One of the great challenges for customers of enterprise software is to understand how a product truly functions. Every product company has their own approach to visually describe their products to the customers. Often this involved beautiful looking diagrams. Some product companies are better than others when it comes to clearly conveying how their products work. What is lacking is a general approach to “blueprint” their products in a way most customers understand. Technical notations such as UML tend to be avoided as they are considered to technical and more likely to scare customers away or loose them because it requires an understanding of UML.
The PrimaryScape modeling notation is perfect for this situation as it strikes a balance between being able to express the most important concepts of a system (product) and simplicity.
I am going to give SalesForce.com some free publicity. I got the information about their Sales Cloud product offering from http://www.salesforce.com/sales-cloud/overview/. Using PrimaryScape I created a very simple diagram showing an example of how the Sales Cloud would look like with respect to one of SalesForce.com’s customers.
It is clear the Contact Management, Opportunity Management, and Chatter functionality runs within SalesForce. The customers information (your sales information) is also stored within SalesForce. The Sales Team is shown to be a part of Your Company. The Email Server is used by the Sales Team to interact with Your Company’s SalesForce Org. It is clear that other companies also have their information stored within SalesForce.com. Ensuring that each customer’s information always is separate from every other customer is one of SalesForce.com’s most important protections.
Now this example may not be the best example of how to showcase a product, but it is one which is well known by most. If anyone would like to collaborate on capturing their product using the PrimaryScape modeling notation then please contact info@primaryscape.com. Until more examples have been built out this will be a free service offering.