In these trying times, it isn’t the price of a commodity that matters the most, but the customer experience, and most importantly the trustworthiness of the people providing the product or service. The people behind Iceberg simply fails miserably in that aspect. They cannot keep promises, and actually keep on making and breaking their promises. They do not know how to manage customer expectations. They assure the customer that what was asked can be done, even if it cannot.

Let me ellaborate.

August 2008, I paid $400 to Fractis, Inc. (the people behind Iceberg). That was the downpayment for customizing a print module for the merchandising application we were building for a client. Iceberg’s current print capabilities are definitely not useable especially for invetory-type applications. Iceberg is unable to print to pre-defined, pre-printed forms. And that was a must!

I was already in doubt if it was doable, but I asked and the reply was that it was doable. We agreed on a price of $800. But yes it is my fault that no contract was signed. I simply put too much trust on this startup. I thought they were the type who really, genuinely were interested in seeing their application work for starters and small businesses.

In July 2009, after 11 months of false promises, I never saw the print module even after submitting our application several times, and creating an HTML template that was requested from us. The client had already backed out and was demanding for a refund. So I did the same.

I requested for refund, and until now, I have only received 50 euros back.

The people behind Iceberg do not value customer relationship. They don’t know how to reply to emails. They don’t know how to deal with deals gone bad. They have not refunded me in full, and they have stopped replying to my emails. The last I heard was that I will be fully refunded in 3 weeks time. This was last October 3.

This was getting old and I was tired of how I was being treated, so I decided to share my experience with as many people as possible. Don’t deal with Iceberg, if you value your time, your clients, your money.

I didn’t move apps to it.

Here’s why:

1. Technical – it didn’t have development capability I needed.

2. Support – When I asked questions in the forums about said lack of capability I was handed work arounds that weren’t rather than “nope. doesn’t do that yet, but we are working on it”.

3. Offsite Option for Sensitive Data – I have a few clients who have data they simply will not trust off site. CogHead should have engineered a platform that can be installed on servers. It could have still used their servers to route authentication and I would have been fine with that.

Poor management decisions imo.

Check the post and podcast out here:

http://www.trac...3/02/saas-tips/

If you are a CogHead customer, TeamDesk tried to automate your transition as much as possible
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Coghead Import Tool: Release Notes:
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Wolf Frameworks, told me this morning that they have written a program that takes a Coghead application definition file (the XML is available from Coghead) and converts it into Wolf Framework XML, thereby eliminating the need to manually recreate your forms, reports and business rules.

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Read more: http://www.wolf...e.asp#22feb2009