Web App: Juvely

3 days late is better than never. We’ve finally come to a point where we can launch something. From the getting real concepts, “It’s better to launch half a product than a half-assed product”. This isn’t quite a half yet, I’d say more of a third. This post will give you some details about the features that have been released. And what you should expect in the coming days/weeks.

• Dashboard
• Tickets
• Management

Lots of hard work has gone into these features. Obviously this is our first beta phase, so work still needs to be done on these features, they are far from finished but in a state which people can begin to use them. The marketing site is also up and running although it’s not finished, the general purpose of it at this point in time is just to allow people to sign up.

Whats to come?
Features are still missing from the Tickets area. Firstly the Reply Suggestion/Quick Reply feature still needs to be implemented. Luca is working on an algorithm for this so it yeilds the best/most relavent replies. Also we want to make sure the same old files were not being uploaded taking up your precious storage space, this means we are yet to implement the “Attach an existing file” feature. This will also save on uploading times when replying to open tickets, existing files will be attached right away.

The aim was to keep the dashboard simple and relavent. Smaller fine-tuning will probably go on here.

Also we’d like to worm out bugs. The knowledge base has most of the code in place and just needs the user interfaces redesigned. This shouldn’t take long at all but we decided to leave it out for now, so we could concentrate harder on what we have got.

As for the Chat feature we still need to begin. A lot of planning still needs to go into this feature, as we want to get it perfect. This will be one of the later features we release.

How can I help?
We’d be extremely greatful to those that do help providing feedback and what not, we’ve even decided to give special life time offers to beta testers that help, discounts and perks when we release fully. If you do come across bugs we have setup some forums at http://forums.juvely.com/ especially for us during the beta phase of Juvely. If you don’t want to signup to anything else there is a feedback form within the app, or you can email us at . We welcome all questions and queries and will answer them with pleasure.

The idea of this beta is mainly get feedback and allow users to get a feel of the application. We recommend that you use either Firefox, Opera or Safari, we are supporting IE7/IE6 but we still expect there to be rendering bugs within those browsers at this point.

Oh, yeah, we had probably better tell you how to sign up! We have our new marketing site up at http://www.juvely.com with a signup form as well as a few other bits!

Again, please let us know what you think, good or bad, it’ll be great to hear from you!

Thanks for listening,
James and Luca

Well unfortunately I have some bad news, and even worse it is a bit of a cliché. Although we said we would be launching the beta tomorrow, unfortunately we will not. But fear not! We are going to be launching it in a couple of days (when we are ready - it won’t be long so don’t worry). Anyway, here is our plan for the beta launch.

Pre launch stuff

• Finish off the first version of Juvely
• Spend at least 5 minutes testing
• Set up a production version on server
• Finish off marketing site & sign up page
• Set up a bug tracking system

Phase One - Bask in the glow (Within the next few days)

• Let people sign up to the beta
• Let people report the many millions of bugs I expect you will find (although we are calling this a beta, Juvely probably isn’t quite that far progressed)

Phase Two - Communication for the masses (By the end of next week)

• Fix any bugs with the bug reporting system
• Start fixing bugs in Juvely
• Setup a better communication system from a bug tracker - most likely forums
• Add direct links to bug reporting and better communication system into Juvely (temporary while in beta)

Phase Three - Instruct ‘em how (Hopefully started by the end of next week)

• Set up a documentation system
• Provide links within Juvely that will take you to documentation for the page you are on

We also planned on having the marketing site and signup page up by the time I posted this, but unfortunately it seems ol’ Jimmy boy is entertaining some floozy (disclaimer - I’m sure she is a lovely lass). As such I am not sure whether he has finished that lot yet. Tut tut. Anyway, you know who to blame.

Right then, so keep an eye open to see what is happening. If you are not all for modern technology and are not using one of those RSS reader things if you want to know when we launch the beta you can also sign up to be notified by email on our holding page!

Well with only five days to go we have still got quite a lot to do, so things are getting a tad frantic! Here is our Basecamp todo list of what needs to be done to complete Juvely for the beta:

Eek! We have also got to do the Juvely homepage, signup page, and tonnes of other stuff! Actually that todo list doesn’t even show we need to basically write the whole of the management section as there is hardly anything done! Eeeeeeeek!

Anyway, some good news now. Yesterday we moved everything over to a (dv) server and I have got it set up all nicely and super duper fast! The DNS is still being a bit slow, so we haven’t got rid of the (gs) just yet though. After we have launched the beta version I’ll put up a review.

Anyway, we still have loads to do and not much time to do it in, so I’m gonna get back to work! Hopefully by the time the next post is up we will have most of the stuff done!

Edit: Just fixed the bug with 404s on the blog, so you can post comments now!