Modern front-end for a new era

At eye-share User Forum 2024, we had the opportunity and privilege to finally showcase what we've been working on in secret for a few years; Project "Flex".

We've always said that we want to deliver the best user experience, and while we're very proud of our current front-end which has served us well, it's starting to show some signs of aging. It has some fundamental technical limitations, both in terms of the technology it's built on and in terms of how expectations have changed since 2016 when it was new.

The main challenges with today's front-end:

• A fixed layout throughout the application with a list, document and details is not sufficient for tomorrow's design.
• A separate desktop and mobile client means that some features are not always present in both.
• An outdated framework that we can't walk away from means we have to rewrite.
  
  
  

Assessing the risk

Rewriting the front-end is not something we’re doing willy nilly. We realize it comes with risk, rework and cost. However, we cannot be stuck in the past and need more flexibility for tomorrow.

With lots of experience, and success, in rewriting software, having done so when we delivered eye-share Workflow 2016, we are confident that we can do so again, leveraging newer and more robust technologies and tools on this more limited scale.

Reaping the rewards

By using a responsive design, Project "Flex" will give us one unified front-end that works just as well on desktop as it does on mobile, meaning that if you order a customization, you can expect it to work equally well on both types of devices.

We're not reinventing the wheel. This is still a layered plugin-based application, so you can expect us to handle your change requests the same way we always have.

Each page in the application can have its own defined layout, and we will be able to create more flexible designs such as what we have for the "Web Shop" in our Purchasing module in other areas of the application as well.

Demo time!

I showcased our alpha state software in a live demo at the end of my talk, and judging from the palpable silence when I was done, I like to think it gave many of you something to ponder. It was certainly a great joy to hear your feedback that being able expand documents into a full screen mode or pinning multiple documents beside each other will be useful features.

When is it coming out?

I'm sorry to say that we don't have a release date to share yet. But you should know that after almost 3 years of secret development in a small team, we are about to scale up to full production. We have most of the basic parts in place, but eye-share Workflow is a very feature-rich application, so it will still take some time for us to get everything in place.

So suffice it to say that we are very eager to get this in your hands as soon as possible!