OX App Suite in its latest version features even more openness and a greater integration potential for external products than previous releases. Sales, professional services and pretty much anyone else at OX will tell you how great that is– and all the benefits of those “Open APIs”. However, this is not about a sales pitch or a technical “brain assault” to try to persuade you to using these APIs.
Enter the Open-Xchange Performance Program. We see ourselves as partners, consultants and a technical resource to our clients, sitting on their side of the table. OXPP has the same values as OX clients working for the same target audience: the user, be it a consumer or a SMB / SME professional.
For OXPP, “Open APIs” is a topic where we help our clients to make the most of this set of technologies and to create a product or service that offers an experience that is as customisable as possible. “Open APIs”, are a gateway to a universe in which social openness and integration is the currency that counts (Lord & Velez, 2013). Integration of social accounts, the offer of unified email, calendars and storage quite simply is just the beginning — a mere example of what our clients can and should expect in the future.
Instead of looking to OX to provide more, they should take this as an opportunity and run with it and see what more can be offered to the customer. Frankly, OX does as much as it can to share knowledge of best practices to enable service providers. Our motto for furthering this knowledge is W&W– wiki and workshops. It’s good to refresh the memory as sometimes what’s important gets lost in the myriad of messages that are relayed during the sales pitch.
OXPP reaffirms the “same-side-of-the-table” mind set. OXPP continually brainstorms ideas with OX clients to discover what other applications could be added from the existing client portfolio. Access to the control panel, billing, website building wizard, TV schedule, parental monitoring and a hundred other applications and widgets that are important for the clients and, more importantly, for their users.
How much clients customize the OX App Suite portal to create a one-stop-shop for their users will define their success, and with that, our success. Creating value for the user must be at the forefront of all conversations around “Open APIs” much more than just wandering off into technical detail. Business and marketing groups have to own that topic and be the driver behind it. Those groups own the responsibility for retention, recirculation and revenue – The 3 R’s– the holy trilogy of OX and the topic of the next OXPP blog.
