1. Everyone Knows Everything

This might scare some of you, but having watched a few projects go awry when certain stakeholders are privy to specific requirements, I can’t emphasize the value of transparency enough. When user stories are submitted, every project member has the opportunity to comment on or modify them, and everyone is aware of changing requirements.

2. Sequence By Priority

There’s no need to lecture you about the cold hard value of scrum – the development methodology that Sprintr supports – but by laying out your user stories (requirements) in priority order and time boxing them into deliverable releases, you can rest assure that the requirements with the highest ROI will be delivered first. In Sprintr, you can even drag and drop user stories into priority order to keep your backlog in check.

3. Immediate Feedback Loops

Sprintr has a great feedback mechanism. You just put a simple widget in your application or website, and end users or testers can submit ideas, issues, or questions from within the application. All you need to do is go through these tickets and turn the appropriate ones into new user stories. Suddenly you have a feedback cycle that enhances requirement management wrapped up in a spiffy little web app.

4. Cloud Connected Scrum

Distributed project teams deal with a host of issues that keep business analysts from achieving their goals. You have multiple time zones, people with different technical backgrounds and work ethics, all of which amplify the miscommunication and inefficiency that typically accompany a complex software project. Sprintr alleviates these issues by centralizing all communication and project management processes in a cloud application.

5. Social Activity Streams

Sprintr is like Facebook, except more productive. The sales guy who coined this declaration was referring to the social facets of Sprintr – the Company Wall, the Project Wall, the daily updates, and the comment threads. These components make Sprintr a collaboration space without any physical limitations – no product owner calls, no whiteboards, and no scheduled meeting times.

As you can see, business analysts truly have the most to gain from Sprintr. Sure, developers can plan out sprints and milestones, and business users can submit user stories and feedback – but you’re the one who gets to sit back and watch the magic happen. You are no longer “over-documenting” requirements ahead of time, hoping that IT has received the input clearly and will provide the output as requested. You have a tool to manage this heavily-trafficked intersection, and virtually guarantee that projects are completed on time and within budget.

For those of you interested in learning more, watch this webinar to learn how Mendix and Sprintr eliminate the risk of project failure.

Somewhere just after Thanksgiving everyone in my family receives a kind reminder from my aunt asking us to fill out her wonderful Excel spreadsheet decorated with colored columns with our names and what we plan on bringing. Sure enough every year my wife and I fill the spreadsheet out with something only to have it returned to us saying, “Your cousin has already signed up for bringing this.” or “We don’t need that this year.”, now this is all well and good but it got me to thinking. I work with an application development platform every day that I know I am going to explain the wonders of to one of these people at this party. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for my poor aunt to have a web application?

So with a few clicks of the mouse I was off, I made a data model that included all of two entities (person and item), I made an association so that a person could belong to multiple items, and then I made three forms. About fifteen minutes later I had myself a nice little application, I then stole the styling package from an existing application and threw it into my project folder. My next step was Microsoft Word where I made this little gem:

I then went into the style and changed my customer’s logo to this image and I was ready! With five more clicks I had my application in the cloud. I’ve since added some Excel import functionality (I’d hate to see my aunt’s hard work go to waste) and Google maps so everyone knows how to get to the party. All in all in under an hour I eliminated many hours of effort for my aunt. Plus now I have a basis to tell everyone what I do. Now I just need to figure out how to explain to people that it’s not just Christmas party planning applications that I build…

BOSTON – December 13, 2011 – Mendix, the leading business-driven application development platform, today announced the addition of an Aggregate Spend Portal App in its community driven AppStore. The app is used by global life science organizations under strict, yet unpredictable, government requirements to report aggregate spend on health care professionals (HCPs) as of 2013 per the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.

In order to avoid costly fees associated with errors in reporting, life science organizations will have to begin collecting aggregate spend data throughout 2012. These reports require multiple, disparate systems to integrate and validate HCP spend, creating a difficult information technology task for legal counsel and compliance teams not used to dealing with such issues.

“Mendix applications have been shown to quickly extend existing systems with custom top-layer functionality. This template allows life science companies to have a pre-built, customizable solution to address their federal reporting needs in two to four weeks with minimal IT involvement,” said Mendix’s Vincent de la Mar, who works directly with North American life science companies. “Federal reporting guidelines are frequently changing and evolving, making ease of adaptability a key requirement for the Aggregate Spend Portal App.”

Several organizations have already taken advantage of Mendix’s built-to-change applications in order to comply with the Physicians Spend Sunshine Act, finding the platform to be particularly suited for fast and adaptable compliance reporting solutions. While Mendix has predominantly focused on supporting mission critical applications and transactional portals, representatives familiar with the matter are praising the platforms virtually limitless integration possibilities and unrivalled speed as the ‘silver bullet’ to compliance solutions.

One of the more notable benefits of Mendix 3.1 is that merging has been made more intuitive and powerful. You can now see which revisions have been merged before, and revert deleted documents, folders and modules, allowing seamless collaboration within a project team.

Another big step forward with Mendix 3.1 is error messaging and sanity checks. We now allow you (and us) to diagnose problems earlier and more specifically, making user feedback even more actionable for development teams. We are fully aware that the dialogue between an end user and a project team should be as flawless as possible.

Also important to note is that version numbering has changed and 3.1.0 is a minor release. You can read our tech-tip blog post to learn how we number our versions from now on.

There is a lot more included in this release. Check out the release notes in the Support Portal for a complete overview.

Yesterday Atos CEO Thierry Breton announced he will ban all internal email from the work floor within 18 months by stating: “It is not normal that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their emails. Email is no longer the appropriate communication tool.”

Not to toot my own horn (well maybe just a bit) but at Mendix we have been collaborating, communicating for a long time now using Sprintr. We’ve already noticed many benefits upon adopting the solution, which enables better conversation but also enhances our day to day work life.

Sprintr is of course two things: a) a feedback mechanism aligning what the business truly wants with what developers think the business wants and b) an enterprise collaboration tool with activity streams (company and project wall’s) and agile project management features.

Let’s zoom in on the day to day benefits of using Sprintr for enterprises like Atos. Here are three improvements that happened when Sprintr was introduced to our various global offices:

1. Mr Breton is right! No more overloaded inbox! Incoming mail has been reduced immensely. No more sales people mailing their wins all the time and receiving 50 congratulations messages afterwards, just one post (and lots of comments and ‘likes’) on Sprintr. No more endless back and forth emailing about the next Mendix company outing and being CC-ed with suggestions (ranging from go-karting to base-jumping), one poll on sprintr and we were done deciding.
2. Finding documents: No more need to call my CEO (CEO’s seem to be quite busy) 15 times to ask if he will send me the slides of his last talk at the Mendix Essentials. Or where was that campaign planning my manager send me last month? Have I mentioned how convenient it is to have everything in a cloud called Sprintr?
3. Increase synergy: You don’t email the whole company when you are working on a super-cool Proof of Concept, but people have been posting these activities on Sprintr, resulting in colleagues sharing their building blocks, themes and widgets. By posting simple status updates people become more aware of each others activities and offer a helping hand.

Managing Director of Benelux Arno Rood Introducing Mendix (in Dutch):

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As our seats for the Mendix Essentials tend to run out fast, make sure to sign up quickly for the next edition on january 27.

It is with great pleasure and excitement that I write this note to you, our customers, partners, user community and friends. Mendix has signed a $13 million investment round led by Prime Ventures. See here for the press release. We are honored to bring forth a new era for Mendix as we continue to bring innovation and productivity to organizations all over the world.

When we started Mendix as ambitious university students, we set out with a mission to revolutionize the relationship between business & IT. We imagined a world where business apps are delivered in days (not months) and where processes can be changed at the speed of business. We envisioned building a company and a team that would attract, develop and retain the brightest minds in the industry. And we could only dream of opening offices on three continents with partners and customers spreading our message around the globe. Today this is our reality.

Our product has developed significantly over the years, from a high-productivity development tool to a complete agile business platform with a fast-growing user community. Nevertheless our mission to increase the speed and ease of business change is as strong and relevant as ever. You can continue to expect us to keep pushing this frontier.

We thank you for your ongoing support.

Derek Roos
CEO, Co-Founder

BOSTON – October 31, 2011 – Mendix (www.mendix.com), a leader in the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) market, today announced the closing of a $13 million Series A round of financing. The round was led by Prime Ventures, with HENQ Invest following on its earlier seed investment. The investment will support the company’s international expansion and fuel its global sales efforts, building upon its fast growing partner network and user community.

Since its product launch in 2007, Mendix has remained profitable experiencing triple digit revenue growth year over year; acquiring and retaining customers such as GE, Genzyme and TNT. In addition to the funding, Prime Ventures’ Roel de Hoop will join the Board of Directors for Mendix and work alongside the company to help accelerate the global expansion.

“Mendix is at the intersection of several IT trends including PaaS, agile development & app stores.  These trends, combined with their innovative technology and collaborative approach to aligning the business and IT sides of an organization, enable them to deliver real business value to their customers,” said Sake Bosch, managing partner at Prime Ventures. “We are living in an app driven world, where time to market and flexibility to change are key competitive advantages. Mendix is leading this trend, and we are very excited to support them with our experience and network to build a global success.”

The company’s core product, the Mendix Agile Business Platform helps companies rapidly develop, deploy and integrate applications at a fraction of the time of existing tools and platforms. Mendix applications can then be deployed in the cloud, on mobile devices or locally at the customer’s site.

“To date we have always organically achieved triple-digit growth on the results of delivering business value and solving real pain-points for our clients,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “Our customers are looking to increase their business agility and turn to Mendix to jump-start their productivity and app deployment. The partnership with Prime comes at the right time for us to accelerate our abilities to meet this demand and act quickly in sales, marketing and product innovation.”