What's Going on With "Dexter in the Cloud"?

First, I need a better name. It's not going to be called "Dexter in the cloud." But for now that name makes the idea fairly easy to understand.

There may be a few of you who don't know about Dexter in the cloud so I'll quickly explain. Basically, I'll be moving the functionality of Dexter -- the processes we perform there -- out of Lotus Notes into the "cloud" -- the internet, specifically into Salesforce.com.

Most of you know that my effort in this direction has been going on a long time. If you look back in this blog you'll see where I wrote about working with ServiceMax, an app inside of Salesforce.com, to bring Dexter to the cloud. Well, after getting us to the point where we were pretty much ready to start beta testing, I took a step back and decided that using ServiceMax was not the right way to go. I had thought that it was about 80% of what we needed out of the box, but it actually turned out to be more like maybe 20%. Just not a good fit, nor a good way for us to spend our resources.

So, it was back to the drawing board. I didn't lose all the work I'd done last year, but a significant amount for sure. I hate that it's caused this long delay but I really feel like this was the right decision. Better to get it right at the beginning.

I've been working with a consultant to recreate Dexter in the cloud. By the end of next week I believe I'll be ready to show some key users a demo of Phase 1 -- creating a project through to requesting work from a sub-contractor labor company. Phase 1 will not include scheduling and dispatch from Tech Services. While I'm working on designing that Tech Services piece, we can test the initial processes.

Watch for more details as time goes on. This is a huge project and a big change for us, but it brings with it all kinds of potential.