At Bamboo, we take great pride in the fact that we listen carefully to our customer needs when implement SharePoint solutions.
Our product calendar is based on three key input areas: (a) our strategic platform and product lines, (b) feedback and suggestions from our customers, and (c) our core competencies and resources allocation. Of course, our Sales team sometimes has other ideas :-)
Even with a SharePoint dedicated development team of 40+ software engineers (not counting QA, Product Management and other related functions), we are constantly busy making new products, enhance current versions, and fix bugs. We embrace our version agile development process, where we typically do about 8-10 new products per quarter, along with 4-6 minor and patch releases per month. We strongly believe that it is best to put the products out on the market as quick as we can, get feedback from customers and enhance it quickly is the way to go. We call it Community Driven development process. One of the major reason why we build this community site is to have a better way to communicate with our customers. We want to let you know more about what we are doing, as well as getting your feedback on our products.
Our Product Management team will be blogging regularly about our up and coming releases of new products in this space. These announcements are for products that are in alpha or beta stage, and is typically due out in 60-90 days. Some of these products will be available in Bamboo Labs section as pre-releases, beta, or free tools.
Our planned new product releases for summer 2008:
- Chart Plus Revolution Pack. This is a new product that we built for the winner of our Revolution Contest for New Product Suggestion. Users will be able to rollup information from various Lists on multiple sites into a simple Chart Plus Web Part.
- Knowledge Base Management Accelerator. This is a KB management tool, very similar to our ASP.NET based KB system that we use on our web site, excepts it works in a SharePoint environment. This product allow users to publish articles, organize categories, tag keywords, search, and posting questions.
- SP Project Portfolio Dashboard. This is a KPI Web Part allowing project managers to rollup multiple projects status from different sites into a dashboard to view information such as project health, risks and performance.
- SP Custom Column. Additional controls for our Custom Column Pack. One component allows users to replace the standard rich text editor with one that can be pre-configured to connect with a Picture Library, so that upload and insert images into the text can be accomplished in one step. The other component display a numeric column in graphical format, such as bar graph to represent percentage completion in the Task list.
- System Log Manager. This product allows the SharePoint administrator to view all the log files associates with a SP installation in one web part. The admin will be able to connect to Windows, IIS, SQL, SharePoint, and Bamboo log files. Mulitple logs file can be filtered and viewed at the same time and sort by date, type, and sources.
- Team Calendar. This is a Web Part that contains many similar functionality as our Calendar Plus Web Part. The main feature of this product is the ability to work with Exchange Server 2007. You can create a calendar in SP (using standard SP List or an Exchange calendar), then create meetings. Meeting invitations will be send to end user Outlook calendar.
- Bamboo Labs Announcement. Our marketing folks won't let us announce this product until close to TechEd 2008, so watch this space on about June 8th. It will be a major introduction to the Bamboo Labs area.
If you have suggestions and enhancement requests, you can let us know in our online product description pages. You can also suggest new product ideas by register on our storefront, go to My Bamboo, and send us the new suggestion. You can also vote for exsiting product ideas in My Bamboo, we do use the voting to plan new product releases.
If all of that is too hard, drop by the New Product Request forum, and leave us a note. You might actually get it for free!
Posted
May 24 2008, 11:47 AM
by
Lam
Lam Le is the COO of Bamboo Solutions. As a founding member of Bamboo Solutions, Lam brings more than 25 years of developing and running software product organizations. At Bamboo, Lam spends most of his time on the product, engineering and operation sides of the company. In his spare time, he likes to dream abou the-next-big-thing, reading stuffs on his Kindle, install the latest Vista patches, draw pictures on his white board, and find any excuses to have a big group lunch where he can sample all the dishes.