jbilling

What is it that you can expect in future releases? Well, that is why we have a road map, but to be fair, it had not been updated in a while. A few weeks ago, the time came for reviewing this page. Considering that we are planning a major release in ... [More] the next few months, it was a good time to get the road-map updated. Before jumping into the future, let me review two important improvements that have been released recently. Dynamic rules generation We use rules for implementing a variety of behaviour: pricing, plans and mediation among others (this will change in jBilling 3, more about that later). It is then often necessary to be able to create new rules by making an API call, rather than writing the rule by hand and deploying it. Let’s say that you have a plan that has a few tiers of pricing, from 1 to 100 the price is 1, from 101 to 200 the prices is 2 and so on. Well, this would be easy to put in rules. But then let’s say that you want another plan that follows this same logic, it just acts on a different product, with different prices and on tiers that follow other quantities. The easiest way to implement this new plan, is to just copy an paste the rules of the old plan, change a few number (the item id, the tier boundaries) and that would do. But this is work, and the kind of work that requires a technical person. Maintaining this is also more and more problematic as more plans are created. What you can do now is write the rules for the original plan once, as a template. This template is a simple text file available to jBilling. Then you call a new API method that passes the variables to complete the plan. jBilling will take these data, apply it to the template, generate the resulting rules and get them deployed all in one shot. Want a new plan like this? It is just one call to the API. You created the plan template once, so the involvement of technical people is limited to writing the template. And because this dynamic rule generation is exposed as an API call, you can have a front end that easily creates plans without knowing that rules are being created (or used). Precision of decimal numbers Of all the mistakes I ever made (imagine a gigantic mountain), this is the one that got to be the most public and problematic to fix. Back in the days where jBilling was a hobby (happy days those), I chose to represent decimal values using a fast data type (float), rather than a precise one. Of course, I should have known this, but I did not. As the years went by, jBilling got to be a popular system and being open source everybody can see the code, and comment on it. This is great, it makes one humble fast, so I was very quickly educated about the perils of Float as a data type that represents money. The issue is that by then it was everywhere in the code. Changing all that to something fully accurate proved to take years. The conversion was a steady process, slowly but surely we removed Floats from the code. With this latest release, none of them remain, and the database schema is now fully converted as well. The future The future is very exciting. The pace of development of jBilling is now incredibly fast. Having work on billing systems for the past 15 years, I haven’t seen anything like this. The combination of open source community development and the technologies we are using (frameworks and tools), makes it really fast pace. I will focus in two really big improvements that you will see in the next few months with the release of jBilling 3: brand new GUI, and product management. To now more about other improvements, take a look to the road map list. GUI A brand new GUI is that: a 100% redevelopment of the user interface of jBilling. Sure it will still be a web based GUI, that is a good thing, but with today’s ‘web 2.0’ technologies a web based GUI can maintain its portability and ease of deployment (just a browser will do), while having great response, auto-complete features, gadgets like date picking and so on. And let’s not forget a great look... The current GUI has changed little since the first release of jBilling. It is not pretty, but the worse is the usability. It is not good. I did it, but I can’t apologize this time: I’m not good at GUI development. Worse, I’m color blind. But at the time, jBilling was a one-man show so I had to do it or there would not be jBilling. The new GUI is the result of professional graphic designers and UI specialists. We hire the best, but we also have a bigger team to collaborate. For example, Matt, who does most of the training, got quite involved at providing the feedback that the people learning jBilling gave. We also sent sneak peaks to partners and key customer so they can comment. Stay tuned, we’ll post some beta screen-shots soon. Product management Having the option to extend the behaviour of the billing system with rules that are evaluated by a rules engine brings a lot of flexibility to the system. The problem comes with who needs to deal with the rules. You need a certain degree of technical skills to deal with rules, and this is fine for, say, mediation rules. For other rules that fall into the product management category this is not good. In jBilling 3, product management will be done directly in the GUI and supported straight from jBilling’s core. No need for rules. You will be able to define pricing models: pricing based on quantity, based on tiers, X amount included, after that priced at a certain amount, etc. The main pricing strategies that we see all the time will be available, with many more added in future releases. The best part is that implementing a new pricing model will be easily done by any developer interested in doing so. Then, you will be able to create a plan that groups a number of products with specific pricing models that applies to the product only when in that plan. So you can have the same product in various plans and have totally different pricing for it on each plan. It will be both flexible and very much easy to use for business people. Thanks in part to the new GUI, they will be able to create plans in minutes. [Less]

What is it that you can expect in future releases? Well, that is why we have a road map, but to be fair, it had not been updated in a while. A few weeks ago, the time came for reviewing this page. Considering that we are planning a major release in ... [More] the next few months, it was a good time to get the road-map updated. Before jumping into the future, let me review two important improvements that have been released recently. Dynamic rules generation We use rules for implementing a variety of behaviour: pricing, plans and mediation among others (this will change in jBilling 3, more about that later). It is then often necessary to be able to create new rules by making an API call, rather than writing the rule by hand and deploying it. Let’s say that you have a plan that has a few tiers of pricing, from 1 to 100 the price is 1, from 101 to 200 the prices is 2 and so on. Well, this would be easy to put in rules. But then let’s say that you want another plan that follows this same logic, it just acts on a different product, with different prices and on tiers that follow other quantities. The easiest way to implement this new plan, is to just copy an paste the rules of the old plan, change a few number (the item id, the tier boundaries) and that would do. But this is work, and the kind of work that requires a technical person. Maintaining this is also more and more problematic as more plans are created. What you can do now is write the rules for the original plan once, as a template. This template is a simple text file available to jBilling. Then you call a new API method that passes the variables to complete the plan. jBilling will take these data, apply it to the template, generate the resulting rules and get them deployed all in one shot. Want a new plan like this? It is just one call to the API. You created the plan template once, so the involvement of technical people is limited to writing the template. And because this dynamic rule generation is exposed as an API call, you can have a front end that easily creates plans without knowing that rules are being created (or used). Precision of decimal numbers Of all the mistakes I ever made (imagine a gigantic mountain), this is the one that got to be the most public and problematic to fix. Back in the days where jBilling was a hobby (happy days those), I chose to represent decimal values using a fast data type (float), rather than a precise one. Of course, I should have known this, but I did not. As the years went by, jBilling got to be a popular system and being open source everybody can see the code, and comment on it. This is great, it makes one humble fast, so I was very quickly educated about the perils of Float as a data type that represents money. The issue is that by then it was everywhere in the code. Changing all that to something fully accurate proved to take years. The conversion was a steady process, slowly but surely we removed Floats from the code. With this latest release, none of them remain, and the database schema is now fully converted as well. The future The future is very exciting. The pace of development of jBilling is now incredibly fast. Having work on billing systems for the past 15 years, I haven’t seen anything like this. The combination of open source community development and the technologies we are using (frameworks and tools), makes it really fast pace. I will focus in two really big improvements that you will see in the next few months with the release of jBilling 3: brand new GUI, and product management. To know more about other improvements, take a look to the road map list. GUI A brand new GUI is that: a 100% redevelopment of the user interface of jBilling. Sure it will still be a web based GUI, that is a good thing, but with today’s ‘web 2.0’ technologies a web based GUI can maintain its portability and ease of deployment (just a browser will do), while having great response, auto-complete features, gadgets like date picking and so on. And let’s not forget a great look... The current GUI has changed little since the first release of jBilling. It is not pretty, but the worse is the usability. It is not good. I did it, but I can’t apologize this time: I’m not good at GUI development. Worse, I’m color blind. But at the time, jBilling was a one-man show so I had to do it or there would not be jBilling. The new GUI is the result of professional graphic designers and UI specialists. We hire the best, but we also have a bigger team to collaborate. For example, Matt, who does most of the training, got quite involved at providing the feedback that the people learning jBilling gave. We also sent sneak peaks to partners and key customer so they can comment. Stay tuned, we’ll post some beta screen-shots soon. Product management Having the option to extend the behaviour of the billing system with rules that are evaluated by a rules engine brings a lot of flexibility to the system. The problem comes with who needs to deal with the rules. You need a certain degree of technical skills to deal with rules, and this is fine for, say, mediation rules. For other rules that fall into the product management category this is not good. In jBilling 3, product management will be done directly in the GUI and supported straight from jBilling’s core. No need for rules. You will be able to define pricing models: pricing based on quantity, based on tiers, X amount included, after that priced at a certain amount, etc. The main pricing strategies that we see all the time will be available, with many more added in future releases. The best part is that implementing a new pricing model will be easily done by any developer interested in doing so. Then, you will be able to create a plan that groups a number of products with specific pricing models that applies to the product only when in that plan. So you can have the same product in various plans and have totally different pricing for it on each plan. It will be both flexible and very much easy to use for business people. Thanks in part to the new GUI, they will be able to create plans in minutes. [Less]

Who? What? Our customers wanted a solution that dealt with their entire sales to cash cycle and Loki BPM is what we delivered. Rather than building proprietary software from scratch, we went out and found the most powerful building blocks the market ... [More] had to offer and we used them to build Loki BPM. Since then, we’ve focused on solution engineering, integration, and deployment with our clients. 1.1 How does this help me get organized and improve performance? You know you’re spending too much time and money managing sales, customers, and billing. A good IT system would add structure, transparency and automation that would help you toward profitable growth. Everything you’ve learned about business tells you that you need to see the forest through the trees, spend some time sharpening the axe vs. slashing away at the forest with a dull instrument. But you’re busy and money is tight. Just browsing the available solutions gives you a headache. We’ve been thinking about you and we think we have a way to help. 1.2 OK, and how are you going to get this done for me? Why Leonid? We’re 100% focused on solving your problems. Our solution leverages industry-leading CRM and billing software from SugarCRM and jBilling and we’ve integrated them into a powerful but easy-to-use package that we call Loki BPM. Loki BPM provides a single interface organized around your business needs. Have you been wanting more visibility into sales activity? Is pricing and billing preventing you from rolling out new offers? Have you been managing the business with a series of spreadsheets? The right IT solution could probably save you a lot of money and overhead. 1.3 Why do so many IT systems get such mediocre results? Am I going to avoid that here? Well, sometimes those of us that write software can get a little nerdy. The software is just a means to an end- and that end is helping your improve the performance of your business. Once the experience becomes about the software and not about you, things generally go downhill. At Leonid, we write very little software. We use the software packages above to deliver a really great solution and lots of supporting material to help you get going- a series of “cookbooks” with step by step instructions on how to set yourself up and start using the system right away. We also have a team of solution “chef’s” available to help you if you need. 1.4 Does this include everything? What else do I need to get? The solution includes what most businesses need, except for an accounting system. We have a cookbook for integrating with most major GL/accounting systems. 1.5 Is this cloud-based? Saas? It is. Cloud computing/SasS (software as a service) is quite popular and we think it’s a good delivery model. This way you don’t have to buy servers and networking to set up the solution. 1.6 OK, I’m ready to hear more. Where do we go from here? Just drop us a line at [email protected] and let us know how/when you’d like us to get in touch. If you have a few extra minutes, here’s a list of questions we’ll probably want to review with you: What is your core business? How do you interact with customers at the moment? Roughly (very roughly) how many customers do you have? What does a typical customer life cycle look like? For example, what does a typical customer buy, how much, how often, and for how long? Who at your firm interact with customers? What systems do you have in place now and how are they working for you? What areas would you most like to see improve? [Less]

Who? What? Our customers wanted a solution that dealt with their entire sales to cash cycle and Loki BPM is what we delivered. Rather than building proprietary software from scratch, we went out and found the most powerful building blocks the market ... [More] had to offer and we used them to build Loki BPM. Since then, we’ve focused on solution engineering, integration, and deployment with our clients. 1.1 How does this help me get organized and improve performance? You know you’re spending too much time and money managing sales, customers, and billing. A good IT system would add structure, transparency and automation that would help you toward profitable growth. Everything you’ve learned about business tells you that you need to see the forest through the trees, spend some time sharpening the axe vs. slashing away at the forest with a dull instrument. But you’re busy and money is tight. Just browsing the available solutions gives you a headache. We’ve been thinking about you and we think we have a way to help. 1.2 OK, and how are you going to get this done for me? Why Leonid? We’re 100% focused on solving your problems. Our solution leverages industry-leading CRM and billing software from SugarCRM and jBilling and we’ve integrated them into a powerful but easy-to-use package that we call Loki BPM. Loki BPM provides a single interface organized around your business needs. Have you been wanting more visibility into sales activity? Is pricing and billing preventing you from rolling out new offers? Have you been managing the business with a series of spreadsheets? The right IT solution could probably save you a lot of money and overhead. 1.3 Why do so many IT systems get such mediocre results? Am I going to avoid that here? Well, sometimes those of us that write software can get a little nerdy. The software is just a means to an end- and that end is helping your improve the performance of your business. Once the experience becomes about the software and not about you, things generally go downhill. At Leonid, we write very little software. We use the software packages above to deliver a really great solution and lots of supporting material to help you get going- a series of “cookbooks” with step by step instructions on how to set yourself up and start using the system right away. We also have a team of solution “chef’s” available to help you if you need. 1.4 Does this include everything? What else do I need to get? The solution includes what most businesses need, except for an accounting system. We have a cookbook for integrating with most major GL/accounting systems. 1.5 Is this cloud-based? Saas? It is. Cloud computing/SasS (software as a service) is quite popular and we think it’s a good delivery model. This way you don’t have to buy servers and networking to set up the solution. 1.6 OK, I’m ready to hear more. Where do we go from here? Just drop us a line at [email protected] and let us know how/when you’d like us to get in touch. If you have a few extra minutes, here’s a list of questions we’ll probably want to review with you: What is your core business? How do you interact with customers at the moment? Roughly (very roughly) how many customers do you have? What does a typical customer life cycle look like? For example, what does a typical customer buy, how much, how often, and for how long? Who at your firm interact with customers? What systems do you have in place now and how are they working for you? What areas would you most like to see improve? [Less]

Who? What? Our customers wanted a solution that dealt with their entire sales to cash cycle and Loki BPM is what we delivered. Rather than building proprietary software from scratch, we went out and found the most powerful building blocks the market ... [More] had to offer and we used them to build Loki BPM. Since then, we’ve focused on solution engineering, integration, and deployment with our clients. 1.1 How does this help me get organized and improve performance? You know you’re spending too much time and money managing sales, customers, and billing. A good IT system would add structure, transparency and automation that would help you toward profitable growth. Everything you’ve learned about business tells you that you need to see the forest through the trees, spend some time sharpening the axe vs. slashing away at the forest with a dull instrument. But you’re busy and money is tight. Just browsing the available solutions gives you a headache. We’ve been thinking about you and we think we have a way to help. 1.2 OK, and how are you going to get this done for me? Why Leonid? We’re 100% focused on solving your problems. Our solution leverages industry-leading CRM and billing software from SugarCRM and jBilling and we’ve integrated them into a powerful but easy-to-use package that we call Loki BPM. Loki BPM provides a single interface organized around your business needs. Have you been wanting more visibility into sales activity? Is pricing and billing preventing you from rolling out new offers? Have you been managing the business with a series of spreadsheets? The right IT solution could probably save you a lot of money and overhead. 1.3 Why do so many IT systems get such mediocre results? Am I going to avoid that here? Well, sometimes those of us that write software can get a little nerdy. The software is just a means to an end- and that end is helping your improve the performance of your business. Once the experience becomes about the software and not about you, things generally go downhill. At Leonid, we write very little software. We use the software packages above to deliver a really great solution and lots of supporting material to help you get going- a series of “cookbooks” with step by step instructions on how to set yourself up and start using the system right away. We also have a team of solution “chef’s” available to help you if you need. 1.4 Does this include everything? What else do I need to get? The solution includes what most businesses need, except for an accounting system. We have a cookbook for integrating with most major GL/accounting systems. 1.5 Is this cloud-based? Saas? It is. Cloud computing/SasS (software as a service) is quite popular and we think it’s a good delivery model. This way you don’t have to buy servers and networking to set up the solution. 1.6 OK, I’m ready to hear more. Where do we go from here? Just drop us a line at [email protected] and let us know how/when you’d like us to get in touch. If you have a few extra minutes, here’s a list of questions we’ll probably want to review with you: What is your core business? How do you interact with customers at the moment? Roughly (very roughly) how many customers do you have? What does a typical customer life cycle look like? For example, what does a typical customer buy, how much, how often, and for how long? Who at your firm interact with customers? What systems do you have in place now and how are they working for you? What areas would you most like to see improve? [Less]

Ottawa, September 8th 2010; jBilling, the leader in open source billing and rating, today announced a partnership agreement with Leonid Consulting to power their “Loki BPM” order-to-cash suite. “We’ve been looking for a partner that could deliver ... [More] upstream functions like CRM, order management, BPM, and provisioning down to jBilling,” states Emiliano Conde, CEO, jBilling. “Leonid’s expertise in business process management and the software they’ve developed on top of SugarCRM added up to something really compelling. We’re excited to be able to broadcast this to our base.” “We knew it didn’t make sense to to undertake development of a proprietary billing engine and we’ve been looking to fill that gap ever since. To find billing, rating, and event processing in a single package, implemented on a modern framework with this kind of transparency was a bullseye for us,” commented Alex Cowan, General Manager, Leonid Consulting. About jBilling jBilling is a global player with consultants on four continents. It’s a mature and rapidly evolving open source system and delivers a comprehensive billing solution that is popular with many industries including telecommunications, ISPs, ASPs and media. www.jbilling.com About Leonid Consulting Leonid is a leader in next generation service delivery and business process management solutions for the ITSP space. Its Loki™ software suite has been deployed at many leading communications service providers worldwide. For more information please visit www.leonidconsulting.com [Less]

We are happy to announce a new release of jBilling. This 2.2.0 version includes many new features collected from various projects around the world. The highlights are: Extended integration with Authorize.net. The credit card information can now be ... [More] stored in Authorize.net, thus avoiding having credit card information in your own database. Many new API methods, including on-demand generation of PDF invoices and support for ACH Dynamic generation of rules, now you can configure jBilling to generate and deploy new rules by calling the API. Fixed all the problems with the way decimal numbers were stored, affecting rounding and calculations. This was a long lasting problem that needed to be fixed for good. We are working hard now towards the next major release: jBilling 3. This will include a brand new GUI done from the ground up, stay tuned! [Less]

Centennial, Colo. (August 19, 2010)—Jones Cyber Solutions®, Ltd., a leading provider of innovative software products for the communications, entertainment and education industries, announced today that it has partnered with jBilling Software, Ltd. to ... [More] enhance its premier customer account and order management product, Intelligent Customer Support Systems ™ (ICSS™), with a complete, scalable and easy-to-use billing solution. The new jBilling tool integrates seamlessly with the other ICSS platform components, offering a full-scale customer management and support system. Customers are able to fully-automate their billing processes by producing invoices, both physically and electronically, for effortless distribution. The tool also allows agents to track payment history, set up alerts and quickly turn over delinquent accounts. In addition to billing management tools, ICSS also offers the ability to provide a complete view of a customer, including account information, order management, flow-through provisioning and up-sell opportunities. The full suite of ICSS tools allows customers to increase their productivity, improve their bottom line and achieve higher overall customer satisfaction ratings. “ICSS is changing the way communications providers interface with their customers, taking customer service and support to a whole new level,” said Bryant Bonds, President of Jones Cyber Solutions. “By partnering with with jBilling we are now able to offer our customers robust, flexible and efficient billing tools as part of our suite of service offerings. Developed through open architecture, the agility of ICSS enables quick integration with a client’s existing or expanding infrastructure. Furthermore, its performance has been fine-tuned in multiple operating environments, proving the long-term value of ICSS. "We are very happy with Jones Cyber selecting jBilling for its enterprise software solutions,” said Emiliano Conde, President of jBilling, Ltd. “Jones has a strong suite of software that includes CRM and billing, plus solid relationships with a large number of cable companies built over the years by providing different services. We are excited to see jBilling included in this suite of software, extending its reach to new industries." To learn more about how ICSS can streamline your workflow process and support all your management needs, visit www.jonescyber.com or call 303.784.3600 [Less]

The road-map is a fairly complete list of features that includes not only the functionality already present in jBilling, but also when new functionality is expected to be released. The upcoming new major release of jBilling, jBilling 3, will include ... [More] a new GUI, done from the ground up and many new features aimed at making interacting with the system more easy friendly and product management available to business users. The revised road-map includes jBilling 3 and other features that were released in recent versions as well. Major features like pre-paid balances and credit limits, were released earlier than expected, while others postponed. All the entries of the list have been revised. The road-map is located in this page: http://www.jbilling.com/product/road-map [Less]

jBilling is pleased to announce an exciting new partnership with Bull, a full spectrum IT company that is based in France. jBilling is a leader and pioneer of open source enterprise billing software, and Bull’s solid reputation in software ... [More] development and enterprise services will be a great compliment to the company. Bull is jBilling’s latest European Partner under jBilling’s Partner Program, which began in 2009. Bull, jBilling’s newest certified European Partner, is an information technology company dedicated to helping corporations and public sector organizations optimize the architecture, operations and the financial return of their information systems and their mission-critical related business processes. Bull focuses on open and secure systems, and as such is the only European-based company offering expertise in all the key elements of the IT value chain. For more information, visit: http://www.bull.com Firms and individual consultants can collaborate with jBilling through the Partner Program to address the overwhelming demand that jBilling has had for its open source enterprise billing software. http://www.jbilling.com Christian Giusti, Bull Telecom & Media’s General Manager commented on the partnership, “We have just deployed the jBilling module for a French operator within a challenging time-to-delivery ratio (less than 2 months), with the helpful support from jBilling. We are now very excited to launch this partnership with jBilling. This program perfectly combines the ability to handle most of the needs of a telecom operator with a very fast time to market ability. Beyond pure rating and billing, Bull is proud to now be able to propose a large IT suite of pre-integrated open source solutions designed to fit the most critical features needed for the telecom and media market (BPM, CRM, etc.).” Emiliano Conde, jBilling’s CEO, added “Bull is a very well known brand in the IT industry worldwide. The largest telecom operators rely on Bull's advice and expertise to run mission-critical processes. We are very proud to have jBilling as part of Bull's suite of products.” Bull and jBilling are well-matched business partners from several perspectives. Both companies offer enterprise services, have clients in telecommunications and utilities, and both have extensive experience in software development and service management. Bull is poised to provide all jBilling Support Services. About jBilling jBilling is a global player with consultants on four continents. It’s a mature and rapidly evolving open source system and delivers a comprehensive billing solution that is popular with many industries including telecommunications, ISPs, ASPs and media. [Less]