Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

As a small business owner with a small number of employees for both our businesses I very much recognize the need for powerful software to help us organize things like employee performance, training, review periods and more. The current solution we use for this purpose, sad to say, is very non-automated.

Therefore I was delighted to have a review come in for software called ManagerAssistant 3.0 that might be able to help our business out in this area someday.

From the ManagerAssistant about page in a little too small font size for my weathered eyeballs:

Recognizing that line managers of corporations, schools and governments need to track and manage important information on their direct employees and themselves, ManagerAssistant.com was founded to provide the first useful and intuitive recording and tracking products to bolster the overall effectiveness of managers on Windows based computers.

So from there we find out that it’s a Windows-only affair, no Mac, no Linux. Since most businesses probably run on Windows, this proabably isn’t a big deal, but when you consider usage of this software for online businesses, it would be worthwhile at least considering a Mac and Linux version.

Site design
Using images for text, beyond logos is a bad idea. Search engines can’t figure out what the text says, so you are left with (hoping, praying) that the search engine will pick up on the ALT attributes used. In the case of this site there is stuff that looks like this:

alt=”"

For a minute consider you are a blind employer wanting to buy software to manage your employees. How would you have any idea what this site was about without text descriptions of everything. Alt attributes need to be defined for site accessibility as well as machines (search engines) to be able to understand what the page is about. Design the text of your site so that a sight-impaired person could navigate and enjoy the content. There are cases like obscuring email addresses from spam bots where using images instead of text make sense.

And while on the subject of using something other than text let me vent a bit about when not to use Flash. Some designers are just insanely in love with Flash — to your business detriment. Don’t let some Flash fanatic sell you into a design for your business that has any unnecessary Flash. You don’t need to be a techie to understand this one: what’s the point of using Flash if you don’t have Flash-type interactivity (sounds, games, video, etc)? If it’s really necessary to have Flash to be trendy or cool (a mistake in and of itself), then have a small Flash logo only and by all means do not have it play some annoying music onload. Just to clarify, the ManagerAssisant website doesn’t play any sounds, but I’ve seen too many other business sites that chase away potential customers by having music blast them the minute they hit the site. Don’t fall into that trip during a redesign and don’t fall for that with a current design.

Downloading the Free trial
On my list of 10 deadly sins for software companies near the top would be: do not force prospective customers to register to download your trial software. I know the argument, heck I’m in the software business. The argument goes like this. You want to get their information so you can follow-up personally with the sale. Ask yourself as somebody on the web how you feel about getting email from somebody you just installed software to check out? Many do not like it. Most consider it barely a step above spam. 10 years ago, maybe even 5 you could have a strategy like this, but these days you can’t. You need to provide people an OPT-IN strategy on everything, including downloads.

Now if you’re worried about the download bandwidth, say if you have a large program (Manager Assistant v3.0 that I demoed was 111.2 MB), then consider using a accessibility friendly CAPTCHA. Something with an option for sight and sound. That will prevent an excess of automated downloads. There also is the possibility of using bittorrent, although that might be risky for software. The bottom line is using bandwidth as an excuse for collecting information and offering a secret download URL doesn’t wash.

There are a percentage of people who will never fill out forms to download anything and some of them could be your best customers. Don’t lose them by stopping them before they even look at your software.

If your software is that good, they will be more than happy to register after installing and trying it out for a couple runs. I think if you absolutely must gather information before downloading than make sure it makes sense. What does knowing my name and address have to do with whether or not ManagerAssistant 3.0 will work for my business?

Unfortunately, ManagerAssistant requires the following information before allowing a download: first name, last name, title, company, e-mail, business phone, state, country and then a dropdown menu: which feature of ManagerAssistant are you most interested in (more on that shortly) and then the only box which isn’t required: what management software are you using now?

The ManagerAssistant v3.0 that I checked out was 111.2 MB, not exactly a small footprint. With our fast cable modem, it still took a good 10 minutes to download from the MA server. Not bad considering I intentionally downloaded during a peak internet usage window. This would indicate to me faster download speeds during off-peak.

First run impressions
After installing and running for the first time I ended up at an interface that looked like this:

The MA trial comes preinstalled with some dummy employee records where you get an idea of the depth of the program. When you click on the employee name a detailed screen comes up with that employees data including tabs for: status, experience, education, compensation and benefits. A handy time-off accruals screen displays vacation and sick time. In red, emergency contact information is listed. There is a photo available that doesn’t accept drag and drop, but you can add the employees photo by right clicking and finding the image on the computer.

I didn’t spot anything missing that I could think of that an employer would want to track about an employee and even if there are MA allows adding custom fields. Very nicely laid out.

The second menu choice along the left is attendance and is equally comprehensive, allowing marking for different types of attendance out reasons like: bereavement, maternity, medical, sick, late/tardy, vacation, comp time, military duty, floating, jury duty and more. There are tabs with multiple views allowed including table, employee year view and the default calendar view. This appears to be an useful tool for tracking employee dependability.

The third menu choice performance reviews offers the ability to track and grade the employee on a wide variety of performance-related items including: attitude, communication, job knowledge, productivity, problem solving and more. Each item includes a grading scale with the following choices: no rating/not applicable, exceptional performance, consistently exceeds expectations, meets expectations, occasionally below expectations and consistently below expectations.

Additionally, you can add comments and support materials and then preview the document. Make spelling errors or need to use some different wording? A spellchecker and thesaurus are included. Nice.

Other menu choices include goals, incidents, accomplishments, training, recruitment and expenses. This software is very well designed, intuitive and covers every aspect of employee evaluation and development. I was very impressed.

Summary and grade
In the ReviewMe area, the company can add comments about the site and what they are looking for in feedback, which is helpful to understand. One of their concerns was whether they should make a more “web 2.0 design” for the website. That might make this software more web-friendly, but it doesn’t seem like this is the kind of software one would use online, so there isn’t a lot that could be done/added for employees or employers to interact online through the website.

ManasgerAssistant has an impressive list of customers including: Bank of America, Comcast, Panasonic and several other big name corporations.

Could the website be updated to include rounded corners, softer colors, bigger fonts, use AJAX, and all the other web 2.0 signatures? Sure. Would it make any difference for most prospective customers? Perhaps a little. Sneeze and web 3.0 will be here so having a trendy design is primarily useful for those who want to attract customers who like using web-based apps. I’m not sure those who want to do most things using web apps will want to use something like ManagerAssistant the web version, but then Adobe announced that they are putting Photoshop online soon, so this could be a good direction for the MA folks to head. It would also make a version that a growing number of Mac and Linux users could enjoy where right now they are left out.

ManagerAssistant pricing is based on named users, not companies, so the pricing can get steep but not unreasonable for larger companies with multiple locations and managers. In the case of our business I believe we’d be fine with the $395 license which considering everything this software does seems like a good deal. It easily made our strong maybe list for future business purchases. Maybe there should be a small business targeted “under 10 employees” version for like $100-200? Perhaps a future web version could be based on a monthly price like $10-20/month instead of an upfront single license fee.

As an employer (and employee if I was still one) I’d be very concerned about security if this amount of information was available through an online interface. If MA does create a future web version, they should take every step to provide the highest level of security. Look at what web apps like wesabo are doing to make sure infomation is protected.

I can’t offer many suggestions for the software other than aesthetically it’s a bit bland like most Windows software. Maybe now that Vista is here with the Aero glass effects more apps will be visually stimulating, but then again I don’t care about pretty software and I doubt most business owners will either. We want to make sure it does what we need it to do and MA seems quite competent in that area. Still, the younger generation which are becoming more employers do care about aesthetics, so this might be something to think about in a future version.

The website definitely needs some work. The MA folks say it is two years old and in this case a more progressive design would be advised, although I would advise against making it too web 2.0-like until/unless they actually offer a web-based version of MA. There’s enough comments about the site in this review that they could do to make it a better website with a more compelling sales pitch. ManagerAssistant is a well designed, comprehensive solution for human resources. Grade: B+

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