I used to work for Intuit, and at one time there was an initiative to do an online version of Quicken. Some of that work seems to have shown up in their My Finances offering:
"Track checking, savings and cash accounts here. You can download balances from your financial institution..."
During my brief stint working on a government web site a few years ago my biggest frustration was the insistence on making the information architecture reflect the organizational structure.
How is the average person supposed to know which office inside of what bureau in what administration is the one that has the content they're looking for?
And try to avoid putting the director's picture on the home page.
We've been working with Broadvision for about two years now. It's a very complex system that is difficult to learn, is poorly documented, and is very complicated to configure, deploy, and maintain. After figuring it out, however, it has proven itself to be extremely customizable, with good performance and stability.
Most of the out-of-the-box functionality is barely useful, and you'll find that to do anything in the real world you'll have to tear it apart and re-invent a lot of what is supposed to be built-in.
The only way to learn it is to plow through the documentation they provide, extracting whatever nuggets of information you can find, then dive into the sample code and header files.
Their sales tactic is to make an end run around the technology folks and go straight for the marketing managers with the "1-to-1" pitch. If we knew then what we know now I don't think we would have made the same decision, but we've managed to make it work for us.
I'd be happy to answer any other questions you might have.
I think you should focus on what, not how. It's the desire to achieve some specific goal that's going to drive them to figure out how to do it. Ask them what kind of programs they want to write, and let that drive the platform/language choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd never bought so many floppies before in my life...
Quicken 2002 on OS X. *wink*
But seriously...
I used to work for Intuit, and at one time there was an initiative to do an online version of Quicken. Some of that work seems to have shown up in their My Finances offering:
"Track checking, savings and cash accounts here. You can download balances from your financial institution..."
Open Financial Exchange
During my brief stint working on a government web site a few years ago my biggest frustration was the insistence on making the information architecture reflect the organizational structure.
How is the average person supposed to know which office inside of what bureau in what administration is the one that has the content they're looking for?
And try to avoid putting the director's picture on the home page.
Most of the out-of-the-box functionality is barely useful, and you'll find that to do anything in the real world you'll have to tear it apart and re-invent a lot of what is supposed to be built-in.
The only way to learn it is to plow through the documentation they provide, extracting whatever nuggets of information you can find, then dive into the sample code and header files.
Their sales tactic is to make an end run around the technology folks and go straight for the marketing managers with the "1-to-1" pitch. If we knew then what we know now I don't think we would have made the same decision, but we've managed to make it work for us.
I'd be happy to answer any other questions you might have.
Jason (jason_defontes@intuit.com)
I think you should focus on what, not how. It's the desire to achieve some specific goal that's going to drive them to figure out how to do it. Ask them what kind of programs they want to write, and let that drive the platform/language choice.