I have changed the theme for the blog. I hope you like it better.

I am also moving the domain from www.monasoftware.com to blog.momsoftco.com. I believe it makes much more sense.

As I have mentioned before, I was intending to replicate the look and feel of the ribbon interface in previous versions of Word and PowerPoint.

It’s official now. I can implement ribbons on Office 2003

After working on this idea, I think I have got a good solution to implement the idea as can be seen in the screen shot below:

The upper half is the ribbon tab of PowerMerge, as seen on PowerPoint 2007.

The bottom half is my new "custom" ribbon tab, as it looks on PowerPoint 2003 (and older versions).

As you can see, the effect is not perfect, but sufficient for my purposes, especially since the PowerPoint 2003 users can’t make a direct comparison between my ribbon and Microsoft’s ribbon.

Now that I think about it, it is funny because people hated the ribbon so much that a product was created to bring back the menus and toolbars of Office 2003 to 2007 while I am doing exactly the opposite.

To be frank, in the particular case of PowerMerge, probably I could make it work using just the toolbar. But PowerTOC will become much more usable when I implement my new custom ribbon system.

Email is not reliable anymore!

I get very frustrated when I receive messages from the web site mail form, answer them but it seems my answer gets lost. I can imagine my customers feeling an even greater frustration, because they don’t even know that their message reached us.

For example, a user of Control Runner has been trying to reach us for more than a month to know how to upgrade to Control Runner 4.0. As it happens, he is entitled to a FREE upgrade and I have already sent him four messages that, apparently, he is not receiving.

Therefore, may I suggest that users than can’t contact us use this blog post to do it.

Here’s how it works:

1. Post your comment.
2. Return to the blog in a few hours to see your comment posted and our answer.

I can confirm that the problem reported in my previous posts has been definitely solved. This means that I will be able to use task panes in all my add-ins, maintaining the compatibility with previous versions (specially 2003, which is still the version used mostly by my clients).

I am thinking also in replicating the ribbon bar interface used by my add-ins in Office 2003 using a task pane.

I personally love the ribbon interface because it allows to group "task" related functions in a very logical and convenient way. Unfortunately I have not been able to take advantage of its full potential because that would have made my add-ins not compatible with previous versions.

For example, I don’t like the ribbon tab used in PowerTOC (shown below). I think that it can be improved substantially to make the application much more intuitive to use.

Compare it with the ribbon of my latest add-in, which is about to enter beta testing, PowerMerge:

And I am sure that I can still do better once I start taking advantage of the possibilities of the ribbon interface.

I thought I was done with the customer support series, but a recent blog post on one of the blogs I monitor, Software Marketing News is so related to my own posts that I have to comment on it.

On the one hand, I totally agree with them. Generally, an unhappy customer can do a lot of damage, so companies have better to solve reported problems.

On the other hand, I found it funny that I have just written three posts because I wanted to thank publicly two companies that provide first class customer support.

Of course, I still agree with them when they say that it is unusual for a happy customer to do what I have just done, writing about how happy I am with their support.

How to tell if a company will succeed?

I believe that hearing what problems have your customers is one of the best ways to succeed. It is not a belief that comes from analyzing business strategies. I know it from experience.

In the past, I have had the opportunity to criticize the products or services of companies owned by people I personally know. I tell them the problems I have spotted, with the intention of helping them.

Doing so, I have come across a law that, so far, has proved universally valid:

1. Companies owned by a person that gets annoyed when a person that they know criticize their companies, fail.
2. On the other hand, owners that thank people making a criticism of their company, and try to solve the cause of the criticism afterwards, have an above average chance of become successful.

It is a pity that I didn’t know this law when I worked as a Private Equity investor. I would have used it much to my benefit to determine if I had to recommend an investment.

What is worse than a noisy unhappy customer?

A silent unhappy customer.

One of the frequent discussions I have with my wife is when we get an awful service at a restaurant or a shop and we consider whether we should complain about the service or not.

My reasoning for not complaining is threefold.

• The service is so awful that the owner should belong to my first category.
• Therefore, the owner is not going to be very pleased when he hears my complains.
• For the above two reasons, I don’t see why should I have a hard time trying to help someone that is not going to thank me and will not use my advice anyway.

So, I take a mental note to never return to the restaurant or shop, and I really do it. My wife, being a better person than I am, still believes that we should try and help the guy in charge, but she gets so violent complaining, than finally she lets it pass.

On either case, they have lost two customers and, still worse, they have no idea why. That really hurts.

This is the third installment of this series. On Part I, I rumbled about the craziness of not providing good technical support, while on Part II and III, I am providing concrete samples of what I consider to be top notch support.

The case of the non-closing PowerPoint application

About a month ago, I discovered that Add-in-Express 2009 has introduced a very cool new feature. The ability to create windows like the tasks panes introduced on Office 2007 in older versions of Office. They call this feature "advanced task panes".

Many of my users are still using Word and PowerPoint 2003. This has prevented me taking full advantage of what I believe is a great interface for add-ins. In the future, most of my add-ins are going to include at least one of these advanced task panes.

For example, below is shown the user interface of my new PowerMerge addin, showing a task pane with the fields used on the presentation.

Right after implementing my very first advanced task pane, I compile and run the add-in and it shows beautifully on PowerPoint. The only problem is that PowerPoint refuses to close. It simply hides itself and continues running in the background.

What technical support was supposed to be

This is no good, so I send an email to Add-in-Express technical support. I recall that at some point in the past, I discovered a bug in their implementation of Office 2007 task panes in PowerPoint, so I ask them if they have checked their new advanced task panes with PowerPoint.

I receive their answer: "Yes, they have checked and they work". And a suggestion: "Maybe there is a conflict with another add-in installed on my system. Can I please check?".

I do check, and indeed there are two add-ins that seem to "cause" the problem. One is the PowerPoint recording add-in of TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and the other is the add-in for a text-to-speech application. I report that information to them.

The support guy at Add-in-Express downloads the trial of the text-to-speech application and discovers that the add-in is a "feature" of the commercial version. So, he contacts me to ask if I can contact the vendor to explain my problem and ask for a "trial" version of the add-in for them to make their tests.

I, therefore, contact the vendor of the text-to-speech application. In a couple of days, I receive the following answer:

[Name supressed] addin toolbars are stable. You can try again.
Sorry, we have no trail (sic) version of full version.

I won’t comment on this message. But, I’d like to say that I am actively looking for an alternative text-to-speech solution, and I regret the day I purchased that one.

Since the text-to-speech route seems to be a road block, I contact TechSmith to tell them the problem and know what might cause it. The support guy there tells me that he’s spoken with a developer who suspects that the problem is related to their add-in hooking into some of PowerPoint events (as most PowerPoint add-ins do). So, I pass on the information, hoping that it is useful.

I don’t know if Add-in-Express developers have carefully studied their code, or they have installed Camtasia Studio in a test system and debugged PowerPoint. Whatever method they have used, yesterday I received the following message from them:

We have fixed this issue. The fix will be available in the next release.

So, in summary, in the month or so that has taken to sort out this thing, Add-in-Express support staff:

• Have taken full responsibility for the problem.
• Provided a useful suggestion, hours after receiving the first notice of the problem.
• Downloaded the evaluation version of the text-to-speech program, only to discover that the add-in was a "feature" of the commercial version.
• Finally, solved the problem as soon as they found a way to reproduce it.

All of that without ever "scalating" the issue or suggesting that the problem was not their fault since it only occurred when other third party components were present on the system.

Thank you very much, again, Add-in-Express.

Update: Today I have received a notice from Add-in-Express saying that they have a new version available that solves the problem. Hurrah!

This is a continuation of my previous post. The first one was a little negative, so I’d like to present the other face of this issue. There are indeed software companies that thrive to provide a good customer support.

My products use a number of third party components. Of these, there are two that are extremely important to me:

1. The protection system. I am using Oreans WinLicense to protect all my applications and add-ins.
2. The office add-in framework. I am using Add-in-Express as the basis to create all the add-ins.

These two components have two things in common: A great portion of the "hard to track bugs" found on my products are caused by, or related to, these two components. On the other hand, the support provided by these two companies is absolutely top-notch.

I don’t know if there are other products that would perform the same functions for me and are better, or cheaper. I don’t care. Their support is so good that I won’t look for an alternative solution to those two backbone functions. Period.

The Oreans history

I have had many support needs for them. This is not strange because their protection system is likely to cause all kind of conflicts with running applications -as an example, for security reasons, my applications are not allowed to run when a debugger is detected- or cause my executables to be flagged as a virus.

Last week, I received a bug report from a customer that had just purchased PowerTOC. I hate when someone purchases a license, and immediately tells me that the product won’t work. I really feel very bad about it.

To make things worse, the problem was totally new to me. PowerPoint will crash on startup and disable PowerTOC on the next run. This is a serious issue.

I offered a remote assistance session to the customer, which he accepted. Fortunately, just before starting the remote session, the customer discovered that the "culprit" was McAfee HIPS. Disabling it solved the problem.

Time to contact Oreans, I thought. I sent them a message and, in a few hours I received a very detailed answer with a possible solution to this problem. I have followed their advice, and it seems to work.

The Add-in-Express history

This is what originally made me write this series, and will be the topic of another post. Please keep tuned.

From time to time I participate in a discussion with fellow independent software developers about customer support. Over the years, I have come to understand that there are basically three approaches:

1. Those that hate it. Plain and simply.
2. Those who think that it is just another cost of doing business.
3. Those that believe that it is the single most effective marketing device available.

I’ll start declaring that I belong at heart at the third category.

These are strange times indeed

A friend of mine said once that we are living in a time in which you have to fight for the obvious, be it Global Warming, the true causes of the recent financial crisis or corporate strategy.

I am mentioning it, because I am at a complete loss when I see how most big companies are externalizing customer support. It is funny, if it wasn’t really another sad symptom of the current craziness of the world we live in.

One of the first business strategy lessons you learn is that the one who owns the client owns the business.

Yet, those big corporations pay external consultants a bunch of money to be told that they could save a few cents by externalizing customer support.

Of course, then they pay a different kind of consultants another bunch of money to create all sorts of annoying customer surveys to try to regain some knowledge about what their clients think or want. A complete waste of time and resources.

I believe that this creates a huge opportunity for new and innovative companies that still understand that a business is just a way of make money out of solving someone else problems.

A little tale

I have received lately two messages from a user that is totally at a loss about how to use FormsAssistant. The messages are:

First message:

I’ve having a mental block on getting the fill-in functions to work.  Could you please complete an example for me?  I think one simple example could help.

How do I code a field to populate with data (my name).  And, how do I code the clip so that my name will appear?

Second message:

Just to clarify -

If I wanted to use the name entered in "Dear [Name] again later in the letter, would I have to go to that next field and select the name from the available clips?  So, it doesn’t have the capability to populate all [Name] fields with the name / data inserted in the "Dear [Name] field?

Well, it is clear to me that this particular person is not understanding at all how does FormsAssistant work. He must be dumb, doesn’t he?

No, he is not dumb at all. What these messages really mean is that I have not done a good job of explaining FormsAssistant. What is obvious to me, does not mean anything to a person that, as you can see on the two quoted messages, is an intelligent person that does a really good job of expressing himself. So, I have explained FormsAssistant in terms of what I do understand, but have not been able to communicate these ideas with him.

What I have done is to answer politely to both messages, trying to explain better to him what FormsAssistant does.

What I would love to do, is to take the phone and talk to this guy to learn why I have made such a bad job of explaining FormsAssistant on the web site, the user interface and the help file.

And, of course, to thank him personally for expending his valuable time to let me know that I am not the brilliant programmer I sometimes think I am.

You know, on this business, when someone does not understand what your program does in about 10 seconds, a click on the back button of the browser loses you a sale.

I was interviewed last year at the ESWC Conference held in Berlin in November 2008. You can hear the whole interview at Shareware Radio.

My English accent is horrible, but I believe it can be understood. Enjoy the interview!

Last week, I finally set my new web site live. I have been busy fine tuning it, fixing everything that was broken, but finally it seems to be working alright.

This is how the new site looks:

And this is how it was before:

What do you think? Do you like it better the new one?