Rethinking Cron Management…

As we are developing the new versions of both 1-2-All and SupportTrio we have put a great amount of detail into usability.  The term usability is often used to simply describe the user interface.  But, the term encompasses a much larger area of software development.

A specific case in our recent development is cron management.  A number of our applications require you to setup a cron job.  In some cases you may need to setup 3 or 4 cronjobs depending on the features you are using.This is something that can be a pain for our users.  Once you setup the application you should not have to do more work when you start using a feature or purchase an add-on.  Thus we are designing our new cron management feature.  Our new cron management feature serves 2 primary purposes:

1. Ability to have a single cron – yet have different timed events.  This means that while you will only have one cron that you have to setup, our software can choose to execute different actions at different time intervals.
2. Improve the process of expanding your application and upgrading.  With this new feature in place you will not need to manually add any crons or events if you wish to use extra features, new add-ons, etc..

Those 2 purposes are the primary objectives of this feature and a great example of improving usability.   This feature will debut in 1-2-All 5 and SupportTrio 3.