We deliberately didn’t include some features in our beta and version 1 releases. We may or may not have made the right decision in all cases, but Oversing is a large complex product and we have a very small development team, and we have to make sacrifices somewhere. So we focused on the user-centric features and sacrificed integration. This is because we know the business of our early adopters and it will not influence their decisions – although it might influence yours.

1) Accounting: Oversing is a project accounting system ( rather than static account system) that functions as a management accounting system (and not a financial accounting system), that provides insight into profit and loss from operations (EBITDA). Separating Financial Accounting (reporting to banks, investors, and the government for the purpose of credit, returns, and taxes) from management accounting (insight into the productivity of the business rather than the financial assets of the business), “de-obfuscates” (fancy word) the performance of the business that is under control of the management and staff. We felt that the world, and accountants in particular, did not want or need another accounting system to learn. And we felt that Oversing would make use of existing accounting system providers and consultants as a distribution channel.

2) API Access: We simply ran out of time. Nothing more to it than that. It’s not particularly difficult. But we promise that we will get it done in the near future.

3) External System Integration: External system integration with Email, Contacts and Calendar (Exchange) and Security (Active Directory) requires that we expose the API. And yes, we do understand how important this feature is.

4) Full Text Search: While the technology to provide full text searching is both open source and well understood, we simply ran out of time to both integrate it, and ensure that we had solved the security and permissions issues that oversing requires.

5) Custom Fields: Custom fields, when implemented by traditional methods, cause a hefty learning, architectural and performance penalty – and we already do quite a bit of ‘magic’ (‘denormalization’) to keep Oversing fast for our users. The solution that circumvents this problem requires Full Text Search, so that custom fields can be searched by the full text index in denormalized form rather than denormalized data. So we will implement custom fields and custom search together.

6) The Compensation Cycle, Positions and Budgeting: We felt that it was unlikely that during our first year, enterprises with over 1000 employees would convert to Oversing for the purpose of managing their compensation planning and budgeting, rather than adopt oversing for management and perhaps convert their compensation planning at a later time. So as a practical matter, we chose to add this feature later.

Additionally, some features are not exposed in the beta.
Our strategy is to release collaboration, task, project management, and time, expenses, and invoicing first, then release the recruiting, sales, culture, career development and personality profile features as we finished them. This starts with the central market then expands to provide coverage to more and more of the organization’s functions.

7) Sales features, Recruiting features, Culture features, and Personality Statistics:

(a) We have not exposed the sales management features in the Beta. It’s under the covers but we need to complete a little more work before we make it visible to you in V1 – the followup notifications in particular. These are minor tweaks but the need to be done before we expose the features to you.

(b) Although we use Oversing for Recruiting ourselves, and it’s under the covers, we feel we need to complete a little more work before we make it visible to you in V1 – We need to add a few events and properties to different ‘candidate’ objects first.

(c) The unfinished Culture features are fairly simple and more of a user education problem than a software one. So we delayed them.

(d) our favorite feature in Oversing is the feedback system that provides you (and management) with objective feedback about you and your performance in the sociology of your organization, as well as metrics on the culture of your organization. But without substantial data accumulated, any statistical inferences we might make will be questionable, so we delayed this feature release until we have sufficient data.

And, there are some features we simply prefer not to include in our product.

8) Scripting Calls And there is one feature we are … less than enthusiastic about: scripting sales calls. This is one of the largest and most profitable sections of the market. But it violates our ethical standard of ‘stealing’ attention from customers, and we do not feel it is something good brands should engage in. And we prefer to be associated with good brands. So as a strategic decision – and possibly a bad one – we chose not to implement it. So, it’s a decision that we will revisit in the future.