Kinda of random day so far today. On the phone with an adilas developer going over some changes. Small bug fix for adding new parent items from a PO. On the phone with Molly, an adilas rep, going over needs and tech support stuff. Paying bills and other light tech support things.

Had a 45 minute meeting with a front end designer named Jonathan Wells. He is very talented at graphics, moving animations, and UX/UI (user interfaces, user experience and design). Super cool meeting. His portfolio is: https://designjwells.myportfolio.com/

Did some photo prep on some of the new screenshots that I got from Jonathan Wells (graphic designer). Spent some time recording notes and pushing up files to document the process.

Eric popped in and we had a half an hour session. We talked about some of his projects and worked on some query of queries processes for his current API project. We talked about options of running certain tasks from memory and session vs direct trips to the database. This is kinda funny, but we were talking about looping, grouping, and summing our way through some of the data. It just sounded funny.

On a different note, the topic of a master corporation to help hold the totals and aggregated sums and totals is gaining some momentum. Interesting how we sometimes need to solve things on a simple one-by-one manner, then we do it manually for a while, then we work on automating things, than we start mixing and blending and putting pieces together to create more of a whole or full picture. That seems to be a common process and how things tend to evolve.

Spring 2020: Jonathan Wells did a work up. See attached video. Waiting for funding of half. Tracking this in project #1627. leans heavily on requests of molly's client.

This page is ugly!! Drea has been asking Steve to fix this page for awhile. 

Dustin has started working on a hub- includes testing, licensing, other operational details. Calling it an oversight hub.

When I got on the morning meeting. Steve and Dustin were talking about their projects and times that they could meet up and work together. They have become a great little team. That makes me really happy. Below are some notes between Steve and I. We were talking about some upcoming meetings with both Russell Moore and Jonathan Wells. Both are designers and graphics guys.

- Graphical homepages (graphical mini dashboard per main 12 player groups), custom dashboard with little widgets that could be moved around and configured per user, mix and match pallet (mini windows - movable and dockable)

- We would like to look into what it would take to build on a JavaScript framework. There are multiple frameworks out there, what does that mean, what does that look like, and how are the pieces managed between the different systems? Lots of questions.

- Projects for Russell - He could work his magic on the corp-wide settings page, 3rd party solutions page, help out Alan with the invoice due date project, and help us get more data tables in place and integrated into the system.

- Getting help from Russell on some of the snow owl theme settings for some of the older AFB headers and such. There are a number of knowns spots. One is the adilas community funded project, the snow owl theme settings, the ecommerce settings, the custom email settings.

- Looking at resources and what do we want to spend on what and how quickly could those expenditures turn around and produce some results.

- We talked about consolidating our ideas and projects, using the adilas community funded projects page, report, and section. We could used it for project management, reports, progress, and a centralized location or hub for developers, clients, reps/consultants, and others. One spot will all of the updates and progress.

- There will always be ongoing development, product refinement, and what is coming (future). The system keeps morphing out in front of us. Sometimes that is hard to predict.

- Help prepare our users for impact - this is a huge system with tons of branching options and paths.

- Keep working with Jonathan on putting together a list of what adilas can do - whitepaper/graphic/map - Getting it all organized - a virtual road map - big dumb animal pictures - this would help so much with sales.

- Helping Jonathan get more system training from myself, Shannon, and Steve. The more training that he gets, the more he will be able to start pulling all of the pieces together. We would like to keep him on the education and sales side of the equation.

- Permissions homepage and how we simplify that - currently, it is kind of a monster or as my dad says - a football field of permissions.

- Mapping out the system functions and what is available. Steve wants a map the adilas world - what do we have and how is it organized - scroll as needed - zoom in/out - etc. Use this as a training and sales tool.

- As we were talking about mapping, we jumped into some of the existing adilas maps and navigation interfaces. We talked about the adilas interactive map (vintage around 2010 ish), the GPS core interface (vintage around 2013 ish), and helping to bring that dream to life. On the newest version of the GPS core graphic, we have included some sub navigation dealing with permissions, settings, training, etc. For the record, currently, that graphic is just a small mock-up of what it could be. The real intent was to use that core interface to interact with different app modes. They could be things like data/work mode (what do you have), permissions mode (who gets to play), settings mode (how does it work or function), training mode (what can I do), usage/stats mode (show me what I've got). Anyways, some cool ideas already exist. Maybe help Jonathan keep going in that direction.

- Use the map and be able to show what new trails are coming. Steve would also love to tie the upcoming pieces out to the adilas community funded projects to help with eduction, funding resources, progress, and a centralized hub for all of our projects.

After our meeting, I spent some going over emails, recording notes, and getting caught up. Today is Monday, back at it again. Part of my process this morning was recording some notes from a couple of meetings we had on Friday. Lots of moving pieces. I'm so grateful for pen and paper and being able to scribble things down quickly and then fill things in later with all of the details. If it weren't for paper and pen, I wouldn't be able to remember enough to fill in the gaps. Great little tools.

Steve and I met with Jonathan Wells to go over some progress. Below are some notes from our call.

- Creating user stories - basically scenarios and simulations - help to visually lead a user through the system and even know what is possible and how to do it.

- Question about obscure features vs basic or super needed functions and features - those extra or obscure tools and features create an expense (extra burden) to other customers (it makes it a little bit harder) - We need to narrow things down a bit.

- Settings - 4 main levels - world, group, page, user

- Templates per industry - basically, a way of controlling bulk settings per industry

- Cause and effect relationships - the deeper you go, the more you get into cause and effect relationships.

- Helping customers succeed - eventually you may need all of the different business tools and/or features and/or modules - there is nothing wrong with having the tools, you just may want to keep some of them in the shed until you need them. Only use or keep out what you will need.

- Each company may need to pick and choose what tools they want and how they want to play

- It also gets into size of the company. Even though they are the same type of company, the bigger they are, they need more tools and options. It gets deep fast.

- Features, advantages, benefits - great way to think about things and options.

- How do we get the word out and let out clients know about some of the new changes? Even then, do they read the news and updates?

- It comes back to the adilas café type model and having  a place to show your stuff, work, play, train, be part of the community, etc.

- Classic vs snow owl - what does that mean? It actually deals with a set of standard look and feel templates, headers, footers, and display options (visual themes).

- Map overview - Jonathan started showing us some of his new menu and nav systems - See the attached screen shots to get some ideas of where he is headed and some of the mapping concepts, mock-ups, layout options, and direction.

- Stacking the view and the nav - getting into graphical homepage and sub homepage and sub navigation. We didn't get super deep into this, but there is tons of potential there. Have a very easy to navigate frontend. As you get deeper, you still have a very friendly and visual navigation page at the sub homepage or graphical homepage level. Don't be confused by the word homepage. Each sub section inside system would need it's own sub or graphical homepage. For example: Say you have a main overview map or nav page. You would then also need a sub graphical overview page for say customer homepage, invoice homepage, time homepage, user homepage, PO homepage, deposits homepage, flex grid homepage, media/content homepage, etc. Hopefully that makes sense. See attached for some mock-up graphics and ideas including flat maps, icons, icon lists, mind maps, and related pieces. You could even virtually zoom in/out as needed to get more detailed views.

- What about a simple search (by typing) type interface? Be able to search for things like gift cards, payroll, inventory, discounts, etc. Once the search is completed, it shows options. This is kinda like a google type approach to the system. They, Google, tried to simplify the whole Internet. We could do something similar to that inside of adilas. Just another option.

- Google map view - zooming in and out - to expose different levels - mind maps (see attached for some concept art for mind maps)

- How visual education could really help them know what is involved and where things are going.

- Ranking pages and sections and what is the most important. That would really help to find the common threads.

Steve and Jonathan kept going with the meeting after I left. Steve told me later on, that he and Jonathan went for another hour (ish). They ended up on the reports homepage and Steve was going to have Jonathan give that page a small facelift. Good stuff.

Just Dustin and I were on the morning meeting. We touched base and then he bailed out to work on his project. I spent some time doing emails, reviewing code for Wayne from a small flex grid export to CSV file, and recording notes. I uploaded a bunch of concept art to an element of time from last week. This was from a meeting with Jonathan Wells. See this entry for some of the concept art.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=5003 - concept art and mapping out the system

I merged in some code for Eric and did some light research on ColdFusion using underlying Java objects and being able to manipulate those pieces. I got two email from reps that needed a little bit of debugging on some reports and exports. Working on those pieces.

We had a meeting with Chuck and he was showing some new progress with the campground stuff. We are code naming it camp-adilas just for fun. That was Marisa's idea. We had Danny Shuford, Marisa Shaw, Chuck, Steve, Alan, and myself on the meeting. Steve and I were lightly distracted, due to a server issue. We had two servers down and we were part in the meeting and part trying to make sure that things were being taken care of. Interesting.

Anyways, here are some notes from our meeting.

- Visual services and access to add-on services when selling and booking a campground site

- Color coded helpers to help with states, statuses, and color coding helpers

- Be able to show available, occupied, and services available to each site

- Marisa was talking about a synced reservation and a non-synced reservation. This deals with who is booking the site. Is it grandma and grandpa who put their card down to reserve 4 different sites for their family (synced or all together) or is it just a single family booking a site (non-synced or self pay). She was saying that we need to be able to do both and allow those groups to expand, contract, and break apart if needed. All of this deals with billing and reservations.

- It is really important to be able to show just the open sites for a specific date range.

- The sites themselves need different status levels. For example: pending, confirmed, checked in, checked out, reserved, etc.

- They talked about a "do not move" lock on certain site. This deals with a state or status that keeps the person locked in for some reason. It could be VIP treatment, special needs, special group considerations, or some other circumstance.

- We need to be able to add notes to any site and/or reservation.

- Block a site through a date range. Also being able to block the same site with a possible extension date range (not for sure, but a maybe or possible extended stay).

- Lots of needs for discounts and campaign tracking. This is already built in, but we wanted to note it anyways.

- Waiting lists would be nice. Able to sort and move people around on the waiting list as needed. They even talked about different queue type options.

- Lots of color coding and legends

- Being able to move reservations from the waiting list to some other available site

- Lots of talk about treating the waiting list like a queue of sort sort. The queue would be, by default, first come first server, but it would also have ways of tweaking it based off of needs, special circumstances, and/or add-on services (being able to manually move things around if needed).

- Currently, the campgrounds are doing tons of little hand-written notes and post-it notes to keep track of things. That gets crazy as things get busier.

- Danny was talking about using the priority fields on the elements of time to help sort certain reservations and/or waiting list persons. Just an idea.

- My biggest take away from the meeting was Marisa's comment - "I can sell this!" - Chuck is making the system sellable due to the ideas of the intuitive graphical user interface and what the possibilities could be. That was my favorite comment. Good stuff. We need to make this thing sellable.

- Sent an email to both Chuck and Russell to have them look into some of the stuff that we have been doing with Jonathan Wells, the designer from Rexburg, ID area. Here is the link: https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/developers_notebook_home.cfm?sort=ASC&q=meeting%20with%20jonathan

Uploading screenshots and photos from earlier meetings today.

https://data0.adilas.biz/top_secret/time_web_gallery.cfm?corp=748&id=5046 - meeting with Jonathan Wells

Some people find the shopping cart overwhelming, even the kush cart. This would create settings or a template where you could check boxes, or uncheck boxes to determine what showed up in the shopping cart- similar to the boxes you can check or uncheck for the fields you want to show for customers. Or, the boxes that you can check for some of the advanced searches. This would allow clients to have only the info they want to see in the cart, which would make it appear simpler even though all of that data is still there.

The current classic cart has the most functionality. The Kush cart looks the best. The short and sweet is the most modern, but we want some cart options that have settings, tabs, ect. We also have mock-ups from Russell, Jonathan Wells, and others. We really want to see what we could come up with here. Brandon has more information and directions, once someone is assigned to this project.

Shannon and I were talking about new happenings inside the system. From Shannon, setting up healthy boundaries - that really helps. Setting up boundaries allows for showing respect for self and for your clients. It is important.

- Dealing with boundaries, we need to setup clear expectations of we go to here, this is provided, this is not, and anything beyond this point (needs to be defined) we need to charge for. It all comes down to expectations and what not. This is where we begin. This is where we end. These are your responsibilities.

- The system really is "as is" - anything beyond that needs to be paid for and covered.

- In a way, some of our clients virtually bully us and just push on us so hard. If we set some healthy boundaries, that really helps.

- Shannon and I went in and looked at a video from Jonathan Wells - video demo of a new adilas nav and layout - As we were watching, we kept stopping things and talking about it. If the link above doesn't work, try this one.

- As we make the things more standard, that will help with navigation, lower the need for training, and general ease of use.

- Putting the settings right where they are used and/or needed.

- We loved the idea that Jonathan had about being able to quick search nav (navigation options, buttons, and links). This allows a user to virtually type in a word like discount and the application would show all kinds of links, options, pages, etc. Super cool idea.

- Education mode within adilas. A switch that could be turned on/off at any time. That would really be awesome.

- Tag line from Jonathan - Where Operations and Accounting Meet

- Being your own style and be willing to go through different drafts and iterations and versions. We get to say and be our own style.

On the morning meeting. Pretty quite. Answering emails, paying bills, and texting back and forth with developers. Danny popped in for a bit and had a couple small questions. They were dealing with the new view only permissions (six new permissions) and making it easier to click those options. I recorded some notes on the time id # 5463.

- This is another idea dealing with permissions. We may need to flag and tag the permissions so that we could show them differently. Currently, they are setup based off of the layout of the classic homepage (system search, system basics, system assets, system liabilities, system time and requests, system reports, system maintenance, and system management). It may be really nice if we could put flags on certain permissions such as invoices, POS (point of sale), deposits, customers, view only, etc. Tag and flag them so that we could pull related permissions into smaller groups to help with grouping and clustering of the permissions.

- Along those same lines... we need to add flags and tags on navigation options, permissions, and settings. That will help us organize and sub organize the permissions, settings, and navigation options. For example: All settings that deal with invoices, all permissions that deal with invoices, all navigation options that deal with invoices. Get them all grouped together, using flags and tags. We could then allow for those values to be searched through the quick search. See the concept art work from Jonathan Wells dealing with the new adilas navigation system. This same concept may be extended to pages, help files, videos, tutorials, etc. Basically flag and tag everything so that a single word search will bring up all possible options (mini search engine within the system). See attached for small concept idea on adding specific flags and tags to the items (permissions, settings, help files, nav, etc.).

Shannon popped in but Wayne, Steve, Alan, and I were still going strong on talking about servers, configuration, upcoming projects, and direction. Shannon and I will hit it again on Thursday.

Most of the meeting was spent talking about the mulit-data source project. This is a stepping stone to help us separate users from corporations and corporations from servers. The eventual goal is to get configurable pieces where we could mix and match corps to servers and corps to databases. We challenged Alan to get a plan together so that we would know what is involved with that project. Lots of earlier prep work has already been done, but things keep changing. Here we go.

After Wayne and Alan left, Steve and I kept on going with some other thoughts, questions, and talks. We ended up talking about some of the R&D guys and what they are bringing to the table. I showed Steve some research that Jonathan Wells was doing on sub permissions and sub functions within bigger permissions. See this element of time for more info and small video.

Steve and I also explored some ideas and options to get the designers to help even more with sales, sales material, marketing, and showing the future of adilas (the vision) - where we are headed. We also briefly talked about our website and maybe doing a revamp on the main website.

Code review and pushing some new changes to the fulfillment homepage. New code changes done by Bryan.

I also got on a meeting with Jonathan Wells (designer) to talk and go over the ++ (advanced add to cart) options and functionality. He would like to break it down into smaller pieces to make it more consumable and usable for a beginner. Good meeting. I also mentioned to him that we would like to wrap up the cart stuff and start heading back towards sales and the adilas café project.

Meeting with Jonathan Wells and going over some design elements. We had a couple of us on the meeting. We had Steve, Cory, Jonathan, and myself. The meeting started out and we spent the first 40 minutes going over some of the changes in direction that we are seeing. Basically closing up the model, switching focus, and why we wanted to change things up. Lots of talk about direction, vision, and upcoming options.

After that, Jonathan showed us some of his new cart R&D stuff and where his mock-up is headed. We also got into talking about configuration and sub permission (functions within a bigger permission). We talked about consistency and design styles and bringing the R&D closer to where we are at. Basically, working on closing the gap between where we are (currently) and where we want to be (in the near future). The closer we can get and start filling in that gap and making that transition, the better.

The final topic of the meeting was dealing with sales and being able to start selling some of the other features that we offer. These are things like: monthly reoccurring, setup, training, design, custom code, tech support, consulting, project management, R&D, sales, and internal development. Lots of other offerings.

See attached for some mock-ups and screenshots.

Chuck and I met up over a GotoMeeting session. We started out by going over some screenshots from a meeting that I had last week with Jonathan Wells. This link shows a number of screenshots for an internal shopping cart mock-up that Jonathan is working on. Click to view cart screenshots.

After that, we rolled into some new things from Chuck. We talked about email campaigns, advertising, and training. We took a little bit of time and worked on an outline for an upcoming ecommerce bootcamp - ecomm basics course. Towards the end, we got into some new ideas and direction on the presentation gallery and digital outline of what we have to offer. Fun new things coming down the pipeline. Good stuff.

See attached for some screenshots.

Private demo between Jonathan Wells and some other clients and reps.

- How can we make this easier and more virtual handrails (keep people on course). Easy out of the box.

- We have built on top of some of these pieces over and over again.

- 2 main things - navigation (go and do) and reports (view and see)

- Trying to get rid of human error - as much as possible

- Anything that can be automated, let's do it.

- Renee really wants to make sure things are being dealt with and she is being heard.

- Who do you want to be as a company? Piecemeal or fully funned - also the size of your business.

- They run their business from the numbers side of things (mix of operations and accounting).

- There is some pain if you try to mix tons of different software packages.

- In a closed loop system, you get cause and effect type relationships.

- Human errors - being able to look at those numbers and making changes. If we could get rid of a number of those human errors that would help.

- Time to get things done - if I can enter it at the source, game on. If I have to go back later, no deal. That makes it really tough.

- There are a lot of tasks that are done outside of the adilas system. Currently, the client is using a number of spreadsheets, label printers, etc.

- Learning navigation

- Bouncing from page to page and end up being left on certain screens - doing things that take you full circle so you are back where you started from.

- Labels and auto printing

- Industry specific code vs a general or generic system

- The client wants to see a start to finish process. I login in, I then clock in/out, I start a cart, I add a customer, I do whatever...

- How can we help you - through settings and configuration - toggle on/off

- On invoice homepage and invoice reports. They would like to see time.

- Being the brains behind other peoples offerings.

- Using X-ray vision, can we see under the covers and see what is really making this thing work?

- Defining our mission and our purpose - that could be really huge.

Two hour meeting with Russell, Steve, and I. Good stuff and we covered a lot of ground. Here are some of my notes:

- We would like to create some CSS snippets and examples. Make it easier for the developers to use good looking code.

- Updating and backing up our WordPress stuff. This is constant maintenance stuff to do.

- We really want to fully use the snow owl theme and the bootstrap themes that we have started to. They look really good.

- Focus on the user experience and keep refining the processes that we already have.

- Helping the customers sell our product by word of mouth. Russell wants to delight our users.

- Russell spent a lot of time pitching the vision to Steve and I. We were buying it... fun meeting.

- Russell wants to do a campaign (focused coding sprint) on revamping the most used pages.

- A small proposal was made for 10 hours a week for 3 months from a small strategic team. We gave Russell approval on that and talked about some plans and ideas.

- As a side note, Russell has been one of the most successful at pitching Steve and I projects, ideas, and concepts. We are excited to see what he can do in the next 3 months.

- Going back to concepts, we talked about some of the awesome ideas that Jonathan Wells has been working on, including building in the advanced search options right into the general pages. Easy exports and ease of use (in general). We also really like his idea of the education mode inside of the main adilas system or core. Able to turn the education mode on/off at the click of a button. Super cool idea.

- Lots of talks about rolling things up into aggregated totals and even doing our own data warehousing stuff.

- Moving our application into more business intelligence (BI) - having the system inform our users what is going on and help them make decisions.

- Tons of future projects. Never-ending refinements.

- User-defined carts and pages.

- The use of CSS variables to consolidate code and make things more efficient and usable.

- Lots of pitching of ideas, flow, concepts, and management styles. We ended by telling Russell that he could manage a small team over the next 3 months with a set focus on refining existing pieces and pages and communicating back with Steve and I. We are excited to see what he can get done. Good stuff. 

Great little meeting with Jonathan Wells. We had Steve, Cory, Jonathan, and myself on the meeting. Cory was only able to stay for the first little bit. The main subject was dealing with a dashboard of sorts and mock-ups and samples in the fracture interface (future project for adilas).

Super cool mock-ups, tons of potential. We are going to be pitching some of these mock-ups to current and perspective clients. See attached for a number of screenshots.

Some other topics that we discussed are: investments, prototypes, reverse shopping carts (brining products into the system), global master lists, virtual catalogs and being able to copy values from the catalogs, predictive buying and selling trends, thresholds with maxes and mins, and other topics. Good stuff.

Jonathan Wells (designer) was on the meeting with Steve and I. He had some questions... the deeper we get, the more we really need to get all the way out to mini conversions. It is becoming more and more plain to see. Our users really want to see their quantities, units of measure, and weight equivalence values. We can fake it right now, but it really needs to go deeper for some of our reporting. Nothing new, we already know about this, we just are seeing the need for mini conversions being pushed forward. It is gaining momentum and steam (warming up and getting hot).

Steve and I looked into the restore quote to cart functionality for Molly. We looked over a number of core pages and also found some custom files. Nothing jumped out at us, everything looked pretty normal. We determined to do some testing with and without the custom code to see if that changed anything. Steve will do that later on based on his time.

The last hour of so was spent with Steve and Brandon going over their business model, going over ideas, and lightly pitching ideas back and forth about adilas as a trust, profit sharing, coop type options, and other business decisions. Trying to figure out the best approach and how we would handle investments, employees, ownership options, etc. Good meeting.

Got on a meeting with Russell just to get him some server log files. He is going to be parsing them and building a tool to pull the log files apart (one of his class projects for school).

Anyways, as we were downloading logs and what not, we ended up striking up a conversation about the adilas model and how things were working. I took a whole other page of notes, see attached. Lots of good stuff. No immediate answers, but openly talking about things and where we want things to go. Steve ended up joining us once we got part way through our meeting. Totally impromptu type meeting, but some good things.

Part way through the meeting, I merged in some code for Steve. We also talked a lot about managing starts and stops (transitions on code projects). That is tough to manage some times. Here are some of the other notes.

Good things...

- Lots of projects coming in with funding
- People want what we are doing

- Limited number of devs
- Some don't like mmj projects
- 2 guys that are designers
- Few project managers

- We don't need more normal developers... we need more mmj developers (currently)

- Smart enough to work on their own but be able to understand

- Project manager and product manager on mmj side
Steve, Dustin, Eric, Spencer, Danny, Bryan, Jonathan Wells

- Here's our problem... how can we get people in and working on those projects quickly
- Not shooting for the best model... but enough to help it work and function

- We are looking for people who are willing to play how we need them to play
- There is a different team that is working on r & d and new code

- Laser focused training to get them up to speed.
- Training for existing developers (already trained but just switching syntax)

- The core system needs to be separate from the business verticals that are built on that core

- Every business vertical needs its own team/manager to really help it play together

- Lift where you stand... take care of your space

- If you get teams that just deal with specific verticals... they become productive in their space - cover your zone

- Trying to keep developers in their flow... the transitions (starts and stops) kill and drain the energy

- Working overtime vs more people working part time - Steve used to do this in the car business

- Managing those resources and making sure we are paying for our guys

- Priorities

- We are looking for developers that know other code... and it only takes 10-20 hours to get them up to speed vs months and months or years and years. We can't train from the ground up.

- Behind the funding game... robbing peter to pay paul

- Making those hard decisions... who is critical?

- Take care of the assets that help the ship keep running

- Budgetting and setting priorities - working within those budgets - what about your family? Looking for the best bang for the buck

- High level decisions and then trickle down to what is needed

- We get enough smaller jobs... the little things start to sink the ship

- Steve's idea... work on what is being asked for and help make it look better while we are in there - bring the designers back inside to help with the current projects

- Constant process of refinement... less clicks, looks better, more automation, looking for the easy button

- Where are things headed... as a question?

- Things keep changing... because we are in a system, you get cause and effect

- If we don't redo or rework some of the pieces... this ship will sink

- We need take care of the customers but we also need to say no at times.

- We build and build and build - we may need new architecture - things have changed over the course and we need to build and/or adapt - we are not what we started out to be and/or were developed to be

- Analogy - cleaning the house... move everything out and do a deep clean or just clean one area at a time

- What is the vision of where we are going... ok, once we know, let's start moving towards that new model - how do you help spread that vision and direction?

- Breaking and pulling out the logic into their own functions (api sockets, function, objects, etc.) - the key is to isolate logic from the view of the page

- Following the processes and procedures to get to the end goal

- Where is the puck going to be... dream it up, and then trim it down if needed

- Improving from where we are at - ok, where are we going... we need to have a master vision

- By small and simple things, great things are brought to pass - little drops in a bucket, over time, they will add up

- Thinking and considering the choice of languages along the way

- Slow and steady wins the race

Nice little meeting between Steve, Cory, Russell, and myself. The main goal of the meeting was how and what priorities we have for Russell and his team for the next few weeks. They, some of Russell's team are in between schooling stuff and doing a small sprint for the summer months. Here are some of my notes from the meeting today.

- We went back and forth on cutting out or adding in the new cart stuff. We ended up cutting out the new invoice homepage to substitute in work on the general cart project. We know that it may not be fully done by end of summer. Small time frame but we know that we need it - eventually.

- Some of the other projects are: new invoice homepage, roles and user permissions, corp-wide settings, header/footer session values, etc.

- Russell spends a lot of time prepping the vision of where we are headed and where we are going.

- Lots of talk between the new invoice homepage and the shopping cart. We hit this subject multiple times. As some side notes, if we do the invoice homepage, we would also want to add new graphical homepages for expense/receipts, PO's, deposits, etc. Kind of a suite of graphical homepages.

- Alan's name kept coming up due to skill level and deeper tasks. He is one of the main assets and everybody wants his help.

- When it comes to time... it feels like there is a pull to either be a developer and doing development or being a project manager and helping others. It is really tough to be both at an effective level. It seems like a choice - either development or project management.

- We are seeing three new carts coming into play soon - Spencer - one-pager quick cart, Jonathan Wells and Kelly - smart cart - industry specific, and Russell - new generic and configurable cart.

- We are heading more and more toward mobile friendly designs.

- Keep moving the core system along. We want to keep working where our clients will be - help them by keeping the ball moving forward in a good and positive direction.

- There were some talks about help files and splitting things up. This could be smaller help files or actually making them more in-line where needed. Ideas about pulling them more into the page flow and showing things just in time, as needed.

- Education mode, videos, helping our users with smaller, in-line help, and options. This could even include tech support and online chat, per page.

- Use technology to keep solving the problems that keep coming up.

- Ideally, keep finding predictive ways of responding to needs.

- We were talking about Russell's small team of developers and options for them once Russell goes back to school. There will be projects enough and to spare... Keep honing in on their talents and skills. Let them run where they can. Good stuff.

- There was quite a bit of talk about smaller redesign projects and lots of form fields and in-line validation stuff. We could gain or get a lot of mileage by doing some small tweaks to the layout and forms, including in-line form validation stuff.

- Chuck could even teach a class on doing in-line form validation to help the other developers.

- We now have access to page level JavaScript and custom JavaScript per page. This is one of the new changes based on the projects that Russell and his team have already produced this summer.

- One of Russell's favorite things is dreaming it up and then really making it happen and function like we were dreaming. That is awesome! Real-time problem solving.

- Everything is heading to customizable and configurable - out of the box - that's where we are headed.

Shannon and I jumped on our normal Tuesday meeting. Right as we started, we got a call from Russell and he wanted to show someone the things he was working on. Basically, a small breakthrough on his current project and just wanted an audience to bounce ideas off of. So, we invited him in to our meeting. As a side note, Shannon, Russell, and I are all brothers and sisters.

Anyways, Russell started showing us some of the new help file options that he is working on. The older system had one help file per page as a whole. Nothing super special and very much a set static page. Some of the new code that Russell is working on is a way to break the help files up into sections and dynamically make them popup and be more consumable. It also offers new options to put in business vertical, industry, or even corporation specific help options. All of the new stuff is there, hidden, but showable on demand without much effort. Light approach on the education mode that Jonathan Wells introduced in some of his prototype demos for the fracture project. Great stuff.

We ended up bouncing all over the place with Shannon, Russell, and I for the meeting. Here are some other notes:

- Help files can seem like a mountain of info... what if we could take those mountains and break them up in to smaller ice bergs of information. Once again, make it more consumable and a nicer presentation.

- Help files could be expanded into courses, videos, quick ticks, settings, and other help or education material. Don't limit yourself to just a plain old help file.

- Russell is prepping and paving the road for where we want to go and who we want to be. Some of that prep work will need others to help fill in the gaps but the virtual roads and ways will already be built. That's fun to think about.

- After Russell was done with his demo on new help files and options for helper sections, we switched and I pitched a few of the concepts that Steve, Sean, and I were talking about earlier today. See this element of time for those notes.

- Switching over to the adilas core platform concept (pretend that you have a floating platform that is supported by the adilas core - different businesses, industry specific options, modules, tools, features, and a virtual city with different buildings and structures resides on the floating platform)... Russell had a number of comments on this subject. He was going so fast that I couldn't catch everything. I should have recorded it. He has some great insight on this topic. Here is what I caught.

- If playing on the platform, what are my boundaries? What are the rules? How do I play? and What will all of this cost? These were questions that Russell wants to know and others who want to play will also want to know. A good starting place.

- Are there maintenance fees? commissions (possibly both ways), license fees, server fees, etc.? Put out and post all the specs that you can - help to sell it as a service. SaaS - software as a services and PaaS - platform as a service type models and mixing the two of them.

- If someone makes their own module, we would love them to be able resale it and/or offer it to others. Once again, what are the rules?

- Imagine being able to quickly choose from modules to build a custom or industry specific tool very easily. That would be awesome.

- What about getting a portion or percent of earnings for using the adilas platform? Just a thought.

- We need to charge based off the components that we offer and what they use. Be able to pass on certain client costs directly to our clients.

- What if there was a certain fee to get in there and play? This could be a service type contract or whatever. Just spitting out ideas right now.

- Back to rules and costs for certain things... servers, domain names, databases, storage, files, images, scans, documents and files, throughput, API socket calls, different modules, components, other pass along charges, 3rd party prices, etc. List it out.

- We could make it profitable by building it, supporting it, selling it, or even pitching it. Lots of options.

- We could also offer other services (virtual marketplace of services). One of which could be consulting for other companies.

- This is a side note, but we have said over and over again, that the services that are needed are more than 10 times the value of the actual product (adilas software). Whoever owns and/or participates in that part of the puzzle will be doing well. Just a small side note.

- If we build it correctly and publicize it correctly, people will come to us and say... Can I do this or that? I want to play.

- It came back to being able to make the application into quick plug and play modules that could interconnect, interact, and turned on/off very easily.

- We talked about pitching ideas... in multiple directions. People pitching us ideas and we, as a company, pitching ideas their way.

- We want really generic tools that may be mixed and blended as needed. Yet, being generic, you could also put a spin or small tweak on it to make it custom in a heartbeat. Quick and dirty changes.

- Help others realize their dreams. Have the ecosystem ready for those dreams to be built and realized. Russell kept saying, people will come to us, once they realize what they can do.

- Speaking about frameworks, conventions, and prepping for growth in different areas. Make it easy, pretty, and powerful. Prep the way...

- Endless possibilities, being able to mix and match to get the perfect flow or perfect mix of tech, ease, and power.

- If we open up our model, we could potentially even buy some of our clients products and pieces if we see merit, need, or wants. Open model.

- Both internal and external modules need to be able to play together.

- We did talk some about IP (intellectual property) and who owns what. It all needs to be spelled out in the rules and how you play the game.

- Think of Legos (kid's (big and small) building blocks - that interconnect) - We may need to make certain things opensource and standard plug-and-play type technology.

- Small talks about limiting and protecting our clients. We may certain limits in order to protect all parties. No limits sounds awesome, but that usually means that someone will abuse things and possibly harm other players. We also talked about ownership and other intellectual property stuff here as well.

- Just some ideas for core pieces that we, as a company, may want to bring up... adilas core, adilas platform, adilas shop (development), adilas services, adilas market, adilas university, etc. "See a need, fill a need" - Robots the animated movie.

As a funny side note... Russell was talking and I was scribbling notes as fast as I could. Front and back of multiple post-it notes. We may want to record the next session, Russell has some great ideas along these lines. Fun.

Steve and Cory were on for a bit talking about finances, plans, billing, and other options. After Cory left, Steve and talked about harnessing user clicks as a way to get things done. We keep coming back to that as a possible option for getting big migration tasks done without us (our internal team) doing all of the clicking and migration of the data. A way of harnessing what is already happening with small side tasks that need to be done. We've considered this and thought about this before. Somehow, we keep coming back to it. I'd love to see it get put into play.

Once Shannon and I got on our part of the meeting, we did a little bit of review and then split up to work on our own part of the info graphic harnessing project (picking up the pieces from years of doing the developer's notebook and other concepts and drawings). Shannon was doing some research. I was going through folders with screenshots for R&D on the adilas café and our future project called fracture. Going through screenshots from Jonathan Wells. As a side note, I made a small folder on my local box to pull the best shots into one place. Eventually, they will be part of the R&D photo gallery. Part of this page (we'll add a new section).

Danny and some of the crew on the morning meeting this morning. There was a small sales theme going on in the meeting. Danny was commenting about sales and getting good communications between sales and the developers. The developers, me included, build and build, but don't let anybody know. Constant moving platform. Good communication is key. We talked about ways of improving those communication lines.

I ended up showing those on the meetings some of the Adobe XD files that I got from Jonathan Wells, just the other day. It was like Christmas. I was showing them stuff, zooming in, panning out, scrolling, drawing, and pitching some of the ideas and concepts for fracture, new shopping carts, and the adilas café. For the record, Brandon has a whole folder that has tons and tons of Adobe XD files that were done in 2019/2020 by Jonathan Wells. All of it was graphic R&D and research. Very much a little treasure box. Here is the file path (www_adilas/extras/jonathan_wells/xd_from_jonathan)

Marisa  was on the meeting this morning as well. She was getting excited to see some of the prototypes and mock-ups. We want to start harvesting some of those R&D projects. Lots of work and efforts have gone in there and some of the mock-ups look great and make us (and our clients) excited. As a small side note, we somewhat switched gears and talked about outside investors and seeking outside funding sources. I pointed them to a document that we made a couple of weeks/months ago that talked about some of our plans. We called it the questionnaire summary report from an internal questionnaire. Here is a link to the doc (pdf) - questionnaire summary. Light talk about investors and seeking funding. Danny, Marisa, Sean, and Steve were chiming in. Good meeting!

Shannon and I had a good little work session. Shannon was doing research and recording notes for good elements of time (in the developer's notebook) that had some content and images that we could harness for the R&D gallery and concept gallery (photo galleries). See attached for her notes and research.

Going along with the harvest type mentality for the day, I showed Shannon some of new Adobe XD files that I got from Jonathan Wells. Super fun and I was trying to share the dream with Shannon! Lots of potential and vision out there for the taking!

While Shannon was doing her research, I was working on an old training site that Russell did way back in 2015. No ones knows about it. I went through a few of the pages, fixed some links, removed some really old stuff, and pushed the files up into the master code branch. This is the address: https://data0.adilas.biz/training/ 

It is kinda fun to try to harvest some of the older stuff. It's old to us (me) but some people have never seen it. Almost like a little treasure hunt. I'm trying surface what I can without going super deep and getting majorly involved (aka sucked into the black hole). Other small changes and pushing files up and live on the servers. Fun little project.

John asked me for some file over email. I knew that we had them, but I hadn't been able to get back to them and review them. The files in question were tons of great R&D files on fracture done by Jonathan Wells. I started to review the files and got completely sucked in and inspired by the level of detail, the work and research that was done, and the possibilities. Great stuff. Anybody who is researching the fracture project, needs to review those Adobe XD files. Wonder full. The originals were done between 2019 and 2020. There are numerous screenshots that have been posted, but the real value is in the raw files, including the clickable desktop previews (mini click through slides and links on the actual documents).

Towards the end of this session, Heather (my wife) came down to talk with me. I showed her some of the things that I was playing with and learning about. Great enhancements and much easier to consume and digest. I loved working with Jonathan Wells, sad that it had to end (time and budgets), but we got a lot of great stuff (R&D, research, mock-ups, ideas, and direction) from the efforts.

See attached for a small list of XD files that I was looking at.

When I got on, Steve had some questions about time templates and making some of them hidden and not allowing users to interact with them. I thought that was interesting, as when we were developing time templates, that there were needs back in 2010 and first part of 2011 where we wanted to build system monitors and system time templates and not let the users interact with them and/or change anything on them. Originally, that was one of the reasons for thinking up some of the templates in the first place. We talked about possible solutions and using the time template status to help control - active, inactive, and hidden templates. The hidden ones would or could end up being the system controlled templates. They would exist, but we could limit them from being edited, updated, and even viewed from time to time. Lots of options.

The other day,  Shannon and I were thinking about permissions and settings and it felt like there was a third piece to that mix. I couldn't put my finger on it. I'm wondering if it has something to do with a mix between the two and dealing with templates, of all kinds, not just time templates. A template is somewhat of possible mix between permissions and settings. Technically, you could have user-defined templates, system templates, time templates, invoice templates, user templates, location templates, corporation templates, etc. The list could go on and on. The templates allows for an interesting mix and also playing more in bulk vs single or standalone permissions and settings. Anyways, just a thought.

Danny, Dustin, and John were on the meeting as well. Each one checked in on what they were doing. Dustin will be out of pocket during the month of September, he was just letting us know (family and travel plans). Also, just wanted to record this - "family first" - super common phrase that comes out of Steve's mouth. Good stuff. In the end, that's what really matters.

Towards the end of the meeting, I was explaining to those on the meeting what Shannon and I are working on and how we are comparing the game changer of the video recorder to what Adilas is doing on the same business recording type level. I gave them some examples and we chatted about some ideas. Tons of potential.

We talked about how the video recorder went through a whole process and series of adaptations to go from big, huge, super expensive, exclusive, and had to have special equipment, budgets, and connections to being handheld, on a phone, in almost every hand (literally) and even cool inventions like the GoPro and how small, mobile, shockproof, waterproof, etc. It has become accepted and readily available. It really is and was a major game changer. Adilas is following a similar path in what we are trying to do and record and make accepted and available our business recordings. It (adilas) is the business recording device, without having to use 6-10 different software packages and then trying to marry things together in a huge mash-up type model.

This, adilas platform and dynamic app, is a fully integrated and fully functioning system - system being the keyword. End to end, the whole digital story. I can't tell you how many times we have said, wouldn't it be cool if we could play the virtual story (movie) backwards or forward and could stop, pause, or replay certain happenings. We don't have the data quite that flowy (aggregated and rolled up summaries and counts) yet but it is getting better and better. Think of the kind of data and business intel (BI - business intelligence) we will be able to get and show as we keep going forward. Once again, end to end, the full digital story! Backwards and forwards! Super cool!

Dustin - How to show an elephant? You show a picture of it and then break it down. We were looking over some research and Adobe XD documents from Jonathan Wells and talking about getting those prototypes, visuals, and mock-up's out to the public. Good stuff. Lots of work there still to do. Show people and the world what is possible. Adilas is a huge, working, fully functional prototype. We would love for people to take the time to really see what we are doing and working on. The trick is how do you do that? Make people slow down and/or take notice of what is going on. Lots to offer!

John and I were on a meeting. I ended up doing a little bit more research and looking at the file from Jonathan Wells and his Adobe XD mock-ups and prototypes. I FTPed  the files up to the content server. John asked me to explain the content server and how that whole thing works. We did a lot of drawing and bouncing to different pages to explain the processes. Some of the highlights were talking about why and how we allow for 3 different sources for media/content (files). We allow for local paths (where are things stored on the local computer or drive), remote references (where are files stored on outside or other servers such as google drive, drop box, skydrive, etc.), and finally, physical upload (files that you push up to our servers for storage and security). Great questions.

John really wants to help out with some visual flow charts and graphical user interfaces, including graphical homepages and layouts. That would really help - for people to get their heads around what is out there, possible, built-in, and available. Each section needs a small visual and/or virtual map of the area. As we get into fracture, I really want to include some maps of the sections so that people could follow along, know what is there, and also be able to customize their own workspace and data flow (digital assembly line with phases, sub locations, date/time stamps, checkpoints, etc.). Make the whole thing a visual delight to work with and organize your space or work environment.

Talking about the internal shopping carts. We went over some of the pros and cons of the short and sweet cart (still in beta mode). We then switched gears and looked at the progress on the parts section (current facelift project). Light code review with Chuck. We also talked about the lead magnet that he and Marisa are working on. Chuck reported on his training hours and where he is spending his time. I made sure that he had access to the Adobe XD shopping cart stuff that I had from Jonathan Wells. He is working on research and gathering up information about the carts (internal secure and external ecommerce carts). He is also doing some research on some of the competition that is out there.

Sean and I looking into the older code from the Leafly integration (back in 2019) done by Will Hudson. We were somewhat going through some of the pieces and virtually reverse engineering what we saw (looking at existing code and trying to figure it out). Basically, what was built by Will and what did it do?

John showed me some stuff on his discount engine. We were looking into a CSS (display) issue. We decided to wait for Chuck who would be popping in on the next meeting.

Just recording an idea, but what if we had Bryan help us out with some training and education stuff. We are really lacking there. Bryan could build it and then we could have Chuck make it look nice. Basically, Bryan could help with content and Chuck could help with presentation. There is a huge need for training, flow, processes, SOP's, etc. Also, just another idea... What if we put Bryan on a project to see if we could write a grant for building out fracture and where we would like to take it (huge future project in adilas and revamping the whole system). That might have some merit. We could really use some major funding to push that whole project forward. I know that Bryan has written other articles and/or research papers. Just a thought.

If needed, we could use the adilas developer's notebook to do more research on the whole fracture project. Lots of notes and ideas have been posted and pushed up to the developer's notebook over time. A great resource. A lot of it ties in with the adilas cafe and community that we are trying to build. We also have tons of R&D (research and development) on new UI/UX stuff from Jonathan Wells. Lots of great little ideas and such. Good starting point.

There were a few of us on the morning meeting. My internet kept dropping in and out. As we started the meeting, Sean and Steve were talking about 3rd party solutions and some of their needs. We are seeing a need and demand for better documentation of the adilas API sockets. We have them, we use them internally, and outside parties use them. We just need to keep giving that section some loving to really make it shine.

Steve asked me about my meeting with my dad and his friend Harry. I mentioned to them that they wanted to see rentals and reservations, as one of the first things that they wanted to know how to do. We can do it, but that too needs a little bit of work and automation. I will keep working with Bryan to keep fine tuning the elements of time and the rentals, reservations, and availability layers that we are working on.

After that, Steve asked a few code questions. He reported that he has been in conversation with some older independent adilas reps. They contacted him and may come join us, internally on our team. That would be cool!

John was showing the guys a demo of the new pages that he has been working on for new look and feel stuff. We talked about hiding some of the text in the forms and making it look simpler. As we were talking, we were telling John that some of those processes are very repetitive and once they learn it, they want to go as fast as possible. As a older side note, when we were working with Jonathan Wells, he had the idea of the education mode where you could turn on/off extra helper verbiage or helpers (handrails of sorts). Great idea.

It is amazing how fast GUI's or UI (graphical user interfaces) change. In a way, we and everyone else is competing with the big dogs as far as expectations and demands. That makes it tough. Along those lines, it would be really cool to gather more info on how our clients are using our system and what they like and don't like. We have tons of data, just no really way to process it and make an analysis of it. That would take a whole other person to really get in there and dig through settings, usage, traffic, choices, wants, needs, etc. That would be really cool but feels like one of those projects that is still out there a ways.

The last topic of the day was another plug for the datasource project and getting everyone on their own database (bus to motorcycle project). It has my vote as well.

Back to the main index for the master adilas plan

Master Adilas Plan - Jellyfish Model

Brainstorming Ideas and Topics:

- How big do you want to be? – See also the internal questionnaire responses and survey - tons of good info there - almost a mini plan by itself. Also, question 7 on the survey has a whole write up on the adilas jellyfish or jelly fish model and explains it further.

- The adilas jellyfish model - see attached - covers almost all of the departments and sub sections of what we are trying to be as a company. It is not the main product, but more of our internal and external departments, areas, and general areas that we will keep refining and working on.

- Possible numbers for the jellyfish model. Going from top to bottom and from left to right.
1. adilas.biz
2. Admin
3. Monthly Reoccurring Service
4. Sales & Marketing
5. Setup & Training
6. Tech Support
7. Design
8. Custom Code
9. Consulting
10. R&D
11. Project Management
12. Internal Development & Maintenance
13. Adilas University
14. Adilas Marketplace
15. Adilas Cafe & Community - Adilas World
16. Databases, Networks, Servers, & IT

Areas, sections, and departments in more detail:

** for me - go deeper into each section **

1. adilas.biz

• Are we going to stay the same entity? Are we the same or are we different entities? Are we rebranding? Are we piggybacking?
• What version are we on?
• Adilas.biz or adilas lite? Branding? Marketing? etc.
• The thing that keeps us all together is the reoccurring monthly services subscription for the main adilas.biz system. It has been the glue that keeps us together.
• Offering upgrades from ship A (current adilas) to ship B (fracture or adilas lite)
• What are our goals for ship A? What are our goals for ship B? Are we building it up to sell it? Are we going to be replacing ship A? How do you transition between the two.
• We want to make our current product better. It then grew into a full or bigger rewrite. It seems to be changing more and more. Originally, it was pretty small changes.
• Timelines to get things done? What will it take?
• Ship A will be great salespeople for ship B, once ready.
• If people change from ship A to ship B, there needs to be an increase or at least a re-evaluation of monthly fees and services.
• Ship B, we are planning for tiered pricing and dynamic billing based on functions, sizes, usage, storage, and preset packages.
• Ship B, they can toggle on/off different settings, include other features, and change what they want. All of this will reflect on dynamic billing options.
• Talking about future plans - selling it, royalties, secession, retirement, etc.

2. Admin

• The admin's role is to manage the budget, make decisions as to the direction that we need to go, do HR type functions, payroll, manage the different groups and departments, communication channels, general running of the day to day business.
• This could be one person, multiple people, a board, a council, etc. Somebody or some entity needs to be in control.
• Co-owners, Co-Founders, CEO's, presidents, vice-presidents, board members, etc. We can figure that out.
• If we do one person, we need to have VP's or managers in the other departments.
• One of our problems is that none of us (on the current team) want to be that person or take on this whole responsibility.

3. Monthly Reoccurring Service - aka Billing (new name)

• This is billing, invoicing, receiving, dealing with monies coming in and reaching out to our clients.
• Accounts receivables
• This could be tied in with admin roles
• Debt collection, bad debt, accounting, financials, etc.
• Setting up new corps (currently) and sending welcome emails and collecting business contact info.
• Bank reconciliation, paying bills, prep the budget info, etc.
• We could automate some of this, in the future.

4. Sales & Marketing

• We like that they are together. This is anything to generate and keep new clients to keep coming in and paying for our services. This could be publicity, knowledge about the system, get new demos, entice our clients to buy and keep buying from us. Serving their needs.
• Currently, the main method of marketing is word of mouth and referrals.
• We have used sales reps, consultants, and light networking. Steve and Kelly have been some of our biggest sales type people.
• We want to listen to what feedback they are bringing back. Currently, the sales people and the developers almost live in two different places.
• Sales should have a good pulse on what is working, what is not working, and what people and our clients are asking for. We tend to get lots of good ideas from clients. Sometimes, what that takes or the priority, that can get tricky.
• How big do we want to be? Get everybody or get enough (sufficient)? Keep pushing into other markets or be content with good ROI?
• Helping with market research, looking around and checking out markets, and what do we need to do to penetrate those markets?
• We almost feel like being in no man's land - too big for just a few people to push on it, not quite big enough to really have the team that we need to push it. Do we push and go bigger? Or do we trim down and keep it like it is (not really coasting but strategically developing as we can)? There are associated questions about speed, reliability, and uptime.
• Along with sales and marketing, there are expectations that are set and keep changing (trends and expectations).
• We need to know who we are servicing. Currently, we are kind of all over the place. We have little accounts, medium accounts, and some big accounts. We could go any direction. We just need to decide. Where is the sweet spot?
• If we want to be big and grand, we will need some major funding and thus major sales and marketing. Or do we figure out the sweet spot and really refine and focus in on things.
• Making things more stable and more reliable. Keep improving.
• We have a lot to offer - no one has even heard of us.
• The new and upcoming business owners are going to be fully connected and have certain expectations. If you want to get those guys/gals, you're going to have to revamp things.
• Our current mix is very developer heavy. We really need to switch that focus and get things that people want. Easy, Powerful, and Pretty!
• We need this department to really keep us in the know on what is going on. Currently, we don't have anyone fully dedicated or assigned to this department. We've been missing this piece.

5. Setup & Training

• Originally, we didn't charge for any of this. We just wanted people to get on our system. We are now charging for this and even trying to presale some of the training, deployment, and setup stuff. We are finding and have found, that people who get setup correctly and have the correct amount of training stay longer on our system. It has a learning curve, and that proper setup and training goes a long way.
• Currently, one of our system admin persons has to go in and create the corp, do a bunch of the settings, assign the master users, setup the logos and colors, and get them going. Most of that requires someone from our team to hold their hand along that process.
• Futuristically, we really want to help automate a bunch of that. Have them setup their own corp, let them pick what industries they want to play into, help them with their settings (wizard style), and then even help them pull in their data (without any other involvement). Let them create a test account or a free version, play around, and then either upgrade or get some help.
• Offer services to help our clients. Also have a number of self-help tools and features to let them do it themselves.
• We would love to develop a number of preset packages and industry specific skins.
• We would like the setup and training to be coupled with education and the adilas university side of things. They are very related.
• Getting products, customers, vendors, and other info into the system easily. Currently, we have to do a bunch of that (data imports) on a one-by-one basis. We need to make that more global and self-help level.
• Provide a good starting point to help them succeed. Show them the benefits and advantages of doing it our way or how we help them succeed.
• This department or division could include the adilas university, training, tech support, setup, and training.
• Easy access to get help and direction if needed.
• We see a lot of user error type problems. Figure out ways of helping them stay in their lane better or put up guardrails or bumpers to keep them on track.
• It has only been recently that we have added more focus on the setup, deployment, and training.
• This department could also include on-going training and retention. That is huge. Things constantly keep changing and we keep adding on new features.

6. Tech Support

• Currently, we allow people to email or call for tech support. It's free but often bleeds over into full on training, not tech support.
• We could build out a report a bug or open up a ticket or an issue. Make it easier to get support.
• We could provide better help files, tips, how-to's, videos, tutorials, and in-person training events.
• Everybody uses the system so differently, that makes it kind of tough. It would be nice if we have tech support stuff that was industry specific or catered to a specific industry.
• Tech support really should be part of the training, setup, and deployment stuff.
• Tech support could be a small carrot for deeper training and/or offering other paid services.
• Helping to show the value of deeper training and education.
• Having a standard way of getting to training and even industry specific training.
• Offer some adilas university training courses - covering various subjects on scheduled dates/times.
• Really helping to push the training and education stuff. Tech support should be quick, temporary, and non reoccurring. Show them the benefits of getting properly trained.
• As we move forward, we are planning on simplifying things. That should help with the training needs and the tech support stuff. Helping them figure it out on their own.
• If people (our clients) really want more tech support, we could offer more robust or advanced support packages.

7. Design

• This could be websites, forms, reports, interfaces, dashboards, UI/UX (user interfaces and user experience). This is the pretty and easy part of it. The powerful may be from a feature or backend process.
• Most of our current guys are developers, not designers.
• We don't charge enough, as such, we tend to skimp on the design phases and processes. This tends to get skipped or minimalized.
• We tend to do function over form - however, most clients say that they want function over form, but really, they want form over function - they want it to work and look pretty.
• Our project management tends to be a simple one liner. Do such and such. No other plans, requirements, mock-ups, or fixed specs exist.
• Mock-ups, prototypes, samples, wireframes, flow charts, graphics, videos, etc. We want to show the plan, air it out, and then build to the specs.
• Modern look and feel and user experience keeps changing. We need someone to keep watching and keeping up with trends, expectations, and options. This needs to be monitored and maintained regularly.
• Figuring out and sticking to a style guide. We do have a section called the "adilas docs". We have been working on it, but it has not been fully adopted yet. We need to set those standards and then stick to it. This is our style guide, and we are sticking to it.
• Doing some test cases and getting user/client feedback. How did their experience work out and what did we learn from that?
• Planning in maintenance and upkeep.
• Our clients squawk at things not being consistent. I don't mind change but I don't like some change and other things not being consistent. We could also introduce settings.
• We could allow the users, or corporations, to choose their default layouts. Horizontal forms, vertical forms, stacked forms, or auto formatted. We also want to store those settings and allow them to change it on the fly on per user basis.
• We need some consistency - this deals with who the designer is, what we are designing and outputting, people's preferences and opinions, and where we are heading. We can all be different, but we need to be consistent.
• Allow people to try things out and/or fully switch over.
• There is a point when we need to keep moving forward so we don't have to keep supporting all of the older styles and themes. Help make that as smooth as possible.
• We have some needs for design work out in ecommerce, customer facing sites, portals, and even business websites or web presence stuff.
• We need designers to help with marketing and social media stuff. Once again, consistency, specific plans, strategic campaigns, etc.

8. Custom Code

• This is one of the things that really sets us apart from other systems. We love it and even encourage it.
• We currently have tons of black box options. That was a solution at the time. There are some great concepts there (black box stuff) but we did run into problems.
• The code base keeps changing. We have had people ask for things, we build it custom for them and then wrap back and make it standard. The ones who got the custom version are now off on their own vs being fully integrated into the main codebase.
• We offer a lot of this. Having said that, we don't charge enough.
• We would like to move as much as possible to data driven settings and permissions.
• One of our current issues in maintainability. If it was on the side (like a black box page) it got left behind. The main pages always got updated but anything custom was harder to test, and harder to main it.
• If we do custom code, we need to build in some maintenance costs to help maintain that.
• We could do a community type approach - who ever helps build it out, gets a commission or a usage fee for others using it. Kinda like a sponsorship or something. We just need to get enough to plan it out, build it out, test it, market it, and then do some sort of kickback or reoccurring usage fee. There may be different levels  - one-time, reoccurring, built in, full one-off custom code, settings, combined projects (we pay, they pay, we then get to use it).
• Custom code should be by our internal developers and internal development team. We need to make sure that it works and doesn't affect something else.
• We have had some maintenance issues. Who made it, what does it do, how does it work, what does it touch, what else does it touch up/down stream, where does it live, how can you get to it, and was there any planning or testing done to the custom code? Tons of potential far reaching questions.
• If we build something... we really need to get an ROI and market those pieces.
• We could do some pay as you go build outs. Monthly fees that get added to their bill. They could pay upfront and then get a payment plan, or set it up on a reoccurring basis, or whatever.
• We need to charge enough. We often shoot ourselves in the foot. We charge pennies to build on top of multi-million dollar platforms and applications.
• We need good planning, good project management, good estimates, and then good developing.
• Estimates - take what you think it will take and double it. Then double that. It's almost a 4x ratio. By the time you add the work to get the work, the work before the work, the work, the work in between the work, the work after the work. It all plays in.
• Paying for both quality and speed.
• On the estimates, we also need to think about opportunity costs and what are we not working on, while doing custom code work.
• Approving custom code. Just because someone wants it... doesn't mean we should build it out. How does it fit with our mission statement, goals, and overarching plans and rollouts?

9. Consulting

• Byproduct of the main reoccurring business services. Once we are in, the system starts generating byproducts and people need to know what is next, how to do certain things, where they could go, options, next steps, phases, etc.
• We haven't really tapped into this yet. We do it, but we could do it so much more.
• This could be tied into the training, setup, and education stuff. Teaching our clients the best way to use the system to get the most out of the system or platform.
• You start getting into paying for knowledge and experience and expertise.
• We have seen many of our power-users become consultants. They know the system, they know how to make it run, sing, dance, and play. That provides a value to others. Those people then offer their expertise and know how to help others.
• Currently, some of this is done on the side. Adilas has no part in it, and no kickback exits. We would love to bring this more inside but that takes money to keep those people on call or on staff.
• This could be a great thing to add to the adilas marketplace.
• We may allow some outside stuff to go on, but we need some rules. We could configure this any way we want, we just need some rules.
• This could be part of the adilas cafe scenario - our clients seeking out a professional to help them out.
• Do we want to manage this internally? What would that look like? Once again, we may need some rules here.

10. R&D

• Research and Development - You have to spend time here to move the ball forward. If you aren't going to move forward, nothing will happen, you will live and die. You have to keep up, especially with tech stuff.
• Exploring different avenues - there are costs for exploring.
• Cutting edge, bleeding edge, sweet spot, new ish, or older/classic?
• How much does it cost to be on that cutting edge?
• Vision, plans, and looking to the future. Where are we/you heading? Plans, how are you going to get there?
• It really comes down to where do you want to play (on the spectrum)?
• Training what is new.
• Maintenance for what was or has been developed. Technical debt.
• Stable and known or less stable and new - How quick will the older pieces change and/or be deprecated? If it's so new, it may not even stick.
• We make things and then it sits on a shelf. That hurts. There could be difference between development that didn't get fully funded vs totally new prototyping and experimenting.
• Is this something we should do? On not? Figuring out what it takes to make something happen.
• Looking into speed, efficiency, demand, cost analysis, needs analysis, scope, scale, and reality of doing certain things.
• Beta testing, prototypes, experiments, testing, pushing boundaries.
• Currently some of our R&D is mixed in with our code. We try things to see if it works. Without being consistent with other pages and code. We often have good intentions (prepping for the future - mini stubs or prepping for stuff) but then get pulled on to other projects. We do a lot of experimenting within our projects. Almost a revolving door or revolving code set. Basically, a fully working, living prototype.
• We are seeing a mix between custom code, R&D, and project management.
• Back tracing or reverse engineering things. Sometimes if you know what you want, you can then figure out a way to get there, that might be easier or better.
• Being aware of what's out there? How could I use some of that in my projects?

11. Project Management

• We have really been missing this piece. We do a ton of just in time project management. We are not very good at doing a more full design, plan, or architecture type layout.
• We do a lot of this one-on-one right now. One project and one developer.
• The project manager can and does act as the shield between the client and the developer. Buying some time or deflecting decisions.
• They help with quotes, estimates, and project specs, scope, costs, timelines, and details. Lots of potential back and forth communication is needed.
• We have spent a ton of time and money going back and fixing things that should have been planned out originally. We have also spent money where a developer makes a decision and just does something and doesn't ask or doesn't get any clarification.
• Teams - authority, accountability, and responsibilities - setting up clear expectations. We have played around here a bit. We need to refine things here a bit, based on our needs. We had some people who were so worried about how to do scrum that it didn't actually happen. We also had some problems with free riders. We want to use some small teams, but still need to get it refined a bit better.
• Dealing with teams, we were trying to do some training... and we didn't really have it all defined. Wasted time in meetings, talking about code, and what is needed. We then fall down based on assumptions or just verbal communication. It needs to be just a little bit deeper and more consistent.
• Team sizes and dynamics.
• As a project manager, not assigning yourself to a required task. Actually, make an assignment to do the project management.
• Someone needs to be available and be the virtual babysitter. Getting rid of hurdles and what is expected of them. Helping them stay on task/track. The project manager's job to help other people succeed.
• Slowdown
• We build and build and build... we need to slow down and test it, train on it, market it, and push it.
• Being able to plan it out so that we can reuse as much code as possible. Giving the developers guidelines, handrails, samples, and good instructions. If it's too tight, they don't want to do it (it takes out the fun of figuring it out). Figure out what developer needs what (how detailed) and then play accordingly. Developers need to accomplish something. Not just follow A-Z and you're done. It is a mix and a spectrum.

12. Internal Development & Maintenance

• This internally funded by adilas to work on adilas. This comes from revenue and budgets to keep the system up and running.
• Bug fixes, maintenance, changes, next steps, phases, testing, documentation, code review, etc.
• This needs to be tied into project management and custom code.
• This is the most defined area that we have inside of adilas.
• We get a plan from project management, we then build it out, test it, deploy it, and make sure that it works.
• We have had problems with guys following style guides. Everybody has their own ideas on what a good style guide is. This could be whitespace in code, tabs, naming conventions, etc. It also happens on the look and feel part of page or report.
• Alan had the idea of having a way of helping to force or standardize the output. Almost a forced style guide or validator of sorts. It all has to comply to a certain standard. Whitespace, naming conventions, comments, indents, variable names, components, etc.
• Keeping things separated - backend, database, objects, services, views, logic, functions, classes, etc.
• In object-oriented programming, you need good encapsulation (only contains what is needed) and low coupling (lower number of steps as possible).
• There is some great value in teams and getting different points of view. A better solution because we worked on it as a team. More well-rounded.

13. Adilas University

• This goes hand in hand with the training and deployment section. This is the training arm of the system. It may also tie in with tech support or consulting. We could combine some of this as needed. Similar type people and knowledge resources.
• General topics for training - One, how do you use the system? Two, how do you run your business? Consulting is a part of this as well - what are the best business practices and how to get the most out of the system.
• There could be standard stuff, custom stuff, and internal stuff.
• Each page would have how to videos, quick videos, and options for more or deeper training.
• We also need to offer some custom or live training events.
• For fracture, we experimented with a thing called the education mode. You could turn it on/off and the system would hide or show more options and information. You could turn it on from any page and all of sudden it would react differently. We have some great screenshots on this from Jonathan Wells. Along with this, the help files could be shown, side-by-side with the page that they are referencing. There were also options to toggle into the actual adilas university site as a tab withing the side-by-side help window.
• There is a known missing gap here on the education and training side of things.
• There could be free levels, basic stuff, and deeper more paid type levels of training and consulting.
• There could also be certification levels, requirements, status, and other testing and certification stuff.
• We are hoping that the adilas lite and fracture project will make it even easier to help train the users and because they can tweak everything, there will actually be less of a need for certain pieces of the education and training. They will still be there, just hidden as needed.
• This could be a whole other business entity, if needed.
• A new user really wants to be guided through - holding their hand. An advanced user may not want any of that stuff in their way, just let them do it quickly.
• Link to this from the adilas cafe.
• If we do certifications, maybe show or allow some of that basic info to show to other users, if they are seeking trained professionals to help them out.
• If we have trained users, those become a value to others who are looking for help or pros on those topics.
• Adilas University could be a stand-alone product, or it could be interwoven with the entire site. Both have the same content, they just either have a standalone navigation system or we help navigate for them based on what page the users are on (context stuff).
• There could be levels to the training... Think of a triangle - simple, basic, intermediate, advanced, and deep or backend logic or design level stuff.
• There may be both external and internal training pieces. Along with that, we may have to have permissions or something that open/closes those training modules for certain people or parties.

14. Adilas Marketplace

• Part of the adilas cafe. People could sell their products and services, buy products and services. Including adilas skills and other professional skills.
• Adilas creates lots of byproducts. This is a way to help harness and gather up those byproducts. 
• Options for 3rd party solutions, white labeling, advertising, marketing, etc.
• Online mini marketplace for adilas products and/or our users could sell their products and services on a mini Amazon or eBay type level (mini consignment type shop built for our users and companies that use our products).
• Possible payment solutions with interest, fees, commissions, and other small kickbacks for using the marketplace.
• Limitless potential for other byproducts and additional services that could be added on to this piece of the puzzle.
• This may need a separate team to help run, manage, and administer this piece of the puzzle. Automate as much as possible.
• Here is a rough draft - Russell did - way back - don't get stuck here... It could be so much more. Adilas Market

15. Adilas Cafe & Community - Adilas World

• A landing spot outside of any corporation or entity.
• A corp selector - where can I go (have permissions or access)?
• Get to the marketplace type stuff.
• Get to the adilas university stuff.
• Forum type stuff - ask Q&A type stuff. This could be answered by staff and/or other users. This would need a moderator or forum manager.
• Let people show that they have the skills that others (businesses and/or individuals) could be looking for. This may include direct messaging or some other way of communicating.
• White labeling options.
• Standardized portal - single sign in be able to jump between servers and corporations.
• Dynamic billing and making payments.
• Mini marketplace for adilas products.
• Sales and creation of new accounts - tiered pricing and auto setup options
• News and updates - configure news feed as needed.
• Interface with other companies and corporations. Get assigned, hub type model.
• Work, play (demo sites), buy, sell, training, social stuff, and participate.

16. Databases, Networks, Servers, & IT

• This is the whole backend of the application or hardware side of things.
• Load management, reliability, up time, speed, redundancy, backups, storage, orchestration, etc.
• Lots of security needs and requirements. They will also be majorly involved in implementation of security.
• Code interacts with these things, but they are separate entities or divisions.
• We will need our own documentation, permissions, training, etc.
• Maintenance and upkeep, prototyping, standardizing, testing, databases, servers, hardware, clusters, network, security, IT stuff.
• Patches, updates, protection, hacker prevention stuff.
• Email servers, text or communication servers, web servers, database servers, backend logic servers (ColdFusion or whatever).
• Monitoring services, requests, traffic, load balancing, stats, specs, remote access, database indexing, automation scripts, tons of IT type stuff.
• Migration stuff, off-hour updates and maintenance, backups, restores, and other tasks.
• Move data around, put things into and out of cold storage, special bulk data manipulation stuff, zip and archiving things, etc.
• Future proofing things.
• Offloading bigger or longer processes.
• API sockets, API endpoints, and being able to load balance traffic, requests, deal with sessions, server config, clustering, and managing small microservices.
• We need a way to get rid or purge some of the pieces. The current system builds and builds. It never really releases or virtually poops (dumps).
• We would love to get a full data dictionary to allow our new frontend to be more data driven.
• This could be multiple people - DBA, IT/Server guys, etc. They could cross over, but these are high level skills and high level people or teams.
• Everything on the hosting side of things. This gets deep but just think - what do we need for hosting? - SSL's, domain names, hard drive space, spinning up servers just in time, pointer records, DNS, DSN, puppet, orchestration, bit bucket, code repositories, ColdFusion Administrator, Fusion Reactor, Papertrail, Nagios, tons of outside services and tools.
• Servers - hard drive sizes, backups, RAM, CPU's, configs, and the list goes on.
• This could go deep and deeper... Etc.

-------------------------

- Alan and I were playing with a mini version or what that might look like (see attached for a mini mock-up of the smaller mini model):

Adilas.biz - admin, monthly billing, and day to day running the company. They could do their own R&D (progress, speed, what the clients are wanting).

Sales & marketing - They could do their own R&D (advertising, pricing, features, marketing materials, etc.).

Consulting, tech support, setup & training, and retention. This could also be part of the adilas university (similar folk). They could do their own R&D (tied into sales, marketing, training, etc.).

Development stuff - project management, custom code, internal development, maintenance, & design. They could do their own R&D (code, frameworks, layouts, look and feel, etc.).

IT stuff - Databases, servers, hardware, hosting, etc. They could do their own R&D (speed, load balancing, redundancy, monitoring, etc.).

Marketplace and adilas cafe - This could be their own little piece or small team. They could do their own R&D (product research, options, pricing, hardware options, services, etc.).

We would love to see each of these sections or divisions (departments) be able to meet and interact with each other on a consistent basis (at least monthly or semi-monthly). Nobody is left on an island by themselves. Communication is huge.

Meeting with John and doing some planning. We were going over themes, ins and outs of how to make a new theme in our existing code, folders, paths, settings, and page level controllers. We talked about some of the new code and R&D that Jonathan Wells did. We are looking for feedback. We may end up offering options and pushing the choices over to the users. Tons of toggle on/off switches for the different features.

People don't want to scroll and they want a minimal number of clicks to make something happen. We talked about getting the information (all kinds) into the database. Minimal on the hardcoded pieces. The whole thing becomes data driven.

I was drawing and talking about different things. We would love to create a master plan. John and I started a small google doc to gather some the of the master plan info so we both could access it.

Shari O. jumped in and had some payroll questions. We did some quick research, pulled some records, and helped her make some changes. We got it all figured out.

New transition today. I popped onto the morning meeting because that is what I normally did. I let the guys know that I wasn't going to be doing that any more. Sean was on the meeting and we chatted for a bit. By way of an update, he is doing great working with the dynamic adilas label builder. He is also willing to do some checking out of what our competitors are doing and providing me some competitive research. Nothing too huge.

John joined the meeting, and we were looking at some mock-ups. We would like to allow our users to interact with options to setup their own space, look and feel, etc. We would also like to do some early prototyping. Get it out and in their hands. Even things like settings for click vs hoover and other simple choices that affect their space (what they do and use - their space, their flow). We already have a bunch that we have paid for and haven't been able to use it yet. We have a ton of R&D stuff that Jonathan Wells did in Adobe XD for fracture, adilas cafe, and a new shopping cart.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Dramatize it, push up XD docs from Chuck on the content server. We have done tons of really cook R&D. Let's use that. This is how we are going to get fracture up and going and off the ground.

John and I talked about trying to centralize all of the data and assets. I have a bunch of it. We have pushed up a bunch to the adilas content server. We also still have quite a few assets and raw authoring files with the guys/gals who made them - Jonathan Wells, Chuck, Russell, Marisa, etc.

As part of our discussion, John was showing me some of the projects that he worked on for school. He's got business design docs, pitches, proposals, flow charts, etc. I'd like to tap into some of those planning and system scope documents. Not necessarily for his project, but more for what we could do for our projects. Once again, show them don't tell them. That is huge and reoccurring theme. Show them, don't tell them.

Here are some other notes from our meeting:

- We could make some awesome customizable dashboards

- Realtime data on what is going on (tables, graphs, charts, and quick aggregates), help them see everything without overwhelming them. Full visibility.

- "Show them" and then do it over and over again.

- Talking about dream salaries between John and I. Where would you like to be, salary wise?

- Keep idea farming - that's what we do

- Shari O. joined the meeting. She loves to do some gaming. I'd love for her to come up with some ideas on how to turn adilas and the daily work into a game of sorts (the game of business). Shari O. said that she could do some light research and maybe come up with some ideas. As we were talking, she said that she changes games based on moods. That's good information. We may want to come up with something similar - what mood are you in? Ok, let's play that way. This is just a dream right now. I'd like to see where it goes.

- Keep gathering things together. Eventually, we will make our own world.

- More ideas for the application and/or system - education mode, game mode, nuts and bolts mode (just get it done - speed mode).

- More talks with Shari O. about Facebook groups, other social groups, having meetings, setting up schedules, and giving people power to run what they want to do. Make the whole thing a team effort.

Awesome session with Alan and I working on the plan for fracture and adilas light. We started out and I was showing Alan some of the R&D for the adilas cafe that Jonathan Wells did a few years back. I sent Alan some links to pull down the Adobe XD mock-up files. After that, we spent the rest of the session working on levels, tiers, user stories, and feature lists for adilas lite. See attached for our notes.

Meeting with Alan. Going over and reviewing my meeting this morning with Aaron and what we are learning and discovering. Alan was showing us (Aspen and I) some VueJS stuff (JavaScript framework). Lots of shortcuts. Mini caching of variables. Listeners and watchers. Two-way passing back and forth. Comparing VueJS to React JS stuff. Event handling and looking into options.

We switched gears and went over needs for training and outside training resources. We did some review of some older R&D stuff from Jonathan Wells. We talked about some new user's stories. I got some notes from Alan (see attached). Light ideas of what Alan wants to do with adilas lite and fracture. We then rolled into a small work session doing stuff with the jelly fish model. See elements of time # 2284 inside of adilas for verbiage there.

Talking with John about the adilas cafe and doing some mock-ups on that interface. We went over some of the older stuff from Jonathan Wells, see entry from back in 9/5/19 for more info. We went over some new mock-ups from John (see attached). After that, we spent the rest of the time going over the SWOT analysis. Today we were finishing up the threats section. See attached for some progress stuff. It is still rough and unfinished, but we are making great progress.

We also got into talking about budgets, making sure that we go mobile first for fracture (adilas lite), and we setup some other times to meet. We are excited to have the first pass done on the SWOT analysis (see attached).

Working with Alan on ship B, fracture, and adilas lite stuff. We were reporting on what we have been doing and who is doing what. Alan has been digging in deeper and checking out ColdBox, CommandBox, React, VueJS (vue), and other code frameworks. I took a few screenshots of his notes (see attached). Here are some other topics that we talked about:

- We would like to organize the features that we want to include and build out. Still on the wish list - to get this done and all organized

- Code style guides

- Features of CommandBox and ColdBox - products by Ortus Solutions - automation with Git (code repository stuff), sanitizing, formatting, and standardizing data and code.

- Alan is leaning towards VueJS vs React JS. We went over some pros and cons.

- Our current choice or pick for our tech stack is looking something like this: CommandBox, ColdBox, Lucee/ColdFusion, MSQL, Bootstrap 5, and VueJS.

- Lots of talk about routing, events, handlers, and MVC layers and levels (MVC = model view controller framework or methodology).

- Integrated testing for integration test and unit testing.

- Custom layouts

- Lots of white labeling options and data driven design and data driven settings.

- Nesting or sub architecture and modules - inheriting different things

- Little baby apps or configurable widgets

- Building out prototypes and playing with concepts, ideas, and options

- Layers and everything going through API sockets or API endpoints

- We would love to get into drag and drop widgets and options to create your own layouts. This would allow for either preset widgets or mini widgets that could be places, configured, and added to dashboards as needed. Super cool!

- Use of popup modals and one-pager type interfaces.

- We want tons of asynchronous type actions and transactions. Certain things need to flow step by step, but other things can be done asynchronously.

- To start out with, maybe a light mode and dark mode, to keep it simple. We may add more other custom look and feel options later on.

- Doing wireframes and then rolling over to actual mock-ups.

- We would like to look at some of our past R&D options from Jonathan Wells (designer and prototype guy).

Paying bills, updating my Adobe XD install to the newest version, and looking around on some older XD documents from Jonathan Wells. On a phone call with Steve to go over where we are both at on different projects and light catch-up. Reding notes on an XD document from Jonathan. He was really good at summing things up.

Looking over some older XD files from Jonathan Wells. I got into a couple of them and created two new small micro videos from the older mock-ups.

First round - Sample of getting into a demo site from the adilas cafe - Length 00:01:13

Second round - Sample navigation on the adilas cafe - Length 00:02:33

Pulling out some new sample videos from the XD mock-up files from Jonathan Wells. See below for details.

- Overview of the education mode - Length 00:01:54

- Overview of the adilas quick search - Length 00:02:49

Meeting with Alan and going over some Adobe XD assets that we have access to. The originals were created by Jonathan Wells. Our plan is to use Adobe XD to mock things up and get some prototypes out without having to write any code. Basically, just pass on the vision for the feel of the app, the flow, and a rough idea of what it will look like. Trying to keep it super simple.

Talking about wireframes, prepping for a login page with real code (still in scratch or prototype level), and going over some notes from Alan. See attached.

We talked about getting some education and training on Adobe XD and other training videos. We are trying to build up our skills so that we can get the job done. Learning is fun. We are planning a number of fun wireframes and scratch files. Alan would like to organize some of the adilas features. I pointed him to the presentation gallery stuff. We may use something like that or even build and expand upon it.

Quick meeting with Alan. We touched base on where we are at and how is doing what. I've been looking at Adobe XD documents from Jonathan Wells and doing XD training tutorials. I've also been digitizing notes and linking things together. Alan is working on a small wireframe for the adilas cafe login. He is also doing some research on modern UI/UX requirements and expectations. We talked about some domain names and also looking at billboard type sites for pointers to the main adilas.biz site.

I'm going to be harvesting Adobe XD videos and mock-ups. Alan is going to be working on features and making a nice list of features. I pointed him to a document that Shannon and I did for the presentation gallery and a backend outline of some of the features. This is not meant for the public (yet) but it will be a good resource.

We looked at the calendar and decided that we would shoot for our next group meeting for adilas lite and fracture to be on 8/30/23 (a couple weeks away from today). Good stuff.

After the meeting, I went and purchased a few domain names to claim our spot. Also did some other small to do list items.

Reviewing Adobe XD documents and looking at options for shopping carts from Jonathan Wells (older files). Light tweaks to the navigation and exploring the adilas features document.

Quick meeting with Alan. We went over a few things that we will be reporting on for our next update meeting in a couple of days. We will be reporting on decisions, training, market research, and harvesting videos from Adobe XD files from Jonathan Wells. Light talk about upcoming schedules for the next couple of weeks.

Lots and lots of research on Adobe XD files from Jonathan Wells. Lots of options. I want to make a number of smaller videos to capture some of the R&D that was done, a few years back. Looking over multiple files.

Chaning my email settings and trying to get things working locally on my computer. I could use a web interface to get to my email, but I couldn't use Outlook Express, on my local laptop. We just changed some email server stuff.

Back looking through Adobe XD files and prep work for harvesting small R&D videos from stuff that Jonathan Wells did for us. Made two new videos. One for the cart and one for a small tour of the fracture or adilas lite interface. See attached.

- Video - Internal shopping cart - round 1 - 00:03:49

- Video - Fracture - Tour of the interface for adilas lite - 00:05:05

Also did some prep work for one on some different look and feel options and the beginnings of an adilas style guide.

I got a phone call from Shannon, my sister, and she was checking in and seeing if she could help out a bit. That would be awesome. She has been a huge asset, over and over again. I would love her help. That's exciting!

Video prep work on the adilas style guide and some possible look and feel options. Taking ideas from Jonathan Wells and some of his Adobe XD mock-ups.

- Video - Fracture style guide overview - 00:02:08

Also got a call from Eric. He is working on some new functionality for tips on credit card transactions. We talked about a number of options including some possible settings. I was recommending that we somewhat follow the existing code for change due on cart and invoice payments. We talked some accounting and Eric is going to reach out to a few other people and contacts to make sure that we have all of the pieces that we need. Good stuff.

Went back in and did another video showing some of the existing navigation, pieces, and elements. This one is a little bit more raw (showing it in the Adobe XD interface) vs a nice slide or PowerPoint type view.

- Video - Mapping out the system - 00:05:00

Back working on the website for adilas lite projects (fracture). Trying to get the main pages in place for our meeting tonight.

Alan I jumped on a GoToMeeting session for about 15 minutes to go over the flow and agenda for tonight's meeting. He handed off a PowerPoint for his part of the presentation. I showed him the work that I was doing for the web page for adilas lite and fracture stuff.

After Alan and I finished. I pushed up some new code on the adilas lite (fracture) site for some of the videos that we have been working on. That's a cool little resource and shows a bunch of the videos that we have harvested from Jonathan Wells and his Adobe XD documents. Good stuff. Here is the link to that site (video resources): https://data0.adilas.biz/lite/adilas_lite_videos.cfm

Meeting with Russell. We were going to be working on our dashboard practice project but flipped over to the shopping cart. We need to define what can be moved for a new cart. Ideally, we need to build in flexibility, have it fully documented and laid out with good documentation, and realize that it takes time to build things like that. We spent some time talking about my new planned changes to an existing cart. Russell and I will build a new cart for adilas, as a side project. I will give Russell some of my percentage of adilas (ownership options) for helping. He has been helping since 2015. Good stuff.

We spent some time looking at Jonathan Wells' Adobe XD prototypes for the cart. Here are a couple of links as resources.

Small video on the cart prototype - 03:49 minutes

Link to Adobe XD mock-up file with cart stuff - mostly research