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iPhone Update and Some Improvements to Our Release Process
For the past few months, the team at Bullhorn has been hard at work on a number of high profile features, including adding support for the iPhone to our Bullhorn Mobile Sync offering. We’ve had the iPhone sync in beta for several months and have received great feedback from customers. Now, I’m happy to report that Bullhorn Mobile Sync for iPhone will go into “limited release” starting in April.Since a lot of people probably don’t know the term “limited release,” it’s a good opportunity to explain how our release process has been evolving and what that means for your ability to connect your iPhone to Bullhorn (and the other features that will be in this release).
Many people are familiar with the basics of the software development and release process. It happens in stages:
- “Alpha” means a release is not yet complete. Alpha releases will definitely have bugs, but are done enough that we can start to get feedback.
- “Beta” generally means that a release is functionally complete but may still change based on user feedback and still has some issues that are not yet resolved.
- “General Availability” (GA) means that a release is ready for broad use. There may be future enhancements, but its reached a point of completeness and quality
Beyond these basics, a lot of enterprise software companies have another stage that precedes GA called “Limited Release.” During this stage, the features are complete and of shipping quality, but deploying them in a staged fashion helps ensure that the rollout goes smoothly and has the least impact on customers. Over the past several months, we have been using this release process with several new features and investing in a number of infrastructure changes to support it. Overall, we’ve had success with it, so going forward we’re planning to adopt it for all releases.
Overall, this change in process means you will get higher quality, easier to adopt features because Bullhorn can gradually scale up the non-technical elements of a release — like our ability to handle support calls or help customers through configuration — and any issues we face early on will only affect a small number of users, which makes them easier to address quickly.So going forward we will be deploying new releases to a single cluster (a cluster corresponds to the first part of the URL that you see after you log into Bullhorn), then gradually expanding the deployment over the following weeks. Bullhorn will continue to notify your account and support contacts when a new release is coming, but since clusters will receive releases at different times, not all customers will receive this notification simultaneously.
So what’s the bottom line for iPhone lovers? When are you going to be able to use your iPhone with Bullhorn? As mentioned above, Bullhorn Mobile Sync for iPhone will go into limited release in mid-April, along with several other features we’ve been working on. Once we’re confident that there are no significant issues, we will release to the rest of our servers. We anticipate being done with this the entire release by the end of May. In the meantime, look for communications from Bullhorn as to when your cluster is scheduled for the update.
March 26th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Wondering if this new release for IPhones will allow users ot search on clients and and drill into the manager contacts ? I know that mobile bullhorn allows email access and limited searching. I use my laptop on the road and want to use an Iphone instead.
Tom Lyons
April 5th, 2010 at 7:32 am
Tom,
The release we’re starting in April is Bullhorn Mobile Sync, which is focused on sync’ing email, calendar, and contacts between Bullhorn and your iPhone’s native groupware apps. So if you make it a habit of putting your hiring managers in the list of contacts that you sync to your phone, then this would allow you to have them offline.
Later this year, we are also planning to make some enhancements to Bullhorn Mobile Access (the version of Bullhorn you can access from your phone’s mobile browser); however, that’s not what we’re releasing right now. If you have ideas for how we could improve Bullhorn Mobile Access, be sure to check Brainstorm and vote for the ones most important to you, or add your ideas if they aren’t already there.
Phil
April 7th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
How do we know if we are part of the limited release group? I signed up for the beta testing, but wasn’t part of that - does that eliminate me as part of the limited release?
Thanks
daniel
April 9th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Your support contact will get a notification when we are releasing the new features to your cluster. We sent out a notification to the first group two weeks ago and will send out additional notifications as we schedule the clusters for the upgrade.
April 12th, 2010 at 3:52 am
Phill,
Do you have pricing for this Feature?
Thanks
Wai
April 12th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
If you’re a new customer, Mobile Sync is included with the price of the Corporate and Enterprise editions. If you are already a customer, the price (if any) depends on which version you purchased and what your agreement was. The best thing to do is contact your support or account representative to get the specifics.
May 26th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Phil - Still waiting to find out if my cluster CL7 has been updated so we can use our iphones? Do you know when we can expect that?
June 1st, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Bullhorn Mobile Sync for iPhone is available as an open beta for all clusters. To confirm that you meet the minimum requirements, you can search for iPhone in the Resource Center or contact support.
June 3rd, 2010 at 10:03 am
When I joined my company in February I had to give up my iPhone and convert to a Blackberry because the iPhone app was not available yet. Before I go out and buy a PC, can you tell me if Bullhorn has any plans to make the software Mac compatible?
June 4th, 2010 at 8:58 am
You can use Bullhorn today from a Mac using popular Windows emulation programs like VirtualBox, Parallels, or VMWare. We do hope to expand browser support to include non-IE browsers sometime next year, but we don’t have a firm timeline yet.
June 4th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
I use bullhorn on my MacbookAir using Bootcamp, it runs fine. I also have an iPhone and an iPad and would like to know whethere I could beta test or be put on the Limited Release to test the new iPhone app? Also, are you planning to build an iPad app at all? The size of the screen and its portability make it an ideal tool for recruiters, either interviewing candidates or meeting with clients.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon. David.
June 8th, 2010 at 8:00 am
Ready for an iphone update. Is the summer release and iphone app just around the corner? Have this dream of being at the beach and using my iphone to stay in touch with those hard to find and easy to miss top candidates.
June 8th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Will Bullhorn Mobile Sync be compatible with the new version of the Iphone operating system announced yesterday? Also is there a target date for the full release of the Iphone Bullhorn Mobile Sync?
June 9th, 2010 at 8:18 am
Phil,
When Bullhorn first adopted iPhone religion, there was hype about having 1st mobile sync with an application to be in development soon thereafter. With that news, I bought my everyone in the company iphones as the apple product is leaps and bounds ahead of the windows based / rim products.
Lately, there is only speak of mobile sync. Has the application idea been shelved entirely or just momentarily? I’m assuming that the engineering / development team have since bound and gagged your president from making any other product announcment guffaws….no?
David
June 9th, 2010 at 8:03 pm
David,
I totally agree with you on this point. We first heard about the iphone sync in a post in Aug 09… then nothing. Then this post sounded promising - end of May full realease … but no, end of May has gone and it’s still not out of beta and still not working in my company. BH: Don’t set expectations you can’t meet.
Meanwhile Apple is on their 4th version of the iphone and have released a tablet. With this track record I’m less and less confident BH can keep up with mobile technology.
Frustrated.
Daniel
June 14th, 2010 at 7:29 am
Bullhorn Mobile Sync for iPhone is now available for all customers. It must be enabled/authorized by your administrator first, and the instructions for configuring the phone are available in the Resource Center. I plan to post some more information on the blog shortly.
We have not had the opportunity to fully test the new version of the iPhone operating system; however, we will support it shortly after its release.
As for a mobile application, we recently made some incremental improvements to the Bullhorn Mobile version of Bullhorn. Those area available today. We are planning a more comprehensive update for this winter. Look for another blog post explaining how to make the Bullhorn Mobile application launchable from your iPhone home screen.
June 14th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Hi David and Daniel,
I wanted to share a bit more information. As I mentioned above, Bullhorn Mobile Sync for iPhone is now available for all Bullhorn customers. In regards to Apple’s upcoming release, we are very aware of this and are prepared to support iPhone 4.0 by July 1st as well.
Regarding the release date slipping from May to June, unfortunately it’s impossible to know in advance exactly when new software capabilities will be ready. In this case, early user testing uncovered issues that had to be addressed before we could release to over 16,000 users.
Daniel, I’m not sure why Mobile Sync is not working for your company. If you contact support, we will look into this and make sure it gets resolved.
Again, we will be posting a blog soon with more specific updates, including support for the iPad.
August 1st, 2010 at 2:24 am
Im really disappointed that your iPhone support only extends to sync - I was led to beleive that you had a “proper” iPhone app which would allow us access to a lot more funtionality on the move.
John