August 17, 2016

JAD Beta – Design the Future of Feith

At Feith Systems, we pride ourselves on our closeness with customers—we like to say that all of our software is born from customer need.

That’s why every year we host JAD- a Joint Application Development session where customers tell us how they’re using the software and what we can do to make it work better for them. Some features that came from past JAD sessions include:

  • Add page- select multiple documents and append a page to them in bulk
  • Record when a user logs into WebFDD for reporting (last login)
  • Print Workflow Diagram to PDF
  • RSS feed to notify customers of new releases.

This year during JAD, we had some of the very first customers using FeithDrive in production participate, which prompted us to look at the application in-depth with the entire JAD audience. We got great feedback on one of the features of FeithDrive from a customer who hasn’t even implemented it yet!

See, in FeithDrive, we save the entire revision history for every document—we do this for a few reasons:

  1. Some clients NEED to preserve a full audit trail for every document they have—we want our software to be compliant with their needs
  2. The convenience of seeing who made changes, when, and being able to see older versions of the documents at a moment’s notice. You only have to overwrite your work once to know the pain of losing it!

Some of our other customers want to ability to turn this off- to have new versions of a document overwrite older versions with no version history preserved.

And we said—why not. As long as the functionality remains in place for customers who need it for compliance, then we don’t see the harm in removing the audit trail for systems that have less strict requirements.

And then another customer had an idea for JAD Beta- that’s right, it wasn’t even our idea! To test new software on the customers we want to use it while it’s still being written.

So here we are—we want your feedback on the software we’re still writing. All we want to do is show it to you and if you happen to say, “what about…” then we’re all ears.