Welcome to the miniTPMS construction site. As you know, lately I am lagging with creating the monthly updates, but now finally I took some strength and decided to write a big one, for the whole last Quarter of 2017.
A lot of stuff happened, but I'll try to keep it simple and to the point, and not to get crazy with 5,000 words of blabbering. Btw. if you want to see other posts on progress, check the link at the end of the post.
This is also a perfect time to introduce introduce new prices for our TMS. Why? you might ask yourself. Well, because we're doing this from time to time. We, as a team spend a lot of time and effort in creating something useful for small Language Service Providers. When you check the post and see what we have done, you might think that this is not much. But bare in mind that it's already March 2018, so I'm just going to bluntly say: you ain't seen nothing yet.
Let's dive in. What happend in four months from September to December (except Christmas, and getting fat, of course).
We started using the software in September 2017 and this was the greatest test of usability. Along with the feedback from some of our members of the Early Adopters Club we were able to prioritise a lot of tasks.
Here are the smaller and bigger tweaks in a nutshell:
Note the change of the name of "Announced" tab into "Other". This requires explanation, but everything in it's own time.
So what else was done?
That was the part of fixin' the existin' but we have also introduced a "stupid simple reports" because we need that kind of stuff for charging clients and sending the list of finished tasks to Vendors.
In terms of actual PO and Invoicing this is still baby shoes, it's pre-history, but it is also almost on par with any excel based system. Actually, we can export that list into Excel and send it to colleagues, vendors, clients for checking. Then they either approve it, or cry that it's not good because something is missing, or something is added twice.
Yes, we have great vendors who tell us when we want to pay them for more than they did, and I am eternally grateful to them.
Here's how Stupid Simple Reportings work:
The biggest thing, though, was the start of refactoring the database which went from the beginning of December and continued through January. Why? Because we needed much more flexibility in workflow management than initially anticipated.
Without having to explain too much, let's just say that now you will be able to set different numbers for each step of the workflow (for example: 10,000 words for translation, 10 hours of editing, 3 hours of DTP, and 1 piece of Postal Cost) and you will also be able to either charge (or not) each step of the workflow to your client, or only some of them.
That is very powerful, especially when you have clients with special projects and particular needs.
But that is the only way to have an adaptive translation company, one that can attend to needs of any client.
Along with the database change, we have been refactoring the main project page so that it better reflects all the new data for any of your Components. This went deeply into January too, but I'm still showing it here because the concept was born in December.
The main look is like this now:
As you can see the Workflow tasks went into the top of the page.
Also we created a simple component picker at the top right corner, where you can easily pick any other component from the same project (this is especially useful if you have many components that you are working on).
The language pairs went into tabs (so if you have more you'll have more tabs). Let the "Show/Hide" button remain a mystery for now 🙂
But without mystery, the three small icons after the numbers are: comment on the language pair (set with editing this task), and then project / component description, and project/component special instructions, as shown in the three screenshots:
Ignore that it says description, it should say "Language Pair Comment" 🙂
Oh, the bugs we find, everywhere, anywhere.
And that's it for this edition.
If you are still alive, not sleeping and reading this, I thank you for your time. Hope that you - as many other members of EAC club - will soon be able to see behind the chaos and rise above the noise and if you are still not in the club, you'll want to join it here.
Remember one thing: early adopter members are not paying for what MiniTPMS is, they are paying because they see what this translation management system will become.
And if you're still unsure, Click to Join our Mailing List and find out everything you always wanted to know about TMS systems, but was too afraid to ask.
Over and out.
You can read all our posts on progress if you click here.
