Bill Bither's Insights

Zero Footprint Document Image Viewer For SharePoint

Bill Bither — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:59:59 GMT

Last month Atalasoft launched Vizit SP, a zero-footprint document image viewer for SharePoint. When we released DotImage in 2003, our goal was to help organizations build web-based document imaging solutions faster and with better technology. We did this by providing a powerful, yet easy to use API with many UI controls focused on document imaging including the very first AJAX based Zero-Footprint Image Viewer. Fast Forward to 2009 with our 7th major release of DotImage and with tens of thousands of successful server installations of our zero-footprint viewer. We solved the document image viewing, editing, and annotating problem pretty well for .NET developers. With the popularity of SharePoint we knew we had the right technology at the right time and made the decision to build Vizit SP (see my August 2008 blog article). This article explains more about the benefits of Vizit SP and a bit about how it works.

Vizit SP’s core technology is DotImage and our zero-footprint document imaging technology. It provides a user interface for viewing, annotating, and editing scanned and faxed documents inside of SharePoint. We could have built a simple document viewer web part for SharePoint (many of our customers are doing this now with DotImage). However, after some research, we determined that a full viewing application was required that would include a view of not only the image, but a library explorer, property editor, and annotation tree. Think of Vizit SP as the RIA (Rich Internet Application) interface to work with document images in SharePoint. It’s a productivity application that leverages all of the document management features already a part of SharePoint, in a very easy to use, modern UI.

There are many uses for Vizit SP. Here are a few general ones.

Document Capture

Vizit SP really shines after the documents are submitted to SharePoint from a capture application when part of a workflow. I visited an insurance company recently where they had a requirement to manually QA a certain percentage of their indexed documents. You can do this in SharePoint by building a relatively simple workflow that emails QA staff with a link that opens the document directly into the Vizit SP viewer without requiring that the document be downloaded to the client, and without requiring any software installed on the client. The document can then be reviewed, properties edited to fix indexing mistakes, and if the document came in damaged, dirty, or upside-down, it can be cleaned up within the Vizit SP interface. To continue to collaborate on the document, annotations can be added, such as a text note and a freehand markup circling the problem area in the document.

It doesn’t matter where the images come from, it can be a desktop scanner, MFP, fax, production scanner, etc. There are many great capture solutions on the market today that probably fit your business quite well. Many of them have or are currently working on tight integrations with SharePoint. Some of these applications are built using TWAIN, ISIS, Image Viewing, and cleanup technology from our own toolkit, DotImage.

Document Retrieval

Vizit SP can be very helpful in finding documents stored in SharePoint. With the previewer functionality (available for no cost), you can quickly view a thumbnail preview of a document before deciding to open it. This prevents the user from downloading many documents before finding the correct one. When combined with the Vizit SP viewer, even more time is saved as only the first page of the document is downloaded to the client. The document is viewable much faster than downloading the entire document to the client, then opening in a client viewer.

Universal Document Viewing

The Previewer combined with the Vizit SP viewer provides a universal web-based viewer for all your common document formats stored in SharePoint including TIFF, PDF, and MS Word. Very soon Vizit SP will have the ability to open nearly 100 various formats including legacy formats, all office formats, and CAD documents. It’s unlikely that a user will have a client viewer installed that supports all flavors of TIFF plus 100 other formats. IT Administrators will no longer have to install or maintain client image viewing software. Help desk calls are reduced as the same viewer is used for remote clients and for Windows, Mac, and Linux PC’s.

Large Format TIFF and PDF Viewing

We specifically optimized our TIFF and PDF codecs for viewing large documents on the web. Our Zero-Footprint viewer breaks each page into tiles, then streams these tiles to the client in a similar fashion to Google maps. Very large scans, such as CAD documents, Oil Well Logs and Strip Charts that are stored as TIFFs cause most client viewers to be very sluggish or crash. Vizit SP will view these documents in just a couple of seconds. Zooming occurs instantly while the server creates a higher quality scale version with our optimized Scale-To-Gray resizing.

More information about Vizit SP can be found at www.vizitsp.com.

Bootstrapping A New Product in a Recession

Bill Bither — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:10:00 GMT

2008 was a very uncertain year for startup and early stage technology companies. First there were warnings about a faltering economy with the real estate bust, then the credit crisis, then Sequoia’s infamous “R.I.P. Good Times” presentation, then finally, proof that the US and the entire world was entering what might be the worst recession in our lifetime. 2009 isn’t off to a great start. In just the first few weeks in 2009, we’ve seen thousands layoffs and cutbacks from well respected software companies like Microsoft and EMC. This is unknown territory for many of us running a software business.

I started Atalasoft during the economic slowdown in 2002 after the dot com bust. While today’s downturn is affecting more than just the tech industry, there are many similarities. It’s not easy to find funding being one. In 2002, it was just me trying to get a business off the ground. After looking briefly into external financing I decided to bootstrap my company and grow it organically. Bootstrapping seemed to be the way to go then, and I’m sure glad I did. I talk more about how I started Atalasoft in my post, From Nothing to Something.

I now can confidently say Atalasoft is a success. We now have 25 full time employees in our local Western Mass office, we’re profitable, and we’re growing. Despite the fact that last year we had a lot of customers with cancelled or stalled IT projects, our revenue grew 25% in 2008 (after 57% growth in 2007). Considering our competitors reports that revenue was flat or declining in 2008, we see our 25% growth to be a great accomplishment.

We have been bootstrapping it again – but this time not a new company, but a new product. In late 2007 we decided to build a product that can measurably save organizations money and leverages our existing zero-footprint document viewing IP. This product is called Vizit SP, Document Image Viewing for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). It will be released in a few days after over a year of market research, development, and testing. We were able to achieve this goal by using profits from our cash cow, DotImage to fund the development of Vizit. We researched the market, talked to potential customers, built relationships with industry recognized players, and are now in the midst of turning Atalasoft from a one product company to a two product company – all without any external financing, and during a recession.

Raising VC money isn’t for every business, and bank financing is never easy for a software company with limited tangible assets. The recession just makes it even harder. I believe that now IS a good time to start a new company, or launch a new product. This is the year for small agile companies to innovate while larger companies cut back and wait it out. If you can, use your profits to spin off a new product or new idea. I’ve leave you with a few suggestions to bootstrap a new product on a limited budget.

Hire a dedicated product manager good at both marketing and product development. You have all you can do to keep your cash cow operating and moving forward. You need to fund at least one person to be exclusively thinking about this new product. If you can’t afford to hire a new person, pull one of your key developers or product managers off your core product.
Understand the market. Don’t just whip out a product because you think its a good idea. Talk to some potential customers. If the target market is different than your existing product’s market, find new people to talk to.
While market research is critically important, don’t overdo it. There is a point of diminishing returns. At some point you need to bite the bullet and build a prototype to test the market test before someone beats you to it.
Build a simple prototype before committing to a full development team. Get feedback from the target audience, make sure the product idea “sticks” and if it does, start designing the real thing. Now is the time to quit or go back to the drawing board if you didn’t get it right. Things get a LOT more expensive from this point forward.
While it might be tempting, don’t use contractors or offshore companies to build your product. You’re banking on this product being a success which means you’ll need your own employees to be the product experts.
Use the SCRUM product development methodology, or a variant of it. Be agile.
Make sure you have a budget for the new product, and track all activities related to the project separately from the core business. Even though you’re likely to have developers and marketers working on both products, you’ll need to track the % of time to analyze how much was spent on new product development, and how profitable you would have been if you didn’t invest in this new product.

I will humbly admit that we made a few mistakes when building Vizit SP that cost both time and money. An expensive way to learn a lesson, but the lessons were learned and at the end of the day, we followed the above steps and ended up with an awesome product that is being released at just the right time.

The Case for Zero Footprint Document Viewing

Bill Bither — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:43:48 GMT

Recently Ralph Gammon from Document Imaging Report interviewed Jack Berlin, the CEO of Pegasus Imaging, about the new release of their Prizm Viewer, a heavy client 25MB ActiveX Document Viewer. Ralph asked about the new wave of AJAX based zero-footprint viewers on the market. This was his response:

"There is certainly some demand for lightweight viewers" he said. "If you are talking about users doing ad hoc viewing of images a couple times per month, I think zero footprint viewers work. However people doing imaging every day as part of their jobs, typically need the power of a locally installed application. It's our view that large corporate users especially are moving away from zero footprint viewers. They want the best performance and are willing to install software on their PCs to achieve it. Of course, they don't want deployment headaches. That's why we are always focused on improving our administrative tools."

Mr Berlin is right on one point, that customers are willing to pay for the best performance. That's exactly why our Zero Footprint Viewer is so popular. When viewing documents that are located on a server (which is the case for any ECM system) it's faster to start viewing the documents instantly in a browser by asynchronously streaming thumbnails and tiles of the document to the client opposed to downloading the entire document to the client for viewing.

Mr. Berlin is also correct on another point that IT administrators do not want deployment headaches. With Zero-Footprint, there are no deployment headaches as there is no software to install. It works with any modern browser on any Operating System including: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. With the right zero-footprint viewer, you don't have to give up features. Our viewer supports features such as markup with annotations, and editing and cleanup. DotImage 7.0, to be released soon, adds support for freehand annotations that performs as well as any thick-client freehand drawing tool.

Where Mr. Berlin is 100% incorrect is that users are moving away from zero-footprint viewers. In fact, the opposite is true. We have fortune 500 customers and ISVs who have purchased a total of over ten-thousand servers. They are each successfully using our Zero Footprint viewer to serve thousands of end users who view, edit, and annotate thousands of documents a day. Atalasoft understands the value that zero-footprint viewers brings to an enterprise level high production environment. This is why we continue to innovate our web-based imaging technology.

Our new product, Vizit SP, applies our zero-footprint viewer to SharePoint giving SharePoint users a zero-footprint document image manager that will scan, index, view, edit, and annotate PDF, TIFF, and Word documents in your SharePoint libraries and workflow.

Our First European Trade Show

Bill Bither — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:31:19 GMT

Last week, Atalasoft exhibited at the DMS exhibition in Cologne, Germany to launch our SharePoint Suite of products called Vizit. It was the company's first European show. We were fortunate enough to have established a partnership with Kodak and exhibited in their booth instead of having our own. This was a great way for us to scope out the show, but also benefit in a big way. DMS was dominated by larger booths, and fortunately Kodak had a good sized booth dead center in the main aisle, also right next to the Microsoft booth.

Three of us attended this show and we thought it might be a little overkill for our small Kiosk...boy were we wrong. We hired a firm fluent in German language and culture to send out information packets (in German) to other exhibitors who might be interested in OEM'ing or reselling our products. They setup meetings for us ahead of time and kept all 3 of us very busy meeting other ISVs and Integrators making sure we didn't miss our important meetings. Not one of us spoke more than a couple words in German. I quickly learned not to introduce myself with "Guten Tag" as what followed was a German conversation that I had no chance of understanding. Luckily nearly everyone spoke English remarkably well.

What was wonderful about the Kiosk was that everything was done for us! We didn't have to ship anything, we didn't have to do anything substantial to setup or teardown. It was remarkably easier than the 10x20 booths or 10x10 booths that we usually exhibit in. The only hiccup was that Kodak used the Atalasoft logo for the main sign when we wanted the Vizit branding. We ended up printing a make-shift sign for Vizit instead.

The best thing about this show as compared to similar shows in the US is the professionalism. This was not about handing out giveaways or giving hundreds of demos. It was about meeting with people, sitting them down, and getting business done. Everyone was dressed professional, mostly in suits (with branded nametags if you were an exhibitor). No loudspeakers and no iPod giveaways. Many CEO's and executives were in the booths ready to talk about their business and to share ideas. A wonderful venue to get down to business, learn more about the industry, and learn about companies that only do business in Europe or Germany.

Overall the show was great, and there proved to be a great deal of excitement about our free Vizit Scan-to-SharePoint for push scanning into SharePoint with Kodak scanners, Vizit Previewer for zero-footprint thumbnail previews of TIFF, PDF, and Word documents in SharePoint, and Vizit SP for Document Viewing and Imaging in SharePoint.

Our New Product Suite - Atalasoft's Response to Massive SharePoint Adoption

Bill Bither — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:04:29 GMT

Most of us in the industry have heard it by now. Microsoft has sold more than 100 million licenses of Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) and it's likely Microsoft's fastest growing product of all time. According to a recent Osterman study, in 2007 50% of all organizations that use Exchange are also using SharePoint and that is expected to increase in 2008. The number of mission critical applications developed with SharePoint is 20% expected to double this year while the number of SharePoint applications are expected to quadruple.

Why is SharePoint Becoming so Popular?

SharePoint began as a portal solution most often used to replace network file shares. But there is a lot more to it than an elaborate file share. It's a full collaboration and content management suite with the roots of a full ECM. This potential is what's causing so much buzz in the ECM industry. SharePoint is very affordable at $100 or less per client license. And most importantly it's from Microsoft, the leading supplier of technology in the enterprise. A very powerful combination.

Using SharePoint for Document Management

Despite all of SharePoint's buzz and usefulness in enterprise departments and mid sized businesses, there are some serious holes - in particular when considering SharePoint as an ECM. Imaging support out of the box is limited. There is no simple way to capture and index documents into SharePoint without a tedious step-by-step processes. There is little image viewing capability to view PDF or TIFF documents directly inside of SharePoint. To view a document users have to download the entire document to their client PC, then hope their default viewers will view the document properly which is often NOT the case for TIFF documents. While SharePoint has workflow and search capabilities, it's limited. This is where 3rd parties are beginning to step in and if I've learned one thing about working with Microsoft it's that they rely and support 3rd party vendors in extending their platform into viable solutions.

Before the Osterman study was released, we had noticed an increase in customers using our Zero-Footprint Viewing technology in SharePoint. We had to fully understand SharePoint for ourselves in order to support our customer's SharePoint integrations of DotImage. With our innovative and advanced web-based imaging technology, and after some research, it became obvious to us that there is a demand for applying this technology as an imaging solution for SharePoint.

Atalasoft's SharePoint Imaging Solution

For over a year now we have been building a solution to fill the imaging gap in SharePoint by applying the industry's best Zero-Footprint Document Viewing technology available in our DotImage toolkit to SharePoint. The goal is to enable SMB's and Enterprise Departments to leverage SharePoint for a highly customizable and affordable ECM solution.

We are providing simple, and FREE scanning to SharePoint that integrates with a leading scanner manufacturer (to be announced soon) for true push scanning into SharePoint.
We are providing a Zero-Footprint Previewer application as a totally FREE server application that gives users fast viewing access to TIFF, PDF, and Word documents stored in any SharePoint Document Library.
We are providing an advanced Zero-Footprint viewer that will view most common document formats in SharePoint including TIFF, PDF, and Word. It supports editing properties while viewing the document (indexing), annotating and collaboration, and document cleanup without installing any client software in a modern and very usable user interface - all you need is a browser.

This product suite is called Vizit, it's very powerful, very affordable, and will be launched as a public beta, with some pieces production ready at the DMS Show in Germany on September 9th - 11th.

31 Applications - Done!

Bill Bither — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:50:13 GMT

Last month marked the successful completion of our 31 Apps in 31 Days effort where Atalasoft developers (including yours truly) developed and deployed 31 applications using the DotImage 6.0 Toolkit in 31 days, with full source code. The goal was to create small applications using our toolkit during our normal workday. It was quite an undertaking for us, but demonstrates just how quickly developers can build something interesting (and useful) using our toolkit. Most of these apps took less than 4 hours for a single developer to create - and some make some pretty useful tools.

I managed to submit 2 applications of my own:
Document Capture to the Amazon S3 Cloud and FlingScan: Searchable PDF Service.

Some of my favorites are:

These days I rarely open up visual studio as my CEO duties generally prevent that; but it's nice to get my hands wet every now and then.

Anyone at TechEd this week? If so, see you in Orlando.

Roses are Red, Technical Support doesn't have to be Blue

Bill Bither — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Before picking up the phone to call a software company's technical support, how many of these questions cross your mind?

They wont talk to me until I show them the money
I'll be on hold forever, just to leave a voicemail that goes unanswered
I'm going to be directed to someone in India
I'm going to be speaking to someone who knows less about the product than I do.

My guess is all of the above, and then some. Why do so many software companies not invest in technical support? Most software executives see technical support only as necessary, or sometimes unnecessary, overhead. For a company with hundreds or thousands of customers there's no question that good technical support is very expensive.

At Atalasoft, we recognize that supporting our customers is worth the cost of hiring friendly, bright, and experienced engineers that work right alongside our product development team - yes, right here in Western Massachusetts. If you call our support department (and I encourage you to do so, even if you aren't yet a customer) you will probably speak with Elaine or Kevin, our full time developer support engineers, who yes - unlike the title of Elaine's blog, are very good software developers themselves.

Let me share with you a recent email from a customer. In it reads:

"The project is a little behind schedule, but I kind of expected that. We have completely converted our document management system from [a competing vendor] to Atalasoft. The project is in beta testing now.

Support has been great, no complaints from me. With the help of your support team, I was able to extend the SDK and create my own cloud annotation. I was a little worried at first, because [the competing vendor] told me that your support group was outside of the USA."

This struck me, because obviously all our employees are within the US, including our support department. Our competitor's sales department mislead their customer; perhaps out of desperation because they were going to lose the deal. Our value proposition was enough for the deal to go our way, even with the misconception that our support would be outside the US.

How many software companies have fans that will provide free Pizza because of our helpful support. And what about those 2-dozen yellow roses that were sent to Elaine for helping out a particularly happy customer! (I can't mention the company yet, but lets just say the gift is right up their alley)

With the release of DotImage 6.0 just over a month ago, EVERY customer receives our gold level of support for 3 months. At Atalasoft, we understand customer support can be the difference between a project's wild success or utter failure, and ensure the best service we can possibly deliver.

Atalasoft, Inc. - 5 Years Old

Bill Bither — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:48:24 GMT

Wow, has life changed since Atalasoft, Inc. was incorporated in August 2002, just over 5 years ago. The turning point for me in founding Atalasoft was the aftermath of 9/11. I did not want to be at the mercy of a large corporation in aerospace facing a downturn. I would seek a new challenge with a simple vision. I realized Microsoft was putting a lot of energy into .NET and it was the next step for software development. I also recognized that Imaging was an interesting and emerging field; one that I had taken a keen interest in. And finally that software was the best way to create a company with minimal startup funds. The vision was to create a company that would leverage Microsoft's new .NET developer framework by offering the best possible imaging technology to .NET developers. I didn't perform any market research, I didn't care about any competitors. I'd like to say that I knew an easy-to-use imaging toolkit for .NET would open the door for other ISV's to create vertical document management solutions, and that the industry would continue to grow at an increasing rate. But I had no idea, just a vision and a goal. The goal of building a company that would provide a better life for myself and my new family.

Today, all I can say is WOW. What luck!! I can honestly state that we have the best .NET Imaging technology on the market highlighted by our ASP.NET Imaging Technology for Viewing and Annotating documents with a zero footprint thin-client.

In 2007, Atalasoft's revenue grew by 57% (previous year's growth was 60%). Since inception, Atalasoft has been profitable and has never taken on outside funding other than a few small bank loans. Sure, we have had our share of growing pains. We are about to grow out of our 3rd office space in 4 years. We've had to change our phone system and telecom provider to support our growing workforce, and had some recent unplanned phone outages (sorry for any missed calls). In maintaining my role as President and CEO, I'm no longer engineering software, but spending more time engineering a business. To me, it's the same thing, but an even greater ongoing challenge that continues to keep me up into the wee hours; not because I have to, but because I want to.

Obviously our goals have continued to evolve over the years, but our vision has remained the same. It's been written down, refined, and the words change frequently, but however you want to word it, we are still about providing value to .NET developers that are building solutions that require the use of advanced imaging and document technology. Will this vision maintain our 60% growth for the next 5 years? Please stay tuned!

9 Concepts High-Tech CEO's should know about Software Development

Bill Bither — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 01:02:25 GMT

Over the more than five years I have founded and managed a start-up software company, we have implemented processes and tools that enabled our company to release high quality, fast performing code quickly and efficiently. Many CEO's that I have met have done an incredible job with their company's strategy, sales, marketing, and product ideas. But some don't quite get the software engineering side of the organization. It is possible to be a CEO of a software company and not have a software background. This is not as rare of an occurrence as you might think among early stage software companies. It's important that these CEO's and their engineering staff understand what it takes for their organization to write quality and efficient code.

The concepts that I talk about apply to a software company using any development environment, but the tools that I'm discussing in this article are specific to Microsoft .NET technologies. This is not an inclusive list of all available tools; just the ones I'm familiar with.

There are many other sources on the Internet that talk about these concepts, including the Joel Test. I'm not posing anything new or revolutionary here. These concepts have helped Atalasoft become a market leader in .NET Imaging Toolkits amongst a number of incumbents in a relatively short amount of time.

1. Source Control

I believe that having a good source control system is the most important system that should be in-place in a software development shop. A good source control system tracks the history of all changes to code, and allows more than one developer to work on the same code base by managing files with check-in/check-out policies. There are free systems such as the open-source subversion, based on CVS. There are also some great commercial choices including Vault from SourceGear, and Team Foundation Server from Microsoft.

Even if you have only a single developer writing code, a source control system will manage all history important when overwriting that important piece of code that hasn't been backed up. It will also enable a developer to work on different branches of the same code-base. For a single developer, the tools available from SourceGear are free. If you are a Microsoft Certified Partner, Team Foundation Server (TFS) for up to 5 users is free. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with an ISV competency has the benefit of 25 licenses of TFS.

2. Bug Tracking System

A system for tracking bugs is very important. It can be a simple excel spreadsheet located at a central location, but for more than one or two developers, you'll want to invest in a commercial product. We use FogBugz, but there are many others, including work item tracking built into TFS. A bug tracking system should have the capability of assigning items to specific users, various priority levels, tracking time estimates, and differentiate between a bug and a feature.

3. Unit Tests

By now, unit testing should be incorporated into any software shop, no matter what the size. A unit test is a small isolated bit of code that verifies the logic of some production code usually written by the same developer. Generally, for every class that's written, an associated test class located in a separate test assembly should be created to verify all of the business rules and logic. The unit test can then be run to verify the results of the test. If in the future, a change is inadvertently made to the tested code that invalidates the business logic, the unit test will fail allowing the developer to fix the issue before it is released to the customer. Having unit tested code gives the developers more confidence to improve their code design by re-factoring, or to add features and fix bugs with confidence that new bugs will not be introduced.

We use NUnit which is an open source testing framework for .NET. However some of our newer projects that are built with Visual Studio 2005 use the testing framework built into Visual Studio 2005 Professional (sometimes referred to as MSTest). Both are about equivalent in functionality. The advantage of MSTest is the ability to easily test non-publicly accessible code., and the built in code coverage tools. In either case, we use TestDriven.NET to debug our code from the unit tests directly. When a customer reports what might be a bug in our code, we simply write a unit test and debug the code directly from the test. Once the bug is fixed, the passing unit test is checked-in along with the bug fix. We can be confident that the same bug will NEVER occur again.

If you already have a giant code-base that is not unit tested, it can be overwhelming to start to add unit tests. If that's the case, make sure that any new code has associated tests, and try to allocate time to write tests for the core business logic of your existing code. It can be expensive, and might delay the introduction of new feature, but the stability and quality improvements will almost always outweigh the costs.

4. Repeatable Build

For a simple software product, sent to just a few customers, a build might be as simple as launching Visual Studio, Getting the latest source code, Performing a rebuild, zipping up the release folder, then copying to a shared folder for QA or the customer. Packaged software with an installer, help files, and multiple binaries can be much more complicated than this. In either case, you're going to want to automate this process as much as possible. Most importantly, you always want your unit tests to run AND PASS before the build makes it to the customer.

We use NAnt for build automation, but Microsoft now has a similar product called MSBuild with Visual Studio 2005. Either of these build systems are very powerful and can integrate with most source control systems. You will need to allocate time into your schedule to build and maintain a build script. For complicated projects, it might even require a dedicated resource.

Once the build is repeatable, you can setup a schedule to run it every night, or better yet use a continuous integration server. More on that later. If you've made it to this step, congratulations. I promise, if you're not doing this now it will be worth it as it can revolutionize your development. Without these 4 steps in-place, your company is at a serious disadvantage from your competitors.

5. An Agile Development Process

Some process is needed before any code is written. But if your team is just one or two developers, it might have been ad-hoc to this point. Ad-hoc is not going to cut it as your team grows. There are also non-agile processes such as CMMI. Generally this approach is divided into 3 even blocks of time. The first step is the design and spec writing. The second step is the coding, and the third step is the testing. This process can work, and some companies have had many successes with this approach, but it's very difficult to keep to a schedule when unexpected problems arise or when using new technology. An agile approach is more iterative. It enables a development team to make changes (such as removing low priority features) without impacting the schedule.

There are many resources on various forms of Agile Development. We have adopted a process called SCRUM at Atalasoft, and it has worked great. With SCRUM, we have a set of prioritized requirements that sometimes do change over a development cycle of many iterations called Sprints. At the beginning of each sprint, the highest priority items are estimated and allocated to the sprint. At the end of each sprint, we have a deliverable product that is presented to the management team. Because the iterations are short (generally a month or less) we know very soon if our time estimates are correct, and are able to adapt to a possibly slipping schedule by removing lower priority features. Requirements also can change during the development process but these requirements never impact the current sprint. This process has enabled us to release major versions of our product more than once a year.

6. Continuous Integration

The definition of Continuous Integration from it's best evangelist, Martin Fowler is:

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.

I suggest you read Martin Fowler's essay on Continuous Integration for a better understanding of the concept. We use CruiseControl.NET, developed by Fowler's company, for continuous integration. It's easy to setup, free, and fun to use. We can now be assured that our code-base is stable (or not) at any time of the day. Problems with the build are reported to the developers almost immediately, and usually can be fixed right away.

7. Static Code Analysis

Static Code Analysis is very useful at enforcing design patterns, catching performance problems, and finding other problems by analyzing the source code without executing the application. If you are using Visual Studio Team System, use the Code Analysis tools built-in. If not, FXCop is the same as the code analysis included in Team System, but without some Visual Studio integrations such as the ability to annotate your code to ignore exceptions.

8. Code Profiling

We use code profilers to help find performance issues, memory leaks, and other problems in our code by instrumenting executing code. AQTime from Automated QA makes a great product. Visual Studio Team System also has some profiling tools, but those tools do not profile unmanaged code. We've been able to quickly optimize our algorithms and code paths by running code profilers on our code-base to find bottlenecks.

9. Code Coverage

Code Coverage is great in determining what percentage of your code-base is unit tested. Visual Studio Team System has some good code coverage tools. We also use AQTime. Our goal is to achieve 85% coverage with any new code we write, but admittedly that is sometimes hard to obtain.

Financial Stability of a Bootstrapper

Bill Bither — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:40:19 GMT

This past week the high tech firm GetConnected of Boston suddenly closed their doors after eight years and $20 million in funding. This left over 100 employees unemployed. I'm sure these former employees wont have too much of a problem finding a job in today's economy, but how could this happen in the first place? Atalasoft is a bootstrapped company, and hasn't taken any outside funding. Some clients look at this lack of outside investment as a problem with stability. Why should a client of ours spend tens of thousands of dollars on a company that doesn't have a significant financial backing?

Since the inception of Atalasoft, it was critical from day one to be profitable. How can this be done without a significant boost of capital? This is the tough part, but it can be done! In my case, I continued to work my day job building a small source of revenue for the company on the side that could eventually sustain myself and my family. After a year I left my day job on good terms and with revenue growing at a good clip. It only took a month to hire the first two employees. I only hired them when I had the revenue to support them.

The first few years were tough, no doubt, but we had a good idea, a good team, and better yet, the revenue to support it. I suppose an advantage I had over some starting out is that my standard of living wasn't too high. I had only worked in the engineering field for 5 years and was guaranteed not to get a raise after 9/11. My salary wasn't even close to 6 figures. It didn't take that much to make ends meet.

These first few years really shaped the company. Banks wouldn't finance us because we didn't have a track record or any tangible assets. I didn't have wealthy family or friends. I was also unwilling to give up equity for early stage investment, and quite frankly, at the time I was more interested in developing the product versus meeting with investors. Atalasoft grew organically. We only hired new employees when we could afford them. Did we take risks? Absolutely. But they were measured risks. Not all of them were worthwhile, but because most were, we succeeded. That's because we had to be. If I failed, I'd have to go back to my former job with a LOT of debt and tail between my legs.

Today, our company continues to grow at a rate of about 75% per year in revenue. Most of our profits are invested back into the company which is how we continue to innovate and grow. Unlike some VC backed startups, we have learned to be careful with spending, take measured risks, and manage the company our way. As a result, we have had virtually no turnover, we've outgrown 3 office spaces, I field calls from Venture Capitalists every other day, and now banks are more than willing to extend us financing that suits our immediate needs.

When investigating a company's financial backing as a decision metric (whether it be to work for, or do business with), consider the stability of a company grown to 20 employees without outside investment forced to be profitable to stay in business vs. a company of 100 employees burning through 20 million in multiple rounds of VC funding. This isn't to say that Venture Funding is always a bad idea as there are plenty of examples of successful VC backed companies. Even Atalasoft could take a form of outside investment at some point for the right reasons. However, in the example of GetConnected stated in the first paragraph, the sign on the front door reads "CLOSED. Good-bye ALL." Which basket would you put your eggs in?

Visiting London

Bill Bither — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:16:36 GMT

Our Sales Manager John Casanova and I are visiting London this week meeting with a number of clients and partners. My first trip to London in 7 years! Unfortunately, with our schedule we wont have time to tour around much although we will make a point of riding the "London Eye", after visiting a fair number of pubs. I did learn that pretty much everything closes at 10:30pm on Sunday, which is unfortunate when hungry and jet lagged at midnight.

If you are in London, or able to make it to London this week (July 16 - 20) and would like to meet us, please call our main office and talk to Lisa so she can schedule it with us. We do have a couple breaks in our busy schedule during the week.

See you at Tech-Ed - Get your free T-Shirt and Zune

Bill Bither — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 02:43:28 GMT

This week we'll be traveling to Orlando for Microsoft's TechEd. Last year, our ".NET Imaging with Mojo" T-Shirts were very popular and went very fast. This year we will be giving away even more ".NET Imaging with Muscle" T-shirts. A spotter who finds someone wearing an Atalasoft T-Shirt at the show will be given free Microsoft Zune media players. We'll be giving away Zunes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Looking forward to seeing some of you at TechEd! Please stop by Booth #1329 for your free T-Shirt. Be sure to wear your T-Shirt to win your Zune!

New Wave at Atalasoft

Bill Bither — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:55:00 GMT

I never thought the day would come when I would have to consult with our office manager to find out how many employees we have at Atalasoft. Well that day has finally come as I've honestly lost track. I just got off the phone with our new Professional Services Director who accepted the job tonight; a job we've been recruiting for the past couple months. Tomorrow we have a new wave of entry level employees starting. Three full time, and one summer intern. Today I met with the owner of the building we lease from so we can get started on building out the space next to us as our office we just moved into a year ago will soon be bursting at it's seams.

The good news for our customers is that very soon we'll be able to provide a whole new level of service. Our enterprise customers will be able to choose a company to implement their document management solutions who are true experts in document imaging technology. While two distinct groups at Atalasoft, the core product team and professional services will feed off each other. Our product team will benefit from experiences in the services division by better understanding industry requirements and demands to better enhance our Imaging SDK's. In the same breadth the services division will benefit from the wealth of core technology knowledge in the product team. We have been fulfilling document imaging technology needs for over 6 years. Within the next few months we will also be capable of fulfilling your entire document management application needs with a team of product managers and experienced .NET application software engineers dedicated to your projects that employ the same Agile engineering practices that have led to the success and rapid growth of our Imaging SDK's.

To Ken, Rick, Jacob, Eric, and Tyler. Welcome Aboard!!

Business West's 40 under 40

Bill Bither — Fri, 18 May 2007 04:38:00 GMT

This week the business magazine for Western Mass, chose me as one of 40 business leaders under 40. I'm truly honored to be included in this list of talented business people in the region. While Western Mass is certainty outside the technology hub of the Greater Boston Area, it's nice to know that there are other young entrepreneurs that call this area home.

With that said, I am terribly disappointed that out of the nearly 40 companies represented, Atalasoft was the only technology company. No bio-tech companies. No software companies (except Atalasoft). No nanotech companies. No engineering firms. Very few people with a technical background. That's not to say that the other company's represented don't use technology; of course they do. That's also not to say that these people don't exist! They also do, but obviously fell short on getting nominated for the 40 under 40.

Perhaps the problem with this list is that Business West magazine is targeted to local businesses, with local clients. Many of the selected are lawyers, accountants, and educators. Those companies are the ones who most often read the journal, and also are the advertisers. I'm not trying to knock the accomplishments of anyone who was selected; just share my disappointment in the lack of technology represented. Each named individual demonstated significant personal and business accomplishments, with most contributing to the local community much more than I as only recently have I been active in the community since surfacing for air from building Atalasoft.

The problem is, what will support all of these law firms, accounting firms, and bankers in Western Mass in the future? Who will help them prosper and grow? The major employers in the area will continue to contribute for sure (Mass Mutual, UMASS, Bay State Hospital, and a handful of others) but that only goes so far as the economy changes. The Textile and Paper Industry held up this region for a hundred years. After that industry was basically sent over to China, it was Precision Machining and Aerospace. Now precision machine shops are having trouble with some of that industry heading to China. It's time for this area to adapt to the globalization of our economy and reap the benefits from the good that comes from it. Invent new products and services that are used beyond the borders of the Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts, New England, or even the United States. Build off of and learn from the successes of other companies. What will sustain and grow Western Mass for the next 100 years? Biotech, nanotechnology, software, and the endless opportunities to deliver technology world-wide.

Kudos to BusinessWest for their first 40 under 40, and congratulations to all those selected. It's a great way to recognize those who have contributed to the local economy and community. I hope this inspires more young technology entrepreneurs to start their own businesses in this area and contribute to the local community. I know for a fact that there are other local leaders under 40 who have contributed their ideas, inventions, technology but were not selected or nominated. Please nominate yourself or make sure you get nominated next year! Prove to me and my naysayers that Western Mass is a great place to grow a technology company.

April Update

Bill Bither — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:21:49 GMT

Let me tell ya, it can be hard thinking about blogging when running a company. I've started a few essays, but haven't had the time to bring them to life yet. So what's been going on with myself and Atalasoft this past month? Here's the abridged version:

1) We started using SCRUM at Atalasoft and delivered DotImage 5.0 nearly on time on March 13. Agile now has a new meaning here at Atalasoft.

2) On March 22 I presented "Blogging Basics" for the RTC along with Mike Taber and Marwan Zubi. Mike gave a great blogging presentation. I backed it up with a case study of corporate blogging. Marwan presented on some interesting legal issues of blogging. The Podcast of the presentation should be available soon.

3) Sunday March 25 I was surprised to be on the front page of the Springfield Republican (our local newspaper). Guess it was a slow news day. =)

4) Atalasoft's revenues grew by 69% in Q1 2007 over Q1 2006.

5) We decided to start a new consulting division at Atalasoft. Looks like a win-win for Atalasoft. Our customers are requesting these services. We can't provide these services without losing focus on innovating our core products which is our primary goal. Therefore we are creating a new services division specializing in document management / ECM enterprise applications where we can dogfood our own toolkit. Interested in building this division with us?

6) We've released our AJAX Document Annotations Demo on our public website. This demonstrates some of Atalasoft's latest innovations in browser based document imaging bringing annotation capabilities to our existing thin-client document viewing/processing component.

7) Lou Franco will be presenting "Bringing your Document Imaging Applications to the Web with AJAX" at the AIIM conference in Boston next week. If you're going to be at AIIM, please signup for the sessions. I promise, you'll learn something about AJAX by attending. This isn't a marketing fluff talk.

Looking forward to seeing some of you at AIIM next week. Send me an email or stop by Booth #3229 if you'd like to meet up.