Update on Shockey Monkey 2.0

I wanted to offer a little update on Shockey Monkey considering that I haven’t kept you up to speed on all the developments and have missed the November deadline with the hopes of going commercial on Jan 1. Unfortunately, I will be bumping that later deadline to February 1st, 2008 or roughly a month from now for the launch of Shockey Monkey 2.0.

I want to say that I truely appreciate the amount of support and input I have received through the whole process. There are now three of us working on Shockey Monkey and the delay was related to a number of reasons, most of them centered on supportability – both of the code/platform and of the people using it. It turns out that SM is generally the first helpdesk for most users and most people have questions about how to implement it, how to customize it, etc. This required a lot of documentation, which later got scrapped for video, which later got scrapped for something I never thought I’d ever do.

The product has grown fundamentally and gotten a facelift to accomodate the message I’ve been sending for over a year – that its all about customer service, not making sure that as little of it gets done as humanly possible. This required quite a bit of code, I had to bring people on, clean up a lot of items, etc.

There are a little over 3,000 active users of Shockey Monkey. Over the past three months there has been a slight percentage dip (about 400 or so fell off the face of the earth) which means they either changed their mind, ran out of business, switched to a different helpdesk solution.. best of luck to them. We feel this is a very long term investment for all of our clients and our partners clients and have been working very hard on bringing the 2.0 to market.

I decided to call it 2.0 because it brings a lot of concepts that I explained on the road to fruition, it is not just a CRM rip. It’s more of a system.

But more on that in January.

P.S. I still aim to offer this as hosted (our server) or downloadable virtual server / vmware image (your server); The product will remain free through February, by the time all the bug fixes are completed in February we will look at a commercial route. Also, starting with February, the product will be fully supported by OWN.