TargetProcess has Help Desk on board. I think it is important to have close relation with customers, to collect their feedback and react on issues and ideas. We've designed Help Desk Portal for that purpose. It is a separate simple application integrated with TargetProcess via API. Customers may post ideas, requests and questions via Help Desk Portal, vote for requests, post comments.

Over the last year, Help Desk Portal has become quite a popular bit of TargetProcess. People use it a lot. But it suffers from many problems:

• Search is not there (so far, scheduled for the next release :).
• When someone posts a request, it is impossible to check for duplicates (what if we have the solution already?)
• Lack of filters.
• It is not exciting to use.

The last issue is a tough one. It is quite hard to make people happy when they are using a tool like Help Desk portal. It is a matter of usability and design, but I believe it can be solved.

Curiously, there are several fresh examples of startups that focus on company-customer interaction. I personally like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction. The idea behind is similar to Help Desk Portal, but implementation is a way better. Currently we are evaluating options, but it seems we will move to the same direction.

Product development is hard. You have hundreds of customers and thousands of requests. It is impossible to please them all. You may bury the product with blind requests implementation, it is not a news for anybody. You should maintain clear vision and balance like a rope-walker all the time.

During last 11 releases we added new functionality. There was maybe 1 release targeted to peformance and usability improvements, but most of the releases targeted new features: integration, customization, horizontal features, vertical features, etc. We decided to stop.

Next several releases will be dedicated to performance, usability and design improvements. Here is what we are going to do:

1. Unify design of the application and make it cool and attractive.
2. Provide outstanding functionality for lists manipulation. People spend much time with data in lists (filtering, editing, etc). All lists will be fully customizable. It will be possible to create a list with any filter, grouping, inner lists, etc. It will be possible to inline edit everything in all lists. All that will be based on ExtJS grid and as a client side solution it will be faster than everything else.
3. We have about a hundred of really nice requests/ideas/solutions from our customers regarding usability. We are going to implement most of them. Especially email notifications, personal customizability, lists manipulation, navigation, reporting.
4. Improve overall performance twice.

These are our goals for the next several releases. Maybe quite many of our customers will not be happy. They demand new features like Eclipse integration, CC.NET integration, extended time tracking, budgeting inside TargetProcess, etc. But great performance and superior usability will bring more benefits to all of them.

We are feeling that it is time to eliminate many medium and small problems in TargetProcess to be able to move it forward with greater success.