After 30 years working in IT, I have a few opinions.

Archive for January, 2015

Adobe and corporate greed

WTF Adobe??  Moving from software distribution on CD or DVD, to cloud-based subscriptions is pricing your products out of the scope of small nonprofits.  The very nonprofits that would benefit from using your software to create professional looking documents and webapges are the ones who can not afford your subscriptions prices. You may think that $20/month/license to use InDesign is affordable.  It is not.  My small nonprofit has three InDesign users.  The subscription would cost us $720/year.  My entire IT budget is $1800 per year.  I can’t spend 40% of my budget on one software product.  We were able to purchase InDesign for $60 from TechSoup.org in 2012. (Thank goodness for TechSoup!  If you work for a nonprofit, check them out immediately for reasonably priced software and refurbished hardware.)  We can no longer afford Adobe products that are only available by subscription.

If you no longer care about small and/or nonprofit organizations, just go ahead and say so.  Or maybe you did and I missed the announcement.  (Adobe to Nonprofits:  Tough luck.)  I suppose your stock holders must be happy, as well as the IT managers at large corporations.  But would it really hurt your profits that much to continue working with TechSoup to make your products affordable for those of us trying to do good in the world without a profit motive?

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MindBody and search

Oh, my.  Here is a classic case of software developers not testing properly.  Or, in our very specialized world, perhaps it is quality control staff testing software they do not understand and thereby cannot  test vigorously.

There is a quick search box in the admin view of MindBody, where you can type in someone’s name and quickly go to that client’s data.  Most of the time it works.  There is also an advanced search with lots of filters to allow you to really home in on a select group.  I haven’t had to use it much, but it has worked for me as well.

Now, last week I was on the phone with a client whose last name is O’Connor.  I typed in the last name and got no results.  I knew that we had at least one O’Connor, so I changed the search to just “connor” and got the matches you would expect, plus three O’Connors.  However, the O’Connor I knew was not in the list.  (At this point in my phone conversation, I had to answer the client’s question about her enrollment in a class and didn’t have time to puzzle over the search not working.  I went to the class roster and there she was!  I could click on her name and proceed from there.)  Later I went back and tried the advanced search, left all the filters alone, and put in O’Connor in the search box.  Presto, 10 clients were listed, all with the last name O’Connor.

So why would a quick search not use the same search algorithm as the advanced search with no filters?  I understand they perhaps were trying to optimize the search, but at the very heart of the code, the name search should be the same.

Next, it’s obvious that no one tried “difficult” names in testing the search.  Any 101: Intro to Programming student could write a routine to search on a single word.  It’s the spaces, dashes, and apostrophes that throw you off.  Yet somehow, MindBody, which is a large company that provides online scheduling, registration, sales, management, and other services geared towards yoga studios and health clubs, hasn’t tested non-standard names in their system.  Apparently they are happy to let their customers find the errors for them.  And we’re supposed to trust them to process all our client’s payments and keep their data secure.

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Technology

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HealCode letting me down again

OK, it’s been 5 months since I notified HealCode that the MindBody hotwords were not all working properly for our website.  I have had no correspondence from them other than the terribly unhelpful clarification that problems marked as “solved” in their customer support database are no longer the responsibility of the customer support staff.

The latest problem:  we have enabled a wait list for several of our programs, so clients can put their name on the list to be notified automatically if a spot comes open.  It works fine in MindBody, but we are using the HealCode Enrollment widget.  The widget is lovely and a better user interface than the standard MindBody formatting.  The Waitlist has worked in the past.  Now, however, the HealCode widget is not displaying the Register button or a Waitlist button.  So the casual user would not know that they could be put on a waitlist.

While trying to figure out whether I could solve this problem with some non-evident settings, I was clicking on the Help/Support links on the HealCode website.  The link for “Known Issues” yields an error message: “oops.  You’re not authorized to access this page.”  Really?!  So I dutifully submit the waitlist error as one request and this URL error as another request to their customer support site.

Guess what happens next?  HealCode lists the URL error as “solved” and sends me an email that they are combining my 2 requests.  My 2 unrelated requests.  OK, I try the link and it’s still not working.  Now, presumably, when they fix the link they can mark my combined request as “solved”.

Oh, an email just came in.  The waitlist is a known issue with MindBody.  Oh really?  Too bad the link to known issues isn’t working!

Not only is this not “customer service”, it is customer aggravation.

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Technology

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