I’ve been having a time getting the video tour recorded. I spent several hours trying to get my old, awesome usb microphone to work. Alas, no joy.
So I went back to the closet o’ supplies and dug around until I found a different solution. It all seems to be working well, so it looks like by the end of this week I should be able to unveil the new WorkMelon sight and enable signups.
All right! I just finished the last item on my list of necessities for WorkMelon. I still have plans to add a few things, but the app has reached a completely useable state.
Now it’s time for me to turn back to the main website and build a couple of walkthroughs and such, so that people will want to try managing their work orders with WorkMelon.
So we started using WorkMelon to manage the work orders for the apartments we manage and what do you know? IE mangled EVERYTHING. So after a full day of debugging and switching things around, I got things fixed and once again vowed to test everything as I go.
In other news, the core “manager” features I wanted for the initial release are all done! Next week I’ll start on the much shorter list for work order “assignee” features. Once I get those done, it’s public launch time!
I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I figured I’d give you a first look at how the app is shaping up.
It is most important in our full time business that the admin side is up and running first, so that’s where I’ve been concentrating. We are to the point now where we will begin using WorkMelon to track the work orders for the maintenance crew at the apartments we manage. There is no interface for them yet, so all work orders will have to be printed and handed to them directly, which is fine, because they’re not big computer people anyway.
Here’s the open work orders page of a dummy company. Each work order can be edited (and thus marked as complete), printed, and deleted.
You can see on the right hand side, every admin page shows the form where you can enter in a new work order.
When you click on the edit button for a work order (as can be seen on the list above), this form pops up.
Ugh. My development computer crashed this past week. The motherboard spontaneously combusted. Thank goodness for DropBox and my little ClickFree Automatic Backup drive. It wasn’t worth it to revive the old machine (although I may still do that someday) so I’m typing on a new keyboard today.
As to the WorkMelon development: The site framework is up and by the end of next week, I should have some of the core functionality built in. Within two weeks, I may have enough done to go ahead and open it up for those who want to try it out.
I work for a business that manages apartments and motels for investors. We have always had trouble managing our maintenance staff.
All of the software we’ve found is too complicated. We don’t need a full on CMS, which most solutions are trying to be. And we’ve tried to use several of the complicated CMS-style solutions. We can’t simplify them enough to make them useful. They have too many bells, whistles, and other distractions.
We’ve also used paper work orders, which get lost, duplicated and just don’t give us a good picture of what’s really going on at each property. Sometimes an on-site manager would have the staff do a bunch of work, and then fill out the work orders afterward.
What I is a repository that can be checked at anytime by myself, another of the managers, or the maintenance staff. It needs to be easy to understand or it’s not going to get used.
That is why I’m building WorkMelon.
I’ve finally started work on the new web app – WorkMelon.
WorkMelon is going to be a simple way to keep track of work orders. It is being designed for small businesses, especially ones that have service personel, including:
I’ve been working on the framework that WorkMelon is going to be built around, and there’s just a couple of things left to do before working on the WorkMelon-specific features.