Knowledgebase

Answers to the questions users should ask about Front Office Box

If you’re going to use Front Office Box to manage your business, there are a number of questions you should probably ask, and we should certainly answer.

This page addresses the ones we can think of. If you have a question that’s not satisfactorily answered here please let us know at support@frontofficebox.us – we’ll get straight back to you, and we’ll update this page with the same information.

Please see below for the answers to these questions:

1. Who is “Front Office Box”?
2. How safe is my data?
3. How reliable is the service?
4. What does the software do, and who for?
5. Why does it work the way it does?
6. What is the future for the service?
7. How do I get to contribute to the direction?
8. Who do I talk to if I need help?

Who is Front Office Box?

The software as a service is provided by Widespread Solutions Llc, a company incorporated in Illinois, USA. Widespread Solutions Llc is owned by Steve Reeves and Gareth Reeves. The company has no outside equity, and no debt. The company is managed by CEO, Steve. Gareth is a non-executive director but advises the board on technology matters.

In providing the service, Widespread Solutions Llc employs a supply chain of business partners. Hosting is provided by Rimu and Amazon, software development and maintenance is provided by Redline Software and our design partner is Samedis Design .

Contact us at:
support@frontofficebox.us
+1 (312)- 324-0024 in USA
+44 (0) 7810 541601 in Europe
frontofficebox on Skype

http://twitter.com/frontofficebox

How Safe is my Data?
With us, Front Office Box isn’t just business, it’s personal as well.

Responsibility
The first people to start using our software were (and still are happily) close friends. They were kind enough to listen to our ideas, commit to managing their business using our software, and help us work out where it worked great for them, and where it needed improving.

Since then they’ve become more reliant on our service, and we’ve made more friends who’ve decided to do the same. Now, we aren’t just running software, we’re providing mission critical support to people’s businesses, and take that responsibility very seriously.

And by the way we run three of our own businesses using Front Office Box.

Privacy
Our terms and conditions clearly explain in lawyer terms our approach to privacy and confidentiality.

In normal speak :- Your data is your data. Front Office Box has no rights of access to it and to the extent our engineers have access for maintenance purposes, we’re constrained by a fiduciary duty dictated by the confidentiality clauses in our terms and conditions.
Front Office Box will not use your data for any purpose other than the provision of the service.

Hosting
Data stored in Front Office Box is held on highly available server configurations in data centres in Dallas and New York. These servers are protected by state of the art security systems, and backed up with highly available hardware configurations.

We employ rigorous test and deployment strategies to make sure, whatever we do, the data is secure and available to users.

Access
It’s your data and you can get it out anytime you want. We offer “Export Front Office” in Manage My Account. At the moment this only exports company and people data but very soon the export will include all opportunity, actions and Webrequest response data. We’ll also offer a bulk documents download so that anybody wanting to move to another solution won’t be constrained by us in any way.

Until we have this utility ready, we’ll get the engineers to run a special export for any users wanting to recover their data.

And Finally
Widespread Solutions isn’t going bust anytime soon – see our Philosophy/Strategy page. However, we would say that wouldn’t we .

Bottom line is the guys at Redline have full authority to access the software and export data for specific users if, at any time, Widespread Solutions Llc isn’t able to respond to requests for such.

How Reliable is the Service
As mentioned above we take the fact people rely on us for managing their business very seriously.

Service Availability
What this means is the availability 24X7 anywhere in the world there’s an Internet connection is our number one priority. Growth, profit, marketing, new releases are all secondary considerations. And the reason isn’t hard to understand. We plan on making money with FOB at some point and we can only di that if people use it, and they won’t use it if they can’t rely on it being there when they need it.

To make our commitment visible to anybody we publish our Service Availablity but the short answer is since January 2007 FOB has been available for use more than 99.8% of the time.

Business Strategy
But service availability isn’t just about software running on hardware. The bigger question is whether Front Office Box will continue in business. We will because, even though we have a very aggressive strategy in terms of exploiting software and the new Internet services, our business strategy is extremely conservative and can be summarized into three main points:

1. No outside equity – so we can make the decisions. Nobody tells us what to do.
2. No debt – we’ll only spend our own cash and won’t borrow from anybody. This way we remain our own masters, regardless of our success or otherwise.
3. Fixed costs close to zero – we’ve organized our supply chain to provide us with flexible resource at costs we can manage as we go. Our only fixed cost is the hosting which, thanks to our partners is minimal.

These rules obviously constrain what we do, and particularly in terms of software development and marketing. That means sometimes we have to wait longer than we’d like to build enhancements, and we have to find ways of promoting the service that don’t require hefty marketing budgets. As a result our growth is not what it might be and our visibility in the market leaves a lot to be desired. The downside is whilst businesses offering similar services are winning more users, we’re having to work harder, and more intelligently, to attract smaller numbers. The upside is we’ll win the game of “Last Man Standing”. We’ll here alive and kicking when all the high flyers have run out of cash, or given up because they couldn’t meet their revenue and profit goals.

Our market strategy is creating outstanding value for our users, in terms of best practice functionality with the minimum of complexity.

Our business strategy is using skills, experience and partners to do this with the minimum investment and zero risk (aside from our investment in the software of course).

What Does the Software Do and Who For?

Describing Front Office Box as CRM is like describing the iPod Touch as an MP3 player. For the right businesses it does an excellent job at CRM but it does a great deal more. For the wrong businesses it won’t stand up as a CRM system, and it isn’t intended to. Businesses organized along functional lines requiring high levels of management control and reporting won’t find what they want with us.

We built the software for people like us, small businesses working in consulting or business services. People who know how they want to manage their relationships and processes but can’t find software to work the way they do. People who build their own “enterpise” systems with a combination of email, spreadsheets and documents. People who would rather spend time working for their customers than struggling with complexity of those systems. People who want a single view of relationships, plans and schedules which they can share with colleagues, keeping everybody on the same page with no effort.

Why Does It Work the Way It Does?

Describing Front Office Box as “simple” software is like describing the iPod Touch as a “simple” music player. Just like the iPod Touch, it does some extremely complex things simply. We figure any fool can build complex software – programmers have been doing it since the beginning. It doesn’t take much more intelligence to build simple software, just a lot of discipline about adding features. Building software that does complex things simply is an entirely different matter.

Doing this requires a combination expertise, in business process, design and software development. It also requires a lot of effort figuring out what people would generally expect to find, and where they would expect to find it. Once that’s done the designer needs to make sure the user views are clear and elegant. Then the developers get on with the hard work of making the software do what it’s supposed to, under the covers.

Front Office Box is the ultimate in user driven development. Every decision about what it does, and how, is made by people who use it every day. It provides a generic Relationships dimension, a generic Planning dimension, a generic Scheduling dimension and hangs all this together with a Plan>Act>Review workflow that users don’t even notice. Marketing would never build software this way – it doesn’t give them “features” to talk about. Programmers would never build software this way – they have to work much harder to give us what we want, where we need it.

This is the reason why users say ” I can’t describe what Front Office Box does, it just organizes me so I can get more done with less effort and a lot less stress”.

We explain our approach to management and software design/architecture in Strategy, Design and Architecture

What’s the Future for Front Office Box?

Check out our Development Plan

Our mission is harnessing Internet technologies so small businesses can exploit more opportunities, at lower cost with less stress and effort.

In our terms this begins with business functionality we all use, internal to our business but our ultimate goal is an on-line community of people who want to work with others,

* collaborating to compete with bigger businesses.
* achieving economies of scale in sourcing services.
* finding mutual support when they need it.
* sharing skills and experience.

We’re now reaching the end of our first phase, which has been focused on building the business application and researching various marketing models. We’ve also been experimenting with the Forum, understanding how to engage our users in building the community.

Moving forward we’ll continue with adding functionality where we can see it makes sense e.g one of the functions we’re thinking about is a simple Cash Management addition.

We’ll also be working to build partnerships with other solutions providers for the applications we don’t provide. These might include Time Recording, Billing and Receivables Management.

Ultimately we’ll build a networking module, to replace the Ning software we’re using for the Forum and we’ll add a transaction management system to make businesses between our users simple. How are we going to do this? Don’t know yet – watch this space.

How Do I Get an Ambassador Account?
Sometime between now and the summer we will transition over to a new pricing model. At the time we make that transition all active users will be allocated a special status, allowing them to continue their use, as is, forever. Inactive users will be offered a short period of time to get started, and subsequently deleted if they don’t do that.

Up until that transition we won’t be charging people at all, so now’s a good time to get an account and get started.

Our Ambassadors are people who want to help us build our business and community. This doesn’t require a lot of effort – just advising us on development, helping us with some promotional stuff, and telling friends and associates about us. In return Ambassadors are entitled to always have free access to our software and invite people they do business with to do the same. The logic behind the strategy is we want to enable supply chains of small businesses – Front Office Box will become operations management for collaborating supply chains.

Ambassador accounts are only available through invitations from Steve Reeves. If you want to be an FOB Ambassador let us know – we’ll send you an invitation.

How Do I Contribute?

1. Tell us how we can do a better job, and keep doing it.
2. Join our release team – here you can get early access to our new software in test and help us sort out any problems.
3. Help build the community – get involved in our forum, work with our other users, help define the future for everybody.
4. Tell your friends and the people you do business with about Front Office Box.

Who Do I Talk to When I Need Help?

Contact Steve Reeves at

Steve.reeves@frontofficebox.us
Phone +44 (0) 7810 541601 in Europe
Phone +1 (312)- 324-0024 in USA
Skype at frontofficebox
Twitter DM frontofficebox
IM steve@frontofficebox.us on Gtalk
IM frontofficebox on AIM
IM frontofficebox on Yahoo