The GroupSwim Diving Board

As you probably know, we are gearing up for a major release of GroupSwim next week.  I thought you might be interested in the things we do to prepare for this event.

1. Testing, Testing, Testing – Did I mention we test?  In all seriousness, it is the most important component of the process.  Quality and customer success are critical, so we try to avoid any and all bugs.  We also learn about the software by everyone pitching in on the testing process.  We often tweak designs and the user interface based on what we learn.  As good as our initial designs are, nothing trumps rolling up the sleeves and playing with the software.  As someone who sells and demos GroupSwim every day, I find there is no better way to learn it.  The engineering team takes the bugs we find and turns-around fixes overnight.  We are a well-oiled machine, but it takes time and effort.
2. Technical Tasks – Rolling out a major release involves important technical tasks.  Once we take the system off-line to do the migration, we perform back-ups, checks, software migrations, queue-up requests, redirect URLs, and a host of other activities.  Since GroupSwim is a SaaS application, it requires a different set of tasks (and mindset) than traditional software.  We aren’t migrating one customer; we are migrating 1,000s. The engineering team does an amazing job in a very short time frame.  We do mock go-lives and test with copies of production data to make sure we are as rigorous as possible.
3. Training and Help – When we roll-out software of this magnitude, we update everything.  The list of stuff we change includes but is not limited to:
   • The website.  This particular release will touch almost every page
   • Marketing collateral
   • Online help.  This is a big task when we add so many features
   • Seed content for new sites.  These are the discussions, documents and wikis we put in every new site a customer creates to give them a running start
   • Videos
   • Update the Pool.  This is our own customer community, so we put announcements, tips and tricks and other content on it
   • Demo sites
4. Marketing Activities – When we create software of this magnitude, we want to tell the world.  Marketing takes a significant amount of effort.  For starters, we do the following:
   • Write and distribute press releases
   • Email past and present users
   • Reach out to bloggers and analysts
   • Email campaigns to leads and contacts

Every time we release software, we learn something new.  I’m giddy about this next one and look forward to a new stage in our company’s evolution.