The price of customization

An important feature of our case management system is the possibility of tracking key values. So to enable different organizations to track different key values the attributes on our concepts are customizable. Not only which fields and their data type, but also the work flow for the different fields and the possibility to set which fields are available to different user roles using different clients. In other words, we can set which fields a resource can view on a form and which fields a group leader sees on the "same form".

The cost of developing this is of course not trivial but the biggest cost will be to create business skins for our customer's different lines of business. With the current product not having this feature the consultants had X fields to play with and then it was easy. They just put the different values in the available holes. But now they get to dig their own holes. And planning which holes are going to be dug will be a great and exciting challenge for our dear consultants. It's no wonder that Microsoft only have a few skins for Team Foundation Server (eScrum and MSF For Agile 4). Lot of thinking behind those templates.