Apple has been quite successfully at using secrecy to their advantage prior to a product launch. They prefer to build suspense around a new product then let loose with a "Big Bang" announcement and (hopefully) a product that surpasses all expectations.

But their recent launch of MobileMe did not go so well using this strategy. Steve Jobs acknowledged that Apple should have launched MobileMe in beta to a select group, then evolve the product prior to broader distribution.

This "iterative, incremental" approach to launching web services, websites, and SaaS applications is pretty much a universally accepted practice today.

After all, software is "soft". It can be easily crafted, modified, and evolved over time. Software-as-a-Service is arguably even "softer" than traditional software with concepts such as declarative configuration, multi-tenancy, and single code bases becoming the norm.

My personal experience working on several eMarketing and portal projects over the years is that projects that start out overly ambitious and strive to launch with a "Big "Bang" with lots of new functionality are prone to either a) outright fail and be abandoned or b) re-correct themselves, but proceed demoralized.

It's no surprise that our most successful clients and projects are those that started small and evolved their solution over time. The pattern is quite clear. That is why we've designed our subscription levels and services around iterative, incremental development.

Many people talk in terms of "SMB" or "Enterprise" software and make immediate assumptions based on price. We don't see it that way. It's perfectly acceptable for a Fortune 500 company to start with a $195 per month microsite and evolve that solution over time to several redundant/load-balanced servers.

Maybe it's the ego of legacy IT and marketing organizations that persist this notion of "Big Bang" projects. "My new eMarketing platform is $30K per month with 3 full-time consultants" sounds much more powerful than "I'm upgrading my $595 per month microsite to manage all our campaigns once I've established a consistent cost-per-opportunity metric."

Sounds odd coming from me because I don't make more money giving this advice, but I would rather have a satisfied customer start with our $195 month microsite edition and see immediate ROI rather than risk a dissatisfied customer pursuing an overly ambitious goal.

You can have massive scale aspirations and scope. Just make sure the software you're using is "soft" enough to support iterative, incremental development and plan for many small releases along the way to achieve larger goals.

I recently attended a Salesforce webinar on how to use the Google API toolkit and must admit I was very impressed.

The power of moving data from Salesforce into Google docs, coupled with an increased availability of Google visualizations and add-ons to Google spreadsheets, is starting to make Google an extremely viable option as a service based business intelligence and analytics platform.

There are really no technical barriers to integration. The challenge now is provisioning, configuration, and deployment. It was not quite clear to me on what Salesforce recommends as best practice for retrieving, storing, and managing the various types of authentication tokens. Once this challenge is reduced to a "one-click" experience, I think the mash-ups will fly.

The motion chart (below) really impressed me as a possible solution to viewing key marketing metrics over time. I'm writing a paper on customer acquisition costs and had initially assumed use of Salesforce bar charts for reporting, but the chart below looks promising. It's currently using sample data now, but the Salesforce Google API toolkit provides the ability to update the underlying Google spreadsheet with actual data.

 A new rating control has been added to the Dialogue Script library that supports the rating of Salesforce objects through i-Dialogue hosted web pages and portal applications.

I haven't dug too deep into the details, but apparently this control can be provisioned in a variety contexts, such as a Thumbs Up/Down rating control (it's derived from this open source Rating control, so anything that can be achieved through the documented samples is portable to the DScript control).

Customer ratings are typically captured in a junction object that intersects a Person with an Object and records their rating.

For example, here's what an example DocumentRating object might look like in Salesforce for capturing individual ratings of documents.

DocumentRating__c.LeadId__c Lookup (Lead)
DocumentRating__c.ContentId__c    Lookup (Content__c)
DocumentRating__c.Rating__c     Number (1,0)

Unlike other Dialogue Script controls that can be deployed using minimal attributes, this one needs some extra guidance to define the junction object source and related lookup fields.

Let's face it. Any good Web 2.0 strategy (or web 3.0) needs to have a "dynamic language" story to attract serious web developers. Languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl are seeing tremendous gains in adoption by Web Developers.

No two organizations are alike when it comes to customizing their online presence and Internet Marketing campaigns, and these dynamically typed languages are increasingly becoming the language of choice as API extensions (see Google App Engine's use of Python).

Now that Dialogue Script is generally available and actively used in production, we've started turning our attention towards how to provide Developers with more programmatic control over the display and processing of web forms and portal applications, similar to how Salesforce employs Apex Controllers in Visual Force.

Our open source C# and ASP.NET API is an extremely powerful option for those familiar with Visual Studio.NET and managing strongly typed, compiled languages. But we wanted to evolve our platform and embrace the latest trend in dynamically typed languages and to go one step further by keeping the entire web development experience service-based (ie through a web browser or rich client).

Fortunately, the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) will be made available to us very soon and i-Dialogue Developers will have their choice of several dynamic languages to choose from when embedding rich programming logic into their web forms.

The DLR will give Developers the "glue" necessary to mash-up Google, Salesforce, Microsoft Live, Fedex, and any other web service using a familiar programming environment. The feedback from making changes will be instantaneous (no recompiling, moving files, or unit tests), making programming an instantly gratifying experience.

The DLR extensions to Dialogue Script will drive the innovation of new development process lifecycles and quality control processes that enable globally distributed teams to iteratively and incrementally evolve complex websites, portals, and campaigns using nothing more than a $599 laptop and browser.

The entire i-Dialogue object model will be made available, so DLR scripts can programmatically control all facets of a well rounded Internet Marketing Suite, including Profiles, Pages, Email, and Web Forms.

If you've ever written a VB macro to customize an Excel spreadsheet or Word, then you'll feel right at home with this new extension. This is probably #3 in the priority queue right now, with a couple tremendous new features taking priority right now for delivery by Dreamforce, so I'll keep you posted on it's evolution.

Suffice to say, we'll seek to leverage the DLR out of the box as much as possible with very few proprietary additions, so any O'Reilly book or MSDN article on the topic will be 99% applicable, if you want to get a head start.

Some at the office may have wondered why I was leaving work early on Wednesday's in July (and relatively speaking only working 8 hour days instead of 10-12). Truth is, I was rehearsing with an all acoustic group for an informal concert performed last night.

This particular song, "On The Horizon", (video below) was written and recorded for my "West of September" CD project in 1998. Original recording is here. The "unplugged" acoustic version came out pretty well. The Mandolin, in particular, played by Scott McAuliffe, really adds a nice dimension.

Concerts I've attended in recent weeks include Mark Knopfler and The Police (with Elvis Costello). I've recently come to a realization of just how many British guitar players have influenced my style (Page, Clapton, Knopfler, Gilmour, Summers) ... amazing how American Blues needed to go travel over the Atlantic and back again for mass consumption. Music truly is an international language.

My musical alma mater's signature event, The Mt Hood Jazz Festival, is just around the corner to wrap up this Summer's musical activities.

And for Salesforce readers who may think this post is totally OT, check out the announcement that Journey will be playing at this years Dreamforce event (good thing I'm through the denial stage of losing Steve Perry and starting to accept Arnel Pineda, who was discovered by Neil Schon on YouTube  )

This is very much a Beta feature right now, but i-Dialogue now provides an Outbound Message listener for synchronizing Salesforce objects in near real-time.

Outbound Messaging (OM) is an advanced feature and there is potential for circular messaging to occur when this feature is not configured correctly, but following the Wiki article should get most Admins going in the right direction.

The use of outbound messaging vs. periodic ETL polling typically spawns a debate over "real-time vs right-time" integration.

For most organizations, it is often acceptable that a press release, job posting, or new property listing appear on a website within 20-30 minutes of publishing. However, in our 2+ years experience with Salesforce and mid-market B2B customers I have fielded many requests for real-time integration.

Even though Salesforce does not have a formal SLA, the reliability of the web service API lately has allowed us to address many real-time requirements through the use of a "query and cache" design pattern. But there is a noticeable latency for transactional web pages that depend on this design, so we've developed a hybrid approach that involves real-time filter queries that return pre-fetched records as the ideal solution.

Outbound messaging ensures frequently accessed objects are always up to date and are kept synchronized in the background.

Here it is July and I feel like a kid on Christmas knowing that the next release of SmarterStats includes advanced charts and graphs using Silverlight. Very cool!

SmarterStats is one of many applications included with every i-Dialogue subscription.

I found it interesting that Entellium, a CRM software company, is abandoning its browser based CRM application in favor of it's rich client CRM application.

This is one of several recent events that signals (to me) that a larger "Software + Services" (S+S) inflection point is now underway.

Looking at Gen Y office workers as a leading indicator, I'm often amazed at how many actually *prefer* to use rich Windows applications. The browser is just an alternative interface, much like a mobile phone.

eMarketing is a never ending battle and compromise between "reach" vs "rich", with maximum "reach" and lowest common denominator channels winning out, so I don't see this trend significantly impacting the custom interaction front lines. A website and simple HTML emails will always be guaranteed to reach a wide audience.

But I think productivity and development tools will most certainly be revived in a S+S context. Even Salesforce.com, known primarily as a web-based application, has converted me to their S+S development model of using Eclipse (a rich Windows application) to communicate with Salesforce via webservices, and I would expect the deployment of an Adobe Air-based Salesforce application to be announced in the near future to keep them relevant with this trend.

"Multi-client" may become the new buzzword that replaces "multi-tenant" in SaaS circles.

The "Milestones" feature in i-Dialogue CMS can really save your bacon if you ever need to rollback a particular web page to a previous version.

Here's a quick walk-through of this feature (click the "Play" button below to view).