Introducing Thincloud
Although we’ve been working with customers for a couple of weeks, we haven’t officially announced that we have launched the Thincloud website, or incorporated the application customization process into New Leaders. So, what is Thincloud? After working with clients on a number of software-as-a-service products, we came to the realization that many web applications provide limited features, and don’t inherently communicate with other critical web apps. Beyond just that, the needs of most businesses are the same, with slight modifications. Rather than rethink and rebuild the back-end of each and every website we create, we wanted a way we could use different combinations of features to solve our problems. At the same time, we wanted these application to be deeply integrated into our own website. So, instead of just publishing or adding products — we wanted it to manage our finances, send estimates, and take invoice payments. We wanted our website to be our business, not just an abstraction. We wanted to avoid double-entering information from our project management site into our invoice tool, and so on.
The idea of Thincloud came about last January, when we were building the New Leaders website. We wanted a way to quickly add single-purpose applications that cloud-communicate with each other, without building a large and complex system with tons of dependencies. Robert conceived a way to use Ruby on Rails to make Thincloud into a very lightweight platform containing the UI specifications. The idea was to create an application-like base operating system. We use small image resources to craft the interface. A Standard Thincloud instance contains only permissions. From there, we began crafting small, single-purpose web applications that we call plugins. Each plugin is independent of the next, with its own version. We can simply install the plugin, or branch it and modify it specifically for a customer.
The beauty of Thincloud is not merely in its desktop software-like interface, but really in the very low amount of code in the Thincloud application, and each plugin. It is such a timesaving process to setup a new instance, install the plugins, convert design files into CSS, and incorporate them into Thincloud that we are able to build an entire site from scratch in less than 12 hours, with the design and production process taking more than half of the time. Thincloud allows us to reduce the time and costs associated with building a website, create a solution to an intranet, or tie APIs together. We have found it more difficult and limited to work in WordPress than developing new functionality for Thincloud.
One of the key benefits to Thincloud is the custom crafting capabilities to meet your business requirements. Traditionally, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has only been under the control of the author. The customer must request changes be made or bugs corrected. When the service provider feels a request is a priority, the feature or problem gets solved. This means that business can only be as good as the services to which it subscribes. As previously mentioned, most tools don’t fully meet the needs of a business, so they require various subscriptions to multiple applications in order to complete their solution. Tied directly into their customer facing websites, these tools actually manage their business rather than just databases, communication tools, or storage locations.
Enter Thincloud. Combined with New Leaders Design on Demand service, creating the look and feel of your site and converting to Thincloud-ready CSS, we are now able to bring your business to the web like never before. The New Leaders website uses Thincloud to manage content, track customers, create leads, deliver invoices, and track payments. We’ve even added our own version of group chat, so every leader can communicate and collaborate. Our permissions application allows us to lock down our financial apps, while giving access and complete control over everything else.
To put the idea into perspective, here’s the process a typical customer will follow when they decide to do business with us, and how Thincloud plays a major role. A customer will usually visit our website to learn more about us. They are unknowingly using our Pages app in which every page is created, Discussions that manage The Leader Board, and Portfolio that populates our recent work spread. When the customer is interested in learning more, they take our online survey and select the products they require. When the lead is submitted, Thincloud automatically creates a new customer, schedules a callback time, and creates a new estimate with the customer’s notes added to it. At this point, we’ll contact the customer a few times to gather enough intelligence about the project to complete the estimate. We handwrite every estimate and do our very best to articulate how we would provide a solution.
We do all our writing directly into Thincloud. The Estimate goes through a review and approval process and is then published securely to our website. At this point, we will send the customer an email with a link to review the estimate. When the customer clicks the link in the email, they land on the estimate page in the New Leaders website. They are able to print if they choose. To accept and begin work, we ask them to click the pay the deposit button. The customer’s information entered during the lead process is then passed directly to the payment form. Unless they want to change something, all they have to do is enter their billing information.
Upon submitting payment, it is processed and provides them with a receipt. Our payments application in Thincloud displays that a payment has been received, and automatically links to the customer page. The project budget then becomes available and our team members can start to log time for that project. We invoice the 1st and 15th of every month. Thincloud automatically generates invoices based on time logs and sets them to draft. Each invoice is double-checked and approved by the owners. They are then securely published on our site, and we email the link with a personal letter about the work we completed and progress of the project. When the customer clicks the emailed link to review the invoice on our site, it states the outstanding balance and offers them the ability to pay online. If they choose to do so, we pre-populate the form, and all they have to do is hit submit.
That’s the power of custom software. It isn’t about merely managing projects or tracking page views; it allows you to do business over the web like never before. It lets you build a workflow that is scalable and reduce the amount of time wasted doing repetive tasks. Thincloud can help you serve your customers better, and can provide you an aggressive edge over your competition. Finally, you can take control of your company like you’ve always wanted, and do away with the frustration of software that doesn’t work as advertised.
Learn more about Thincloud:
http://thincloud.com
Visit the New Leaders page that explains how it works:
http://newleaders.com/pages/3-thincloud
Posted on Dec 03, 2008 by Kevin Milden
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