Posted by mbos on Aug 5, 2009 in
CrowsNest,
News,
Products
Sir Chrisalot and the Reports Dragon
This is the story of the brave knight Sir Chrisalot who vanquished the foul and vile dragon called Reports from the land of Mutiny!
The Queen of the land, the fairest of them all, our beloved Queen Merleesa summoned our hero to her palace. Upon arrival, the court marveled at the astutefulness, intelligence, and utter heroism of our knight Chrisalot. The Queen, upon beholding our hero knight, lost all sense of mind and could not think of what to say – and promptly ordered his head chopped off.
Fortuitous for all, she soon regained her composure and remembered why she had summoned the knight and saved us from a rather short and abrupt ending.
She then spoke… “Sir Chrisalot wilt thou heretofore vanquish the evil and foul dragon Reports from our beloved land of Mutiny?”
Our hero Sir Chrisalot did thus kneel and swear to his Queen that he would utterly vanquish and dispose of the dragon Reports. Oh what a joyous day it was when our hero did thus defeat the vile dragon and bring peace, harmony and prosperity to the land.
Tags: CrowsNest, development, Products, story
Posted by mbos on Aug 2, 2009 in
Design & Development,
News,
Products 
Relaxing Summer - someday!
Decisions, decisions. Trying to manage and formulate the best strategy for domains, names, sites and so forth for multiple products can be a challenging one.
We have decided to use sub-domains of the mutinyware.com primary domain to setup our products’ website and application on. After some debate and research, we came to this conclusion for a couple of reasons. One is integration. We plan on having all of our apps be capable of complete integration with the others, and can easily foresee a future where clients may be subscribing to more than one app. Having all of these under a single domain makes this a little less painful. The second consideration was branding and SEO. By keeping all of our products under the MutinyWare umbrella, we are better able to consolidate branding efforts, as well as SEO.
Previously, we had setup individual product domains, such as mw-crowsnest.com and mw-quartermaster.com. We have now transitioned these to crowsnest.mutinyware.com and quartermaster.mutinyware.com. Hopefully this will make things easier both for us in administration and branding, and also for our customers. This should make our SEO efforts and rankings more relevant to all, instead of to a single product.
If anyone has any feedback on this conclusion, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
PS – what do the feet have to do with this post? Nothing really, I just like the feeling and the photo 
Tags: domains, sites
Online Property Management
We have a product in development called QuarterMaster Property Management. It is a system to help property management firms manage their websites for their main company, as well as for each individual community.
QuarterMaster came about when a Cambridge Partners, Inc. requested a basic content management system to manage some facets of their websites. This is a client that I have had for several years, one that I manage the regular maintenance on and last year, had completely redesigned and rewritten all of the sites. Needless to say, as we were working out the details for their requirements, we ended up creating a system that was much, much more than they had bargained for. We can’t be accused of doing things half-assed! Thus, QuarterMaster was born.
The system is being used by the Cambridge Partners site right now, and has been for the past several months. Currently the system is only handling portions of the website data, those that are directly related to the properties and their details. The textual content and layout of the site is still being maintained manually. Ultimately QuarterMaster will manage all of the content on a site.
Currently, QuarterMaster handles the following features:
- Create and manage individual properties
- Create and manage individual models (floor plans)
- Create and categorize all of your amenities
- Manage pricing
- Manage locations, contacts, URLs
- Create and manage custom neighborhoods
- Amenity value assessment
- Create, manage and schedule specials
- Apartment search functionality
- Leads management
- User management
- Changes to the QuarterMaster system updates your site immediately
- Integration with your existing site
If you have any questions, or are interested in using QuarterMaster for your own property website(s), please don’t hesitate to contact us. As we move forward with development, and have a public demo and beta system in place, we will post updates here.
Tags: community website, development, property management
CrowsNest Assessment System
We are making excellent progress on the CrowsNest application! We have completed the private launch, first release, and are working on finalizing some significant changes that were made to the base functionality of the system. By the first of July we are looking at opening up a beta program for the Assessment portion of CrowsNest.
If anyone is interested in participating in the beta of the assessment system, please contact us. The assessment system is geared towards creating and delivering online assessments/tests.
Primary features of the assessment system include:
- Ability to create a question bank
- Ability to show images with individual questions
- Ability to categorize your questions
- Ability to add custom proficiency levels to your questions
- Create manual/custom assessments, save in bank
- Create random assessments using the generator
- Ability to define grading systems
- Ability to assign point values to individual questions
- Automatic scoring/grading
- Assign time limits to an assessment
- Customize and assign documents to an assessment
- Invitations
- Instructions
- Case Studies
- Closing Notes
- Ability to group multiple assessments into a “Course”, save in bank
- Schedule assessments/courses
- Skip question functionality
- Timer functionality
- User Management
- Customer Management
- Review Scorecards
- Terminology customization
- Interface customization
Tags: CrowsNest, development, News, software, update
Happy Mother's Day!
Well, we are at Mother’s Day. And of course, being a mother, happy mom’s day to me! And even more so, to my own mother…who is still the biggest help and lifeline of my life.
My mom was just here visiting me for 4 weeks last month, and as usual, she spoiled both my daughter and myself outrageously. Now, not to say she spoils us materially…but with taking such good care of us while she is here, and the daily Tim Hortons run. I have also discovered, that as ridiculous as this sounds, I sleep like a baby when she is here. On the flip side, she does get me to do all of the icky stuff that I have procrastinated on since her last visit. When she leaves I always have a full freezer, clean house, and all of my mail taken care of 
On this last visit however, something new occurred. We went out for drinks at the local pub! Now, this is something I have never, ever done with my mom. Neither of us are drinkers, and neither of us are in the habit of going out to bars. However, I have noticed over the last several years, that my mom enjoys music. I know, seems like a silly discovery doesn’t it? But, she has become quite exposed, and I must say, very accepting of what my daughter and I listen to. Soooo….twice, yes twice, while she was here, we went out to listen to live music and have a few drinks. And go figure, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!
Now….next visit, she is coming down to go to a Nine Inch Nails concert with us. She wonders if she will be the oldest person there….but damn, she is looking forward to it!
Happy Mother’s Day Mom! And of course to all of the mothers and grand-mothers out there. None of us would be where we are without you.
hab.la works with your IM client
A couple of weeks ago we went to the TechNow 09 event in Royal Oak, Michigan. It was a conference, presenting and promoting information and technology based business / entrepreneurs in Michigan. One of the presenters was hab.la, a company that has created a great method of providing click to chat technology on your website.
Now, there are a lot of click to chat services out there…so what makes hab.la different? Well, for one, the service is free. For another, and this is most important to me, their service connects directly to your IM client, whatever it may be. I use iChat on my mac, and the hab.la service connects directly to iChat. This way I don’t have to download and install yet another desktop client on my mac, nor do I have to have a web browser open at all times in order to have the click to chat functionality available on our website.
A really great feature of hab.la is also the fact that my iChat shows when someone enters my site, and if they click to chat with me, I can see as they move from page to page within the site, allowing me to know what they are looking at as I chat with them.
If you are looking for a click to chat system for your site, definitely check them out at http://hab.la. You can also follow them on Twitter at twitter.com/hablagroup.
Posted by mbos on Apr 22, 2009 in
Design & Development,
News,
Products 
Coming Soon!!
Sometimes it can be a real challenge working for yourself, and starting up a new company. One of our biggest dilemmas comes in the form of having too many ideas. We are always thinking, and finding ideas for new products, add-ons, functionality, etc. It comes down to prioritization. We have to prioritize our ideas into what is most feasible, most desirable, and what we have the time to do. Sometimes, we can jump off track a little bit when a client comes to us for a specific product. In that case, we change course as there is an engaged customer.
We did however have an idea come to us recently that we simply couldn’t sit on. Since we have recently become very involved in the Twittersphere, we quite quickly were hit with a couple of thoughts on things that could be done to improve our Twittering experience. As it is a relatively small application, we decided to jump on it, and the timing is just right.
Keep an eye out soon for the launch of this new application
Tags: app, development, twitter
Posted by mbos on Apr 17, 2009 in
CrowsNest,
News,
Products 
CrowsNest Survey & Assessment System
A quick update on the CrowsNest Survey & Assessment System.
Development is coming along nicely, and we are looking to launch for our first client towards the first week in May. The initial launch will be for them only, as the assessment features and functionality have been developed around their requirements. This initial version will include only the assessment portion of the system.
Soon after this private launch, we will be adding in the survey and poll portions, then doing a public launch. We are soooooo excited to get this up and running and available publicly!
We do have the website up for CrowsNest, at www.mw-crowsnest.com. The website indicates a mid-2009 launch, which is what we are targeting for. Please feel free to take a gander around the website, and let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Tags: CrowsNest, development, update
