Intuit Partner Platform team blog

Meet IPP at Boston Flex User Group, 5/12, 7pm at Adobe, Newton, MA

I'll be presenting at the Boston Flex User Group's next event, to be held on the evening of Tues, May 12th at Adobe Systems' Newton office (275 Grove St, Newton, MA) at 7 pm. Please feel free to come at 6:30pm or so and hang out before the talk. Pizza and drinks will be provided by Universal Mind. There will be a bunch of the IPP peeps there...we look forward to meeting with you!

Please RSVP at http://bostonfug.eventbrite.com/ if you're planning to attend.

Here's what I'll be talking about, along with a demo of the IPP stack with the IPP plugin for Flex Builder.

Today, millions of Small Businesses are adopting the SaaS model. These businesses need their data to connect, synchronize and interoperate across the multiple back-office and front-office applications and services they use to run their business. How will this work? How can the cloud help Small Businesses get more out of their data and leverage the functionality of the cloud? What are the opportunities for ISVs and SaaS providers and Flex developers to connect and program against the Small Business data cloud? This presentation will describe how Intuit’s PaaS offering: the Intuit Partner Platform, is enabling a brand new class of cloud connected services, SaaS and RIA offerings for Small Businesses, and how Intuit partners with ISVs and SaaS providers to solve real problems for millions of Small Businesses. In this session we’ll also be demonstrating how Flex developers can use their skills to take advantage of this huge opportunity.

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Alex Barnett.
Dev Relations, IDN and IPP

Chance to Win $12,500! Contest for Location-Aware Apps

The Intuit Partner Platform has recently partnered with Xtify Inc. to incorporate mobile phone location technologies into Intuit Partner Platform applications. By building and publishing a location-aware business application using the Intuit Partner Platform Flex SDK, plus the Xtify Flex API, you’ll be eligible to win up to $12,500 in cash prizes.

Three Prizes

• Grand prize: $7,000
• First place: $4,000
• Second place: $1,500

Key Contest Dates

• Contest begins: 4/23/09
• Application publishing deadline:6/23/09
• Panel judging date:6/25/09
• Contest ends (Workplace users counted):8/05/09

The Judges

• Ed Zander, recent CEO and chairman of Motorola
• Jeff Samberg,managing director of Acadia Woods Partners, LLC
• Alex Chriss,business leader of Intuit Partner Platform
• Andrew Weinreich, CEO of Xtify, Inc.

Watch the Sample App in Action

 

Check out all of the contest details here.

Thanks,
—The Intuit Partner Platform Team

Prototyping and Wireframing - Getting Everyone on the Same Page

Communicating ideas visually and getting everyone on the same page (literally) when you are designing or modifying user interfaces is a critical step in the overall development process and ending up with a great user experience. And doing so earlier and often, the better...without this you'll end up here :-)

There are many ways to do this and quite a few tools that make this a speedy and simple task.

Of course, Flex is a great tool for developers already familiar with the tool, but there are lots of different options for those with varying skills - this article provides a review of 16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing.

One of my favorite is Balsamiq Mockups - an Adobe AIR app, great for communicating the concepts of a proposed interface via wireframing.

Do you use tools to prototype and develop wireframes? Which tools do you use, and why? How do you communicate your ideas?

Advantage SmartRoutes Now Live!

Advantage SmartRoutes, built on the Intuit Partner Platform is now live and fully available at the Intuit Workplace! From the FoxBusiness.com article:

"TomTom, the world's leading navigation solutions provider, today announced a strategic partnership with Advantage Integrated Solutions, a premier Intuit QuickBase consultant-developer, to optimize business fleet organization and itinerary planning on TomTom PRO Series navigation devices. TomTom PRO Series, a new line of navigation devices developed specifically for businesses with mobile workforces, offers best-of-breed GPS navigation, a free map update and premium support services.

Coupled with the Advantage SmartRoutes rich internet application, the TomTom PRO Series now offers a way for fleet managers and route dispatchers to organize, plan and optimize routes. This solution also gives drivers detailed mapping information about the locations to which they are navigating."

Features include:

• Copy-and-paste your customer data from Excel into the program for geo-coding, mapping and route creation, or import complete routes you've already created by other means.
• QuickBooks users - Get Going Quickly using SmartRoutes' built-in sync to your QuickBooks desktop Customer data. SmartRoutes is a certified Intuit Workplace application and QuickBooks add-on.
• Maps all of the locations your people need to visit, lets you visually create efficient routes, and easily push them to TomTom devices or save them for future use.
• Download your routes to TomTom devices as complete itineraries from any pc with web access.
• Microsoft MapPoint users - export your contacts in an Excel format that you can import into MapPoint for additional data analysis.

You can find out more about the new IPP app at the Intuit Marketplace.

Advantage SmartRoutes went into beta in January 2008, so a big congrats to Scott and his team at Advantage to go fully live!

Flex 3 in Action: Ch. 23 Debugging, Functional and Unit Testing in Flex

Manning Publications has posted a free pdf of Chapter 23 from their book called "Flex 3 in Action". Chapter 23 includes Debugging, profiling, 3rd party tools, unit testing, and functional testing of Flex Applications.

Flex 3 in Action
Chapter 23
Manning Publishing
http://www.manning.com/ahmed/Flex3-sample-chapter-23.pdf

From the author's blog

Happy Coding,

Jarred

RIA’s and PaaS’s, The Intuit Partner Platform

RIA Weekly is a great podcast series produced by Adobe’s Ryan Stewart and Redmonk’s Michael Coté discussing Rich Internet Applications and related news.

Last week they published RIA Weekly #45 - RIA’s and PaaS’s, The Intuit Partner Platform, where we talked about Intuit’s involvement in the RIA space and the Intuit Partner Platform. Thanks to Michael and Ryan for inviting me on their show.

If you have any thoughts on what you heard, let me know!

ViewMyPayCheck built on the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP)

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with some of the team who have developed a brand new Flex application “ViewMyPayCheck”, built on the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) and now available as a beta product at WorkPlace.

We’re always excited when new applications go live on IPP, but what makes ViewMyPayCheck particularly interesting is the fact that it is an Intuit Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product built by the internal Intuit Payroll product group using the same platform as external IPP partners are using today. More on this in a second…First, a bit more about ViewMyPayCheck…

ViewMyPayCheck enables small businesses to provide their employees the same easy and protected access to their payroll information that employees at large companies enjoy.  Employees log in to the application (entering their WorkPlace credentials) and can view and print their paystubs and, in the future, other payroll-related information.

The team began development on the ViewMyPayCheck project in October after winning an Intuit “IdeaJam”, a regular internal competition that encourages “whitespace” project time for internal teams to collaborate on innovative ideas for potential products. Once the team had the go-ahead to go from idea to productization, they began rapid development on IPP, allowing the team to develop and deploy the SaaS solution in less than three month, without them having to do themselves the custom work normally associated with authentication/authorization system integration, permission model development and hosting & billing infrastructure that scales – all the stuff that comes for “free” on IPP.

The interesting thing for external IPP developers to take note of here is since WorkPlace now hosts this ViewMyPayCheck product (built by Intuit), the small businesses and their employees who use ViewMyPayCheck will find it easy to find, try and buy other WorkPlace solutions that can help solve other business problems – solutions developed by not only by Intuit but also external IPP developers. This is the small business ecosystem at work!

Here’s the video interview I did with the ViewMyPayCheck: the team members are Lalit Shahani, Deepa Viswanathan, Michael Dehlwes and David Leary (who unfortunately couldn’t join us for the interview itself).

You can try ViewMyPayCheck at WorkPlace here and find out more including demo videos here.

Advantage Integrated Solutions drives its way to success on IPP

Scott Wyatt of Advantage Integrated Solutions and early adopter of the Intuit Partner Platform recently completed and published the, Advantage SmartRoutes for TomTom GPS, application to Intuit Workplace. We had a chance to catch up with Scott to hear more about his application.

So… Scott, what is the Advantage SmartRoutes for TomTom GPS application? 
Advantage SmartRoutes is an application designed for any company whose staff or contractors drive frequently for sales, service or other calls. SmartRoutes, combined with TomTom GPS devices help centralize, organize, assign and optimize the driving work.  It is a complete commercial solution to improve productivity, service, and lower costs.

Wow! That’s powerful -- how does it work?  
It provides a central repository (or sync with QuickBooks customers) to consolidate all the places personnel need to drive. Then, it geocodes this information using Yahoo! Maps and allows users to visually build optimal itineraries.  Once the route is built, SmartRoutes pushes the itineraries into a selected TomTom GPS unit, which is passed to the driver. It becomes an ‘intelligent navigator’, taking the driver(s) to all the places they need to go, in sequence and most efficiently.

QuickBooks integration?
Yes, SmartRoutes syncs with QuickBooks data to make all customers available within the app. The customer information is then geocoded for mapping and route planning.

How long did it take you to build the app?

Approx 400 man-hours. We contracted outside Flex expertise.

What advice would you give to other developers interested in IPP?
Keep your first version simple for lower cost and quicker to market success. Then build on additional demand-driven functionality as necessary.

You can see a video of the Advantage SmartRoutes in action or try the app directly within the Intuit Workplace.

Universal Mind Wins Intuit WorkPlace Application Contest

At the Adobe MAX08 conference we were very excited to announce Universal Mind’s “Customer Explorer” application as the winner of the Intuit WorkPlace contest. We think this app is pretty amazing – it had to be to win the contest as it beat some stiff competition with a total of ten apps built on the Intuit Partner Platform making it to the final contest review round.

A Big Thanks

A huge thanks to all the developers who entered the app contest. The process was a challenging one for them – they were developing on Beta bits, services and moving targets as our team was preparing the platform to go live. We really appreciate their patience and perseverance and all of the quality feedback they provided throughout. We hope to bring you more examples of their work in the coming weeks.

And also a big thanks to the contest judges: Oliver Marks (writes the Collaboration blog at ZDNet), Mario Morejon (Senior Technical Editor at everythingchannel.com) and Ryan Stewart (Platform Evangelist at Adobe) who took the time to review the ten finalist applications and talk with the developers as part of the judging process.

Now…About the Winning App

Customer Explorer allows customers to quickly see geographic and temporal trends in user's QuickBooks customer data. Users can view interactive heat maps of their balances and filter by time, job status or job type and drill down to specific customer and job details. Street and satellite imagery in the application is provided by MapQuest. Users can also view thematic demographic data provided by Placebase's Pushpin data and mapping service, which includes median household income, in context with their own customer data.

The prize included $5,000 cash, a place at the Intuit booth at MAX08 to demo the winning application (plus covering travel expenses) and an opportunity to take part in the Intuit Partner Platform speaker session at the conference. It also got some deserved attention by press and media (see Slick data-visualizer launched for QuickBooks users).

A preview release of Customer Explorer is available for free on Intuit WorkPlace so you can play with it right now.

Meet One of the Winning Devs

Today we took the opportunity to talk to Doug McCune, Principle Software Engineer at Universal Mind - one of the developers involved in creating the contest-winning Customer Explorer application. At yesterday’s speaking session he mentioned a few things I thought would be cool to share you, so video’d our conversation:

Congratulations to Tom Link (Universal Mind’s CTO), Doug McCune (in this video) and the rest of the Universal Mind team!!

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Update: see a video of the app in action at Universal Mind's blog.

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The Intuit Developer Relations Team

Tour de Flex app includes Intuit Partner Platform code sample

Adobe's Tour de Flex is a desktop application (running on AIR) for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more.

The app includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and includes Intuit Partner Platform code samples.

The code sample used is from the same sample app James Ward (Adobe Technical Evangelist for Flex) put together and blogged earlier in the week - thanks James!

(via Robert McDonald)