The Terms, They Are A Changing
A lot has changed at Field2Base since the calendar rolled over to 2018. One of the biggest changes was to make a commitment to more aggressively update our products as well as communicate what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. We’ve made great strides by adopting agile methodologies and procuring more feedback from our existing and prospective Customers than ever before. One thing that hasn’t changed, and will never change, is that we want to help our Customers solve problems they encounter in their business. We looked at every angle of our products and services to evaluate what else we could do to improve their experience and ultimately, help solve their problems more quickly.
As we gathered feedback externally and learned internally from onboarding new employees, we discovered that there was an opportunity to improve the experience of using our products by simply changing how we have identified key concepts throughout our platform. We’ve analyzed our key concepts, identified terminology that needed to be changed, and have been making those changes over the past few months. Our Customers who have participated in the Beta Program have already seen some of these changes in action. We’re excited with the new terminology that was chosen and believe it will make our products easier to use going forward.
At this point, we’ll take you through some of the questions we’re anticipating you’ll ask about these terminology changes.
What terminology is being changed? And why were they chosen?
- PreFills are now Work Orders
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to explain what a PreFill was when introducing our products to new Customers (and new employees for that matter). The conversation explaining what a PreFill is can be distilled down to me stating that “it’s a work order that’s been dispatched from the office”. Once that was said, we could quickly move on, but even having that moment of uncertainty should be avoided for such a key concept in our solution. For that reason, this was easily the first and most obvious change we knew we had to make. - Projects are now Folders
The decision to move away from Projects was trickier, mainly because it was based on the concept of projects in the Construction industry where Field2Base got its start. As Field2Base has spread to other industries, the term Project has not always been understood. In the end, the concept of a Folder in a file system is a much more natural way to understand how you can use this part of our platform. Customers can organize their data using Folders in numerous ways including: by geography (i.e. regions, branches, locations), by organizational structure (i.e. sales, safety, accounting), or by functionality (i.e. time sheets, safety forms, inspections). - SmartFill is now to Quick Copy
Similar to PreFills, it was often challenging to explain SmartFill to newcomers. To soften the learning curve, we decided on the term “Quick Copy” which better describes the ability to quickly copy information from a previously Sent Form into a new Form Draft. - Web Client is now Web App
The usage of the word “Client” in our web-based solution has caused some confusion with Customers because they refer to their Customers as “clients. At the end of the day, the Web Client is intended to be used in the same way as our Android and iOS Apps so we’re officially changing it to be called our Web App. - Serial Number Queues are now Unique IDs
Calling Web Services in Forms and using Serial Number Queues were introduced only last year, but there was some struggle in explaining what they were because the serial number concept is primarily used in manufacturing and is not universally known. The term Unique ID is clearer for our Customers and describes the primary goal of generating a unique identifier for each Form.
Is there anything related to these key concepts that are not being changed? And why not?
There are only a few specific items that are not going to be changed and that’s the URLs, the URIs, and keywords / variables used by our Integration Suite. The reason why we’re not changing these parts of the product is because they are typically part of integrations and custom development projects. They are not often part of the learning process for our Customers when it comes to using our products.
How are these terminology changes going to affect products?
Essentially, there are no changes to the functionality that our products provide. These changes are cosmetic and will only affect labeling and documentation. These new terms will allow faster adoption of the key concepts critical to using Field2Base products.
Who is being affected by these terminology changes?
Everyone. We decided this is the type of change that should be universal, so all our Customers, Partners, and Resellers will see these updates reflected in their experience.
When are the terminology changes taking place?
The terminology changes are going to be rolled out in two phases:
- The terminology in the Admin Portal will be updated at 10:30AM EDT on Tuesday, August 7th. There is no maintenance required for these changes, but you may have to reload the site to see them reflected.
- The terminology for the Mobile Forms and Integration Suite is already updated in the new 6.5 release. When you upgrade each of these applications, the terminology will be present.
We hope that you enjoyed getting a peek behind the scenes at Field2Base and learning how we are evolving our products. Also, we hope that you do take advantage of the new features found in the 6.5 release for the Mobile Forms and Integration Suites that coincide with these terminology changes.
Please reach out to product@field2base.com with any questions you may have about the changes to terminology. We’re looking forward to sharing more insight about our products in the future!