The idea is to let people freely edit their own invoice templates to suit their own business. A fair percentage of people seem to want modifications, e.g. in the colour of text, or they want to add new images and fixed text. This new forms designer should let customers do all these kinds of things very easily. I'm also going to let people adjust the widths of columns as well as add new columns. We do use a version of the template editor in-house to do custom modifications for people for a fee. This brings in a little bit of income but we think that if people could edit their own templates we'd probably get a lot more customers. The thinking is that if 1 in 10 customers asks us if templates can be modified, a lot more must simply reject the package and choose a competitor's without getting in touch at all.
The forms designer itself isn't specific to my main package and could be used to design forms for any purpose. It could even be used as the data output (print/ email) engine for other data sources. Any ideas on a possible use for it outside my main product line?
When I was doing Y2k work and I re-wrote a mail order system, towards the end of the contract, I decided to try and sell the software to other companies.
ReplyDeleteAs a result I put a lot more effort into the look of the program and a means to create custom reports.
I didn't get as far as creating a form designer program (I think) but I did start to develop reports which used points, fonts and styles along with boxes etc.
Which I had hoped would lead one day to a form designer.
I believed this functionality must be a fairly common requirement for all programs which output business data onto paper.
However, the technology to link the data from one program to the form designer itself would be very tricky and therefore I can't see it being a popular product.
In the past when I've been developing my software I've produce several (add-ons (which I believed to be useful functionality, which could be used in other programs) but I've never made much money from
them.
It's nice to think when your developing functionality that it can be re-used and you feel, wow this is amazing, someone else must be able to use this. I don't think that in the actual world, that
theres a lot of money in this.
However to answer your question, I produced some advice notes.