’re a business major or have a need for business planning, it’s a rare event for people to get very excited over business planning software. But designing and writing Business Plan Pro has been anything but boring! Everyday I’m challenged with new problems and need to think outside the box to deliver what is hands down, the best business planning software on the market. I get to use the latest cutting edge technologies and learn new things daily. To me programming is my art as I always strive to the point of obsession for a clean, robust and efficient design; taking great pride in the success of our products.
I could be writing the latest version of Halo for the Xbox and I honestly think I would be having just as much fun and even learn many of the same things. Programming is largely transferrable to many different types of applications. I can write a module for Business Plan Pro and if designed well, could easily reuse it in a huge variety of applications. Almost no part of our application is so specific to Business Plan Pro that it couldn’t be reasonably used in a multitude of contexts.
Which is why I love when I have time to share some of the techniques I’ve used while building our software with other coders. The piece of knowledge I was able to share with my fellow programmers most recently had to do with some conclusions I came to while making our application responsive and user-friendly during long operations. If you’re as geeky as me you can go off to the site and read the article. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/progress/ProperProgress.aspx
The nice part about this article was that I was able to prove to myself just how useful the things I develop for Business Plan Pro are and can be to other developers because the other day, my article won an award as best VB.NET article of the month on CodeProject (the premier site for sharing code, tips, and techniques amongst developers). Besides winning over $4,000 in software prizes, I now have the honor of knowing that my experience has helped the community in some way.
Stay passionate about whatever you do and we can all grow from each other’s knowledge,
Tim Greenfield
Senior Software Design Engineer
Palo Alto Software
Posted on May 15th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Business Plan Pro now takes advantage of the robust nature and high speed bandwidth provided by Amazon S3 to serve its web updates. Palo Alto Software gets a smaller bill for bandwidth and one less feature running on our server farm to have to maintain. While at the same time, our customers get reliable, high speed service for our downloads. It’s a win/win situation for everyone but our ISP.
Business Plan Pro has a great feature that allows users to opt to automatically check for updates to the software every time they run the application. This ensures they will always have the latest and greatest version of our software on their machine and helps minimize the impact of bugs our developers and QA missed. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that even our world class team of developers and testers still release software with bugs from time to time 
And with the time it takes a CD ROM to enter production and make it to the shelves of our retailers, it’s more common than not that there will be a newer version available on the web at the time the user first runs the application. So the auto-update saves the day, allowing users to never be the wiser about bugs already having been fixed but still lurking in the software they were about to run.
Business Plan Pro, by virtue of being the decisive leader of Business Planning software in the world — applaud goes here ;), has great demands on bandwidth for its updates. Without disclosing confidential figures on the size of our user base, I can tell you that thousands of updates are served per week. And each update ranges anywhere from 4 MB to 40 MB. This kind of strain accounts for a significant portion of Palo Alto Software’s total outgoing bandwidth needs. Therefore, moving the services to Amazon S3 is a significant change.
The good news is that because of the way the web update feature was designed, we were able to seamlessly move our updates to Amazon S3 mid product lifecycle. Business Plan Pro hits a web service on our ISP which returns the URL to download the software thru. Easily enough, going live was as simple as modifying the web service to issue Amazon S3 Urls to the client instead. All the changes to implement this feature were server side and so now customers get even better update service without having to get an update first .
Tim Greenfield
Senior Software Design Engineer
Palo Alto Software
Posted on April 29th, 2008 | No Comments »
In advance of Monday’s public launch, we released a couple of minor updates to Email Center Pro today. The highlights are:
- Added NOT operator to the smart folder rules builder (example: subject is not “marketing form submission”, assignee is not Alex or Evan). More work to come in this area, smarter smart folders are on the short list for post-launch features.
- Improved search results - order is now date descending (most recent on top), which should help you find messages easier, as the “relevancy” score didn’t appear very ordered to the user. We’re working on some enhancements to the search experience to be released soon as well.
- Threading enhancements - responding to feedback from our beta users, we’ve updated the rules that define how messages get threaded. Hopefully this will put an end to stacking up monthly newsletters, web site form submissions and some other use cases that were falling through the cracks. We’ve also added a great “break from conversation” feature (located in the message menu in the top right of each message view), which will allow you to split messages out of a conversation if the system didn’t do its job.
- Help documents - inside Email Center Pro, help is just a click away. The online documentation will outline each feature and use case in the system and provide tips for advanced users. Context sensitive help is often available for dialogs, indicated by a “?” in the top right corner.
Thanks for all the feedback from our beta users!
Alex Boone
Senior Software Design Engineer
Tags: ecp update, Email Center Pro, feature
Posted on April 18th, 2008 | No Comments »
Welcome to the Dead Simple Software product blog, a new blog focused on conversations about the Palo Alto Software product line that is authored by the people at Palo Alto Software and the customers that support them.
The Dead-Simple Software blog is for you, our current customer and our curious future customer. It’s a place you can visit to learn more about Business Plan Pro, Marketing Plan Pro, Email Center Pro, and the other products we have to offer.
The great people at Palo Alto Software who build and support the products you use will be using this blog to share information they think will make your experience with our products a better one. Posts will include product news, tips and tricks, event notifications, and much more.
The Dead-Simple Software blog is also for us. The conversations started here will help us learn more about you and what you want to see from us in terms of future products and improvements to exisiting products. These conversations will help us produce better products that benefit you and us of course. This won’t be a one-way communication channel; we very much want to start conversations here and good conversations usually take more than one.
So please check here often for the most up-to-date news related to Palo Alto Software’s entire product line.We look forward to having great conversations with you.
Thank you,
Cale Bruckner
VP Product Development
Posted on March 25th, 2008 | No Comments »
