Now I did promise this would be an honest account of what I’m doing, not just a sales outlet. So here it goes: The biggest mistake I set myself up for with Shockey Monkey is assuming that all the people considering it would be competent IT consultants.
That apparently was an exceedingly optimistic and has eaten up nearly a week worth of my productivity to backtrace. Let me explain the particular problem: Shockey Monkey is rolled out as a hosted portal that is totally customized and tweaked for the company that will be using it to work with its customers. This includes everything from the color scheme to the logo and even the URL itself – think about it, if you were about to work with your client wouldn’t it be far more professional to offer them a url of https://support.mylocalsbscguy.com than https://aadvarkconsulting.schmuckhosting.org?
The first step in the activation is asking them to provide an FQDN that will run their hosted Shockey Monkey portal on. I won’t tell you how many questions about FQDN came up. Next up – why do I need SSL and what is it? Third, can I just send you my SBS cert Fourth… you get the idea. Some were emails, some were phone calls, some were IMs. All left me in a partial coma over what I was trying to do here. Thankfully its only been a small bunch but even one person that doesn’t know whats going on is far too many.
So here I am, 7 days behind deadline, staring at a growing list of people that need to be explained what an SSL certificate does and why its important to encrypt the portal that they will use exchange financial and other secret data with their customer. I am at this point writing more documentation than code and I need to figure out a more effective way to train people on all of this. Look on the bright side right, now I know why video professor makes so much money.
The first failure: Not writing enough documentation to cover every aspect of deploying an ASP service.
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