Editor's note: Last year we introduced the Bamboo Year in Review feature, kicking off with a note from the desk of the CEO and including in-depth Q&As with each of the Bamboo department heads. In keeping with the Bamboo commitment to transparency, we're going to make the Year in Review feature an annual Bamboo Nation tradition. In this installment, we check in with Wes Bryan, who heads up the Bamboo Product Management team.
By design, the Product Management group planned to release fewer products in 2009 than the furious pace of the previous year's releases, focusing instead on a handful of major new initiatives in addition to effecting upgrades to our existing product line, investing in R&D to make sure our products are ready for SharePoint 2010 and, of course, a selection of new Web Parts. How did those plans play out?
It has played out rather well and we were able to achieve a good measure of success on all the fronts you just mentioned. While it's true that we didn't release as many brand new products as in years past, our product teams still set an aggressive schedule with 8 new products released and close to 20 major and minor upgrade releases to our existing product line. We can highlight some of those new products later on, but let's not overlook the value presented by the upgrade releases. These upgrades represented numerous new features and enhancements that were passed along to existing customers without charge, allowing our customers to continue to see returns on their initial investment in Bamboo technology. One major product infrastructure improvement that was introduced in 2009 was the Web Licensing Manager. An improvement like that doesn't often get much marketing play, but it has been a boon for new and existing customers alike. While our standard licensing manager is great for licensing a few products, the Web Licensing Manager provides our larger customers with a single location to check the status of Bamboo product licenses and update them across the farm. Finally, an important piece of our 2009 product strategy stemmed from our involvement in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for SharePoint 2010. This access to early builds afforded us the opportunity to make significant progress towards ensuring that our products will not only work with SharePoint 2010, but to continue to add value in the next SharePoint platform.
Of the new products released this year, which were your favorites? Which are selling the best?
Our Project Management Central (PM Central) product is my runaway favorite - and not just because of its strong sales record. I find it an exciting product for a number of reasons. An obvious one being the business problem it solves. SharePoint's strength as a collaboration platform is evident. Many have seen the potential to marry those collaboration capabilities within a framework to facilitate structured project management, but in the past this required a significant investment of both time and money. We have a history at Bamboo of delivering components that focus on delivering discrete solutions for project management. With PM Central, we are able to offer customers a complete solution for SharePoint-based project management that can be deployed within minutes. In many ways, PM Central is the culmination of a longstanding strategic product vision here at Bamboo. It leverages the strengths of many of the features that we have built into our Web Parts over the past three years, and it provides them in the context of an off-the-shelf solution with instant business value.
Another of your team's major initiatives for the year, Bamboo Conductor, debuted as a beta in Bamboo Labs this month. You mentioned Conductor around this time last year, which brings up a question regarding the lifecycle of major undertakings such as PM Central and Conductor. Has your team been shepherding Conductor throughout the entire year?
Yes, unlike many Web Part projects which tend to be of a narrower focus, products like PM Central and Bamboo Conductor obviously require a larger and more sustained effort to bring about an initial launch. The product team at Bamboo has dedicated product management and engineering teams whose sole focus are these two product lines, and the requirements for Conductor were being communicated to our development teams as early as last year. At its core, Conductor is a platform that allows other components to be built on top of it. Because of this, the initial release had the added complexity of constructing both the underlying platform, and creating a sufficient amount of functionality/features on top it to make the product useful.
How does Conductor fit into the Bamboo family of products? When do you anticipate this product's graduation from the Labs to its official release in the storefront?
Given that some readers may be unfamiliar with the product, it is probably important to quickly describe Conductor before I go any further. Conductor is a product that allows users to build workflows in SharePoint through a simple drag and drop interface. It is targeted for use by both site administrators and business types to allow them to easily build and manage workflows in SharePoint. How does it fit into the Bamboo product line? Our product teams at Bamboo are split into three major groups: Web Parts and Components, Applications, and Tools and Technologies. Conductor is in the last bucket, which includes infrastructure tools like MashPoint. Conductor is a key product for us because we envision it enabling users to link together the features provided in our Web Parts into value-added business processes. We see Conductor as both a standalone product, and as an infrastructure piece that will allow us to build process automation around our existing products. The beta is available in Bamboo Labs now, and we will officially release version 1.0 in January.
What else is on the product roadmap for Bamboo in 2010? What new products can we expect?
One aspect of our plans for next year is a continued focus on PM Central and Bamboo Conductor. Our 2010 roadmap contains multiple major releases for each of these products. You will see two major releases of PM Central next year - one in March and then a follow-up release in September. Conductor will be released out of Labs in January with additional major releases in June and November. We are also planning for major upgrade releases of popular products like Calendar Plus, Alert Plus, List Rollup, Task Master, List Bulk Import, and Data-Viewer. We will release another eight new products in 2010 as well. These include three new additions to the Custom Column Pack and an online content viewer similar to the one that hosts our online product documentation.
With the highly anticipated official release of SharePoint 2010 expected from Microsoft in June, what's the SharePoint 2010-readiness status of the existing Bamboo product line? Is Bamboo's sizable portfolio of products going to be fully ported to SharePoint 2010 before the June release?
Actually, through the Microsoft TAP, we have been working with advance copies of SharePoint 2010 for the past six months. This has enabled us to have already completed ports of about 18 of our top products onto the beta version of SharePoint 2010. We currently have plans to port our entire product line to the new platform. Our goal is to be able to offer customers free upgrades of their existing licenses to components that work with SharePoint 2010 the moment that it becomes available. In addition, our efforts in the months leading up to and through the official SharePoint release date will be focused on adding SharePoint 2010-specific modifications to our product line. These will go beyond the mere "porting" of the products and aim to include features that augment new SharePoint 2010 capabilities.
You joined Jonas Nilsson in San Diego this year to present a session on Code Access Security at the Best Practices Conference. You also presented a Partner-led session on Bamboo SharePoint Analyzer at that Conference, and also spoke to several SharePoint User Groups over the course of the year. Do you anticipate another uptick in speaking engagements for you and/or your team members in 2010?
The answer is definitely yes for both me and other Bamboo team members. Bamboo has always championed itself as a company that is both tuned in to customer feedback and driven by it. By engaging with customers at user groups and conferences, we are able to learn what users are doing, what features or new products they need, and thus how we can better serve them. We also enjoy the opportunities to share some of our learnings with the community through our unique position as a large independent product company devoted entirely to SharePoint. So yes, I expect the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 will provide us with many topics and perspectives to share at user groups and conferences next year.
Read the entire 2009 Bamboo Year in Review package:
Posted
Dec 17 2009, 01:47 PM
by
WesBryan
Wes Bryan leads the Product Management team at Bamboo Solutions. He has been with Bamboo for over 10 years and has a decade of experience developing enterprise commercial software products. Wes has published numerous technical articles related to SharePoint technologies and has spoken at SharePoint user group events and conferences across the country.