What’s it all about
With the launch of new Kaboodle web site, now hosted in WordPress (before we used a public facing O365 site but Microsoft’s determination to do away with this hitherto splendid service meant we finally had to give up the ghost on that one), I thought it would be useful to explain what the strategy of the business is and where are to focus moving forward.
First up, I need to make it clear that we have always specialised in Microsoft SharePoint and O365 technologies only and will continue to do so. We will not be side lined into other products or technology stacks. The reason for this is simple. I believe that specialisation is a good thing. It means you get very good at what you do and become intimately aware of what will and will not work. Would you really trust your GP to perform your heart bypass operation?
Were are focusing on the following 3 main themes.
Products
Since the business was founded in 2012, Kaboodle Software has always offered products which extend the capabilities of SharePoint and O365. Many of these are free, some of them are licensed either directly (for traditional full trust Farm solutions) or via the Microsoft App Store (or is that Add-in Store).
We generally get great feedback for both for their quality of our products and for our customer support. Our most successful product by far has been Word to Wiki which enables users to convert Word based content into SharePoint wiki or publishing pages at the click of a button with none of the messing about that is usually required for uploading and relinking embedded content (clip art and images etc.).
We offer Word to Wiki for on-prem and in the App Store using a provider host solution (in Microsoft Azure) but currently there is not parity between the capabilities offered by each version. So in 2017 we will be re-engineering Word to Wiki and bring out a new on-prem solution that supports SP2016 and will included new capabilities and features (such as chunk publishing) which have so far only been available in the cloud hosted version.
It seems that our best selling products are those which deliver real business value and a capability which has no real competition (seems obvious doesn’t it). That’s certainly been the case with Word to Wiki.
Learning from this, in 2017 we are going to focus on developing products that enhance information access. In other words we are going to specialise even more narrowly and stop trying to be the best at everything but instead be the best in what has ended up being our focus area.
So the main (license required) product deliverables for this year will be:
- Word to Wiki Uplift: Re-engineering of the existing product to make it easer to deploy and manage and with new and enhanced functionality.
- SnapWeb for SharePoint: This is like Word to Wiki but the other way round. It will basically take a snap shot of SharePoint pages and save them out to PDF. The idea is that organisations can use these snap shots as a record archive of the information that was displayed on a SharePoint portal or wiki.
- Scaffold: This is something we have had at the back of our to do list for a long time now and something I am very excited about because I don’t think there is a comparable product out there. Essentially, Scaffold will bring Structured Authoring to SharePoint and O365. If you don’t know what Structured Authoring is then hang on in there because I’ll blog about it soon.
As there 3 capabilities are clearly related, we’ll see about bundling them into a package.
Over and above that we’ll still support out wider portfolio of free solutions:
- Alt Login (Login to SP2013 as a different user)
- Solution Manager (Windows App to deploy and manage SharePoint farm solutions)
- Bing Go (UI for Geolocation column management)
- Synch Convertor (Convert Word to PDF straight from a SharePoint library)
- Blingo (Brings Bing Translation to SharePoint)
Consultancy
Kaboodle Software is based in Adelaide South Australia and we have supported (and will to continue to support) numerous organisations with the highest quality of consultancy support within the Adelaide metro area. These customers include:
And many others and the list of happy customers is growing.
Providing consultancy services is lifeblood of our product development efforts. Through working with customers in the real world we often end up building innovative solutions and some of these end up as germinating seeds for our product line. Only be seeing how customers want to use SharePoint and O365 in the real world do you get to understand what’s missing and you simply wouldn’t believe some of the crazy and totally brilliant ideas that come out of the heads of some of the people we work with. So consultancy is here to stay.
Thought Leadership
Being born in the mid 60’s means that I’ve been around a while and long enough around the IT industry to see the ebb and flow of ideas and the technology that supports them. It may surprise (or even offend) our younger viewers to know that not much has changed. Sure, broadband has pushed the performance of the Internet so that things run quicker and things these days are more shiny and sparkle a bit more but conceptually not that much has changed.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not setting out to change the world but I have been around long enough to not get too carried away with the next great thing because too often it becomes a best a stepping stone and at worst a blind ally. Remember Silverlight anyone?
I’m in danger of starting to rant, so I’m going to check myself here and just point out that it is my intent to use this blog to provide a candid, sometimes cynical and hopefully thought provoking assessment of life the universe and everything.
Kaboodle Software 