Hi folks. Welcome to our first newsletter. Before we jump into this month's content, let's go over a couple quick points regarding the newsletter itself:

So, without further adieu...

The Botonomy News for August 2006

New Botonomy.com Website

We recently rolled out a significant upgrade to Botonomy.com, our company website. Our site now has lots of updated content related to our product and service offerings.

Recent Enhancements to ProjectPipe

Over the last couple of months, we have made a number of enhancements and improvements to ProjectPipe,our hosted project management solution. Pretty much every screen has been re-written or otherwise improved. The following is a sampling of the changes that we've made recently:

Action-Oriented Home Page
The Home Page provides functionality to address the collaborative and task-based needs of new and experienced users alike
Streamlined Outline View
The outline view is now much cleaner and simple. Reorganizing outline data is much easier, thanks to a "point-and-click" interface
View Selection Enhancements:
Custom queries are integrated into the view selector, and the system "remembers" your view preferences
Common Task Browsers
The Home page has common tasks grouped by project role to reduce the learning curve for new users.

The Admin page has tasks grouped by topic to make administration a snap.
Dependency Management
Viewing and establishing links among items is much easier, due to a streamlined screen layout and workflow.
Easier Customization
Nearly all content in ProjectPipe is customizable. The Administrative Task Browser now makes navigating the customization options much more straightforward
Context-based Help
Many pages, when invoked from a Common Task Browser, have integrated help text. This means that when you need it, the application becomes the help system.
Query Builder
The tool for creating custom queries now allows for drag-and-drop column selection and ordering
Query-based RSS Feeds
Custom queries automatically generate RSS feeds
Workflow
The graphical workflow builder is now exposed in the application. Workflow states and transitions for each data entity are customizable

PMI-DVC Tools Conference

We will have a booth at the 2005 PMI-DVC Tools Conference. We'll have more information on that in next month's newsletter.

TurboGears Video Sponsorship

TurboGears is a web development "mega-framework" built atop the Python programming language. We expect that it will become very popular in the coming 18 months. It is similar to the Ruby-based Rails framework that is getting a lot of press these days.

Like Rails, TurboGears makes it very easy to build web applications, but Python has a much lower learning curve than Ruby, especially for mainstream (Java, VB, C#) developers. These two factors (power and ease-of-learning) lead us to believe that TurboGears will be an increasingly attractive platform for building web apps in the Post-J2EE world.

Botonomy was one of the sponsors of the TurboGears Ultimate DVD, a collection of videos created and produced by TurboGears founder and project lead, Kevin Dangoor.

Twisted Success Story

ProjectPipe is featured in Twisted Matrix Laboratories' Success Stories.

Twisted is the networking framework that we use to build our hosted applications. It is a high-performance, event-driven, multi-protocol networking framework for Python, and is arguably the best framework for building applications that integrate multiple network services.

Approach.Botonomy.Com

Approach.Botonomy.Com (A.B.C) is a site that we put up to share our approach to software development and project management. It will be a work-in-progress over the next several months. We have not published a ton of content yet, but we did get a decent amount of traffic for the short story titled Your Project is Not the Science Fair.

AtomAntenna.com Sneak Peek

Here's a sneak peek at our next hosted product offering. It is a business data syndication solution called AtomAntenna.

AtomAntenna helps organizations of all sizes easily share information via standards-based (RSS or Atom) syndication. Users can quickly build a secured RSS or Atom feed directly from an Excel spreadsheet or flat file coming from an existing application or database. Plus, your hosted data is maintained in a private relational database, which you can easily manage online using an easy-to-use web interface.

If you are starting from scratch, AtomAntenna provides a web interface for building out your data model online.

Once your data is uploaded or entered through the web, you can build derived feeds using AtomAntenna's Query Builder. You can also subscribe to feeds that are generated from the differences between subsequent uploads of a given data source.

We have designed AtomAntenna to support a new class of web applications, which sidestep the complexity of enforcing business rules (pushing that duty upstream) in favor of making it super-easy to slice, dice, and share data securely across departments, offices, or organizations.

We believe that RSS will become the "dial tone" for Intranet and Extranet communication. This makes AtomAntenna a very attractive service to use in either production environments, or for testing out the business case for RSS-enabling your internal applications with minimal upfront investment and infrastructure impact.

We will have an announcement regarding AtomAntenna's beta release in the coming weeks.

Stay Tuned.

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