We started the year off by moving down the hall into a whole new office space:
And it is a sure good thing we did, our team has expanded and for a brief stint we offered in-classroom training sessions to our TouchConvert customers.
Our Create team has been very busy this year, developing a bunch of new websites, maintaining the ones we already have and having a major role in a few MVPs.
Energy Price Choice, an MVP, also launched this year. Virteom built them a website that gives visitors real-time quotes on both gas and electric. We were able to tackle this highly complex website and deliver a simple user experience.
This year we developed our first Hardware and Software product in conjunction with MFs Supply. This product is called VaultLocks. Its public release milestone was reached in November. A lot of late nights, hard work and dedication from our team went into this project. We worked to develop the software in the mobile app and web app for VaultLocks.
In August 2016 our product CMOBuddy officially changed its name and became TouchConvert. We felt that this name better described what it does. It touches our client's customers with Marketing Automation and converts them into sales leads with the built in CRM Software.
Additionally, in August of 2016, we launched TouchConvert as a production product. Prior to that we were in a private Beta with approximately 35 trusting customers.
In October TouchConvert attended its first tradeshow:
It was exciting to take our product to the public and really get a feel of what users want out of this platform.
This year CMOBuddy/TouchConvert saw thousands++ of updates, making the platform feel much smoother. Our team has taken much time to research and learn how to build software that can be scalable, secure, fast, extendable, easy to implement, integrate and most importantly easy to use.
If you haven't heard yet, we've been working on an Outlook plugin for TouchConvert. This will allow you to lob your leads from your email directly into the platform, how easy is that? Virteom's team not only created the plugin, but integrated into Windows to make upgrading, requesting help and providing user feedback easier. We're still working out the final kinks before this pushes out to the public, but the time and work that has gone into this project is something worth noting.
Software engineering is ever changing, we are constantly learning - and we think our team has kept at a great pace. Here are a few of the new frameworks and languages our team has dedicated some time learning and implementing this year:
_ We learned to use Angular
_Began implementing Aurelia for the first time
_Wrote our own Cordova plugins
_Learned about .NET Core
_Learned Entity framework
_Learned about Blob storage services in the cloud
In 2016 we've really been listening to what your needs are vs. what we think you need. We've learned a lot about our client's needs and we're road mapping out ways to solve those problems.
We've also implemented a new project management and ticketing system that has allowed us to stay on top of client needs.
There is a lot to look forward to in this coming year. The team as a whole is excited to grow and learn as our company grows. In the new year, we'll be pushed into full gear to add new features into TouchConvert and our CMS. We think this year will really be our year to shine.