[amberdms-bs] ABS Roadmap - 2009 to mid 2010

[Jethro Carr]

hi all,

The following is an updated roadmap for the Amberdms Billing System,
detailing our plans for the next 6 months (roughly).



RELEASE 1.5.0
Expected Date: Mid-to-Late December
-------------

Release 1.5.0 will fix any glitches that appear in the 1.4.0 release and
adds the additional feature of a language translation tool, to assist
users with helping to contribute back translations.



RELEASE 2.0.0
Expected Date: Late-January (Beta in Mid-January)
-------------

The goal of the 2.0.0 release is to polish up the current features and
add other features we consider key, to turn ABS into an extremely well
polished application ready for almost any business.

Currently there are several great features (PayPal, SQL-Ledger import,
etc) that are 80% complete but just need the final polish to make them
easily usable by non-developers.

We also want to knock down some of the "getting started" barriers such
as overly-complicated UI and the lack of an easy setup wizard.


Accounting

* Credit Notes - the ability to refund a customer and have the credit
applied against future invoices.

* PO generation - ability to create a PO to send to a vendor to place an
order.


User Interface Improvements

* Conduct user studies of some parts of the application to determine
areas where users are having difficulties navigating or performing
actions.

This will most likely involve some paid UX experts, users, volunteers
and outsiders reviewing features and reporting on where it could be
improved.

As the developers, Amberdms engineers know exactly how everything works
so it all seems "easy" but to an outsider this is not always the case
and it's an area we want to improve.


* Re-design parts of the UI to suit better usability - simplicity and
easy steps are key.

* Addition of AJAX in some locations, particularly with invoice creation
and adding items.

* Simplify the process of creating invoices from record time.



Templates

* Template selection for all PDF exports in the application - invoices,
quotes, reports, etc.

* Ability to upload custom templates for PDFs for your organisation.

* Addition of more contributed templates.



Installation

* New "setup wizard" to assist users with getting started and setting up
everything.



Scheduler

* Addition of scheduler to automate time entry, payments, re-occurring
transactions, etc.



Import Tools:

* Currently have an alpha-grade SQL-Ledger import tools, these will be
updated to production quality and available as a download from within
the application.

* Addition of CSV and QIF import of bank statements to simplify
transaction and payment entry.



Payment Gateway:

Sample code for integrating PayPal with ABS is available in the extras
tarball, however this is only really usable by developers.

A more user-friendly PayPal module will be provided, which can be
configured entirely from within ABS and the module able to be deployed
anywhere, talking back to ABS via the API.

This will make it far easier to get your customers to pay via credit
card or PayPal and in future will expand to other payment gateways.


Databases:

ABS is database independent (in theory) but currently only uses MySQL -
we plan to extend this to support other DBs such as Postgresql to better
meet the needs of users who don't want to have to run and maintain two
different DB platforms.


Developer Stuff

* Expansion of SOAP API to cover all timekeeping and project management
features in addition to the (currently) covered accounting features.





RELEASE 2.1.0
Expected Date: Mid-April
-------------

Release 2.1.0 will focus on extending the features in 2.0.0 with better
developer resources, improved features for service billing customers and
improved financial reporting.



Video Walk-throughs

Development of video walk-throughs showing how to use particular
features, to be used both for application promotion but also as a form
of documentation for users to refer to.


Reports

* Graphical financial reports.

* Financial trend flow reporting (and prediction?)


Service Billing

* Support for service bundles - aggregating multiple services into one
set fee.

* Thirdparty costs - ability to record costs of a delivering a service
(for example, reselling ADSL connections).

* Ability to upgrade from one service to another one (ie: between
different internet plans).


Support Tickets Feature

This feature needs a lot more work to make it truly useful, ideally it
should link against projects to track support requests for projects and
also into the timekeeping feature so hours can be assigned against a
particular support ticket.

One approach is to also do more integration to link this feature with
other tracking systems (eg: Eventum, Bugzilla) to make use of their
advanced features with a simple interface from ABS.



Import Tools

* MYOB (Proprietary Accounting Application) Import Utility

* Achievo (Open Source Timesheet Application) Import Utility


Developer Stuff

* Documentation on Amberphplib framework to assist developers working
with ABS.

* Move of codebase from internal-only Amberdms CVS to public SVN or Git
to better encourage contributions and development involvement.





LONGER TERM STUFF
-----------------

PHONE INTEGRATION

Currently investigating work required to develop an application on
Android phones and possible iPhone as well to make it easy to access ABS
on the go as well as entering hours into timesheet, etc.

As a consulting company, Amberdms itself would find this extremely
useful.



ECOMMERCE

Amberdms can see a lot of potential for linking ABS with various open
source e-commerce packages available, so that when customers purchase
items from a store, ABS is used for the invoice generation and
transactions are automatically entered into the system.



CDR CALL BILLING

Amberdms has had organisations interested in being able to perform Call
Detail Record billing with ABS, with the goal of charging customers for
VoIP calls.

This would not be an insignificant amount of work, it is likely to only
go ahead if a company is willing to fund some/all of the work to make it
happen.


CUSTOMER PORTAL

ABS is a great application for a company to use, but it would be good to
have a separate module that can be run elsewhere (linked via SOAP) to
allow customers to login to view their account, invoice, upgrade address
and make payments.

This could also tie in with the service billing to upgrade their plan or
other options.




These features and release dates are not set in stone, it's likely they
will get shifted around a fair bit.

As always, we welcome feedback from the community to help us better
improve the product, in many ways this sort of contribution is just as
important (if not more) than code contributions.

I shall post revised versions of this roadmap to the list as
decisions/targets change.


regards,
jethro

-- 
Jethro Carr

Amberdms Managing Director
www.amberdms.com