ArchiOffice 2011 Beta Test Winner Announced

We have a winner! Back in June we sent out an invite to our customers to help us test the now released ArchiOffice 2011 during its Beta stage. An iPad 2 was up for grabs for those that participated.

More than 40 firms volunteered to put ArchiOffice through its paces and help us release a quality upgrade to the 2010 release. We thank you all for participating.

Today we’re happy to announce that the winner of the iPad 2 is…Jeff Seeley!

Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture partners. From left to right: Jerry Fountain, Bob Foreman, Jeff SeeleySeeley, a second generation architect, is a partner at Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture. They are a medium sized firm that has used ArchiOffice since 2007. The firm’s specialties include church design, education facilities and, before the financial sector’s down-turn, financial institutions.

Jeff is definitely an ArchiOffice power user who uses almost all of the program’s components. Seeley said, “I personally, enter time and expense records, set up projects and phases, input contacts, make joint appointemnts for office functions, create all project budgets, create invoices, enter transactions and run a lot of different reports for historical data on project.”

This background of course made Seeley a perfect Beta tester.

Because his firm had a less than ideal transition from ArchiOffice v8 to 2010, due to conversion issues, he was excited for the opportunity to make ArchiOffice 2011 an improvement over 2010.

“To be honest, that is the area I was most concerned about,” said Seeley. “I wanted to beat the program up and find the problems before it effected my business again. It was a lot more fun to go find the problems, report them to someone else and let it be their problem.”

During the Beta testing, Seeley ran ArchiOffice 2010 and 2011 side-by-side, comparing all invoices, reports, records, etc. All employees entered time records into the program. The testing was a team effort. “I found most of the bugs, but a few were found by two other employees that use some of the parts that I typically don’t frequent,” said Seeley.

Jeff was thrilled to win the iPad but admits he was so focused on making sure ArchiOffice 2011 worked right; he didn’t realize there was a prize on the line.

“To tell the truth, when I got the invite, I must not have read any further than, ‘invited to be a Beta tester.’ Until Steve [Burns] replied to me in the last week on a bug issue and mentioned it, I didn’t even know there was an iPad up for grabs,” said Seeley.

His wife and teenage son are currently arguing over who gets his older first gen iPad.

We’d like to thank all of you who participated in the Beta testing program. Your input was tremendously useful in helping us to improve ArchiOffice.

You went to school to be architects, not business managers. We know this. It’s our goal to make ArchiOffice so it reduces the time you spend on office management tasks (i.e., time, billing, project and document management) while simultaneously boosting your profitability and increasing your time to do what you love most – designing and creating.