Design web services as 'easy adopters'

A very sensible article extracted from the book Architecting Web Services recommends designing web services as 'easy adopters' — that is, making it easy for users to build them into their own applications. In other words, design them for the customer's convenience, not the programmer's. That's always good advice.
posted by Phil Wainewright 9:41 AM (GMT) | comments | link

Online training for trial customers

Another example of best practice in customer relationship comes from apps4biz.com, which has just announced a 30-day free trial with a difference for its online smallbiz application suite. Rather than leaving prospects to flounder without guidance, the trial includes daily online training sessions so that they can really get to grips with the service.
posted by Phil Wainewright 4:43 PM (GMT) | comments | link

Joy at web services conference

Webservices.org has done a sterling job of reporting at length [btw, registration required I believe] from the Infoworld Web Services conference that I mentioned in yesterday's posting. Indeed, so good is it that their server is running a bit slow just now. Much food for thought here, although I must say I feel glad I missed hearing Sun's chief geek Bill Joy talking about how web services allow "silicon-based life forms" to engage in meaningful interchange.
posted by Phil Wainewright 9:48 AM (GMT) | comments | link

No-one cares what it's called, so long as it works

It seems attendees at one of the first major conferences on web services couldn't agree what they are, and nor can customers decide what to do with them. It reminds me forcefully of the early ASP conferences back in 1999, when many participants were obsessed by defining what was meant by ASP (and yet somehow expected they would bump into customer prospects amid such self-indulgent navel-gazing). Successful practitioners, then as now, are those who just get on with delivering real-world business solutions to customers, and worry about what to call the technology later on.
posted by Phil Wainewright 9:51 AM (GMT) | comments | link