I've been itching to introduce Trello at work but this sentence made my heart sink:
> It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an "installed software" version of Trello.
We already use the installed version of FogBugz at work and I had hoped that Trello might some day be provided in this form too. Ideally, we'd have wanted FogBugz and Trello to work together in some way.
Unfortunately, using a hosted version of Trello is not an option due to insurmountable problems with the procurement and information governance processes within my company.
I'll be honest, if our customers were not as stubborn as they are about hosting their own software then I would never do anything else but host it myself either!
We host a lot of sites on our custom CMS and it makes life so much easier to role bug fixes and db updates when there is only 1 code base to update. Also you don't have issues where people are on older version and need to update through versions
We try push all our customers into this model with those exact reasons.
It's a dangerous road when you value your own operations over customer needs. I'd say invest in the infrastructure needed to one-click deploy outside your data center as well.
This may be a solution further down the road but our code at the minute changes literally daily and it would be counter productive to have to test every deployment against previous versions
We actually discussed this very point in work today, I still class our product, 2 years down the line, to be in beta. We are actively working towards a version 1, if you will.
We could revisit at a later point and probably will but the time it would take to document all db changes and create a version every day would far outweigh the benefits.
Distributing to other peoples data centers comes with it's own host of issues as well, we would have to charge for a maintenance contract for 1. We would need to bring on a customer service team to support people. At the minute, bug fixes can come straight to developers via our technical director as we can deploy straight away. We would need a team to asses what their setup is, if they have everything needed installed etc etc.
Deployment to our own servers helps us and the customer a lot, we don't charge a lot for hosting, our uptime last year was over 99.97% and bug fixes and functionality are rolled out on a daily basis without interaction from the customer.
We did a massive project recently that the customer ended up deployment on their own $5 hosting company, turned out the company didn't support what we needed and we ended up coding around the road blocks. Ended up costing the customer more.
So there's a lot of extra work to do for self hosting customers. But isn't the question really whether your customers are ready to pay for that extra work?
In the specific case of my current employer I can say that we have enough budget to pay a few dollars per seat per day without blinking, and we'd choose this option even if a hosted Trello option was ten times cheaper.
There are two main constraints that need to be taken into account where I work when it comes to buying things:
Firstly, variable pricing models are a no-go. We'll happily pay well over the odds to secure abundant capacity but we need to know in advance with absolute certainty exactly how much it will cost for a full year of service.
Secondly, we deal with potentially sensitive information that could be damaging to our organisation and our government if it were in any way compromised. Because of this we need to retain control of the data we'd store in any kind of issue tracking or collaboration system.
Trello is clearly a great tool and I hope Joel et al do well with it. It's a great tool for agile teams to use, and I can only blame the bureaucracy of my organisation for preventing my small team's ability to use it.
I tried to pitch Trello to a company I know that I think could have really made good use of it, but their objection was the same, uncomfortable with not having their development tasking and customer issues stored "in house."
Wouldn't it be relatively easy for them to provide a server hosted by a client, on a corporate internet?
They may think such cases don't support "get big fast". But they might be wrong about that. A lot of software (Excel) is first propagated through work usages, and workplace availability might provide important vectors to 100mm users.
Now, users on a client-dedicated server won't help scale their data operations. But they will help spread the word and introduce use cases. And provide a target for developers / consultants to build out applications.
Even if some corporate solution doesn't seem a priority, they might want to dedicate some time to serving a few such edge cases. Just to keep an eye on that niche and keep themselves somewhat adapted to the requirements.
It'd be easy to provide a server, sure, but the problem is maintaining it. It is much easier to maintain stuff that you control 100% because once you've given it to someone else to put on their network:
1) You have to get remote access to it. This probably means setting up a VPN. Probably some weird thing the client uses, which only works on Windows XP. And is unbearably slow, and is down at random times.
2) You have to coordinate upgrades with the local administration. Need to reboot to apply a Windows patch? Best make sure there will be someone available if it turns out you need to hit F1 in the BIOS to continue. IPMI/KVM-IP help with this, but add cost (and security concerns).
3) Hardware failure? You get to deal with the local admins (are they competent? Do they know the hardware you picked? Did they keep track of the spares you sent?—you did send spares, right?). Or worse, fly someone there.
4) "The page loads slow". Now you get to debug the client's internal network! —assuming you can even get to the box, over same broken internal network. So even better, you get to debug the client's internal network, over the phone with whoever their IT department can spare—and who definitely believes its not their problem.
5) Monitoring. Yeah. That's going to be difficult if you only have access to it at all with that Windows XP VPN client (which automatically times the connection out after 15 minutes, security and all ya' know). Hopefully the client can do it. Monitoring means more than just "is it up"; it also includes "how close to capacity are we", "are we seeing any weirdness that'd indicate problems", etc.
6) It's a single client on the box. So they will ask you at some point "oh, we're really busy this month, please don't upgrade it, we can't risk it breaking". And you'll be hard-pressed to say no, after all, they client will point out that just not deploying is less work for you.
6b) "except we found this one critical bug, we need a patch for it ASAP"
7) When you own the boxes, you can keep things consistent. Want to upgrade RAM on all your web servers? Go ahead. You'll have very few configuration differences. Want to upgrade the RAM on the box at the client? Yeah, you'll need to open a ticket with their IT department, they'll get back to you sometime.
8) A client that demands their own local box is also one that's likely to be paranoid in other ways—they'll want to know who (on your team) has accessed the box, when, and why; they'll bug you about it; they may want a say in who you can hire to administer it; etc. This may or may not be justified (e.g., it probably is for the DoD). But it'll surely be a pain.
9) Utilization of boxes you host is going to be higher—the client's box will need to be sized for peak times, but will be 99.9% idle off-hours. Also, the client boxes will probably be lower-capacity (to be cheaper). Fewer users per box = more boxes. More boxes = more administration. Especially when they're different.
Sure, but you're talking about the vendor supplying the program to the customer and still maintaining the installation at the site. I was under the impression the request was by customers who have their own IT departments, for a "give us the program and let our IT department do the maintenance" scenario. Or is that not the case, do all the prospective customers who want to run software on their own servers, only want to do so if the vendor still maintains it?
The IT department can't maintain it themselves, because they didn't write the program and don't have the source code. So at least some of the support has to be from the vendor.
Some customers will have competent admins, who like to solve problems themselves, they probably won't be a huge issue (except for the ones who do crazy and insane things). Other customers won't, and you'll get contacted all the time.
I can only use trello for mumdane work tasks or personal work if there is no self hosted solution.
This decision is a mistake, Joel. I love trello, but i cannot trust a hosted solution with my plans for taking over a market. Please give us an installable version. anything else is amature hour or naive.
> It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an "installed software" version of Trello.
We already use the installed version of FogBugz at work and I had hoped that Trello might some day be provided in this form too. Ideally, we'd have wanted FogBugz and Trello to work together in some way.
Unfortunately, using a hosted version of Trello is not an option due to insurmountable problems with the procurement and information governance processes within my company.