Webling began some years back, when we realized that the cost of maintaining projects was not proportional to the number of projects managed. Project management would soon become project maintenance. Since we couldn’t find a solution flexible enough to integrate with our business needs, we decided to solve the task ourselves.

Initially we built a simple prototype that integrated trivial project management tasks into our everyday tools. The goal was to solve problems with business logic and automation – so we’d never have to do the same thing twice.

As development progressed, the advantages of having appointments, messages and contacts automatically linked with projects, were obvious. It allowed us to track and manage projects faster, with less effort and fewer mistakes.

After a few years of development, Webling was a fully customizable business platform supporting the core principles of project and relationship management.

Today Webling is a web-based business ecosystem and Platform as a Service offering for developing and delivering third-party Rich Internet Applications to small- and medium-sized businesses as Software as a Service subscriptions.

The platform, which is written in Microsoft .NET and AJAX on a proprietary graph database is based on HTML5 standards and facilitates xRM business practices while supporting the principles of game dynamics.

Webling includes a free enterprise software suite initially consisting of fully customizable business applications for managing customers, communications, workflows, time tracking, projects and tasks.

We expect Webling to be launched in private beta during the fourth quarter of 2010.

Game dynamics is a framework for understanding how social incentives motivate people. The term is commonly used in conjunction with computer games, but can also be applied to business software. Game dynamics are about getting things done - in a fun and satisfing way.

Imagine if a gamer was just as motivated to spend time on work as he would be on playing World of Warcraft. There’s a great potential to be unlocked by motivating people through deployment of business software based on game dynamics. Whereas the last couple of years have been about social networks, we think the next couple of years could very well be about game dynamics.

Most of us feel that projects, deadlines and budgets aren’t particularly fun. What happens when you meet a deadline? The next one is waiting. And the next. Not very motivating. Would a coporate vision and overall goals help motivate you? Probably not. This is where game dynamics come in.

Game dynamics in enterprise software is about turning another day at the office into a memorable experience - something to look forward to. People love to compete, they love to help and they love progress. Having a purpose, contributing to a community, and seeing progress all stimulate satisfaction. And satisfaction helps productivity.

This is why you can create a win-win situation for both employers and employees by intelligently using game dynamics in business software.

As you might know by now we are extremely focused on performance and scalability. This search brought us towards graph databases in the first place. After spending a while looking for a well-suited graph database, we are now experimenting with our own .NET C# graph database implementation.

We haven’t yet settled on which graph database to go with. OrientDB (www.orientechnologies.com) makes a good candidate, but it’s still Java-based. The only actual .NET-based graph database out there is sones GraphDB (www.sones.de). Unfortunately we find sones GraphDB unattractive because of it’s licensing and pricing. InfiniteGraph (www.infinitegraph.com) has promised a C# version of their graph databse, but there’s currently no time frame.

The benefit of creating our own back end, is that we can create a top-tuned graph database natively written in .NET that is designed for the specific purposes of Webling.

We look forward to writing a followup (and knowing where we’re heading). :-)

In our ongoing quest to improve speed and flexibility, we have taken the initial steps toward integrating Webling with the Neo4j graph database (www.neo4j.org), InfiniteGraph (www.infinitegraph.com) and OrientDB DBMS (www.orientechnologies.com). We are still testing the databases and looking to find the one that is most suited for our purpose. 

It makes a lot of sense for us to have a graph database manage data relationships and permissions. Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) like MySQL and Microsoft SQL are great databases - but they are just not good enough at handling large interconnected datasets.

We are very excited about the future promise of a Giant Global Graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Global_Graph) uniting everything on the web and look forward to contributing to it.

Today we completed a brush-up on the way the backend handles JSON-queries through webservices. Speed is one of our top priorities and these optimizations result in even faster AJAX data-requests and lower latency on the user interface. We also implemented a URL rewriting module to make the URLs simpler to remember and the API calls easier to do.

The launch of Webling is getting closer and like any other web start-up, we have to be laser-focused on preparing webling.com for search engines.

Since Webling is free, we rely heavily on incoming links like reviews, referrals, likes, and free PR. We hope you will enjoy Webling enough to recommend it to others. :-)

Recently we began promoting Webling as free entreprise software for SMBs. We know that it’s self-contradictory, but we’re making a point. In our opinion enterprises have an unfair competetive advantage over small businesses, in the way they use business software.

Today most SMBs only have access to proprietary software solutions that are difficult to manage, hard to integrate, and almost impossible to customize. Enterprise businesses have the size and capacity it takes to build business solutions that can help optimize every aspect of their business.

This is what Webling does for small businesses and that’s why we call it free enterprise software for SMBs. 

Policies have now been implemented into Webling. They give you a flexible way to manage and control your data. Policies can be used to enforce validation rules, set predefined field values, customize input design and run user-generated WSL (Webling Script Language) on any dataclass upon opening and saving data.

Like permissions, policies are inherited from top-level dataclasses and can be applied to parts of your organizational structure.

By combining WSL and policies you get the possibility to create workflows based on complex data conditions.