My 2nd Reason for Entrepreneurship: Develop a product that is useful to people (Part II)
An open source project called anyInventory provided inspiration for the development of anyInput. See the anyInventory homepage here. anyInventory seems to be no longer maintained as of March 2005.
anyInventory is very similar to the first product that I made. It had alerts, multiple users, was customizable and was very simple to use. Here is a testimonial for anyInventory:
“My job is managing the IT equipment at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Unimas. I’ve been trying Web-based open source software to manage the IT equipment records for months, and none met my requirements until I tried anyInventory. It allows me to customize the system according to our needs. It’s easy to install and very simple to configure. I’m really excited to see the development and improvement of the system over time.” Ahmad Hadinata Fauzi, University Malaysia Sarawak
With my first product, I received similar praise from customers. At that point, I decided that building an web based hybrid product that would incorporate features from both anyInventory and my first product would be great!
Also, the anyInventory idea addressed a few of the issues the I had with the first product:
- Old Language - my first product was written in un-maintainable Visual Basic 6. anyInventory was written in PHP4. PHP5 was available and somewhat backward compatible.
- Software Upgrades - every time a bug was fixed in the first product, I would have create a patch and distribute the patch. With a web based application, there is no need to worry about patch distribution and upgrades/bug fixes can be transparent to users.
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Multiple Users - If multiple users wanted to use the same database for the old product they had to put the database on a file server and point the software to that server. With an online application, there would be one centralized database that the user would not need to maintain.