Mojo: one year on

By Matt Benton, Deputy Manager of the Software Innovation Team

It’s been one whole year since we first showed mojo to our customers at the Client Summit in July 2017. And what a year it’s been.

As part of the team responsible for the development of Mojo, the launch was a very proud moment. All of that hard work, all those long hours, finally greeted by our customers and industry specialists with such excitement.

It was certainly that customer reaction that resonated with me most. To me it vindicated our ethos of designing software that we, as users, would want to use ourselves.

Most of us in the Software Innovation Team have worked in the property management industry, in roles that required daily use of Trace or competitor products. But we’d all joined Trace to help make software that people would want to use, rather than have to use.

For so long, Trace has been seen as a solid key player in UK property management software. But our industry as a whole has been slow to react to the advances in modern technology. People no longer work in offices 9am to 5pm. They’re not constrained by old working practices.

There’s a phrase a colleague of mine uses all the time: ‘work’s not a place, it’s an activity’. And that’s the philosophy behind Mojo. Mojo is a fast growing family of web apps, each of which aims to put the right product into the right hands to do the job right – anywhere there’s an internet connection, whether that’s at the office, the home, or even on a sunny beach.

We now have 38 customers using the Mojo app for data management, and with the soon-to-be released version 5.60.10 in July, we’ll have launched a total of 52 standard forms and data management tasks.

Last year we also released the Form Designer, which gives you the ability to create and customise multiple forms of the same type, and allows you to create forms that handle everyday processes instantly.

Many such processes would require access to quite a few different maintenance screens in TRAMPS, Bluebox or o6ix. Now you can handle them with just a single mojo form.

Of course, the year has not been without its challenges. We’ve had to rejig how mojo handles approvals, to make it a better fit in with the reality of most companies’ workflows. And some of the background work we needed to get Form Designer functioning the way we wanted gave us some pretty significant technical challenges to overcome.

But the pain has been worth it and the extra work now means we have a brilliant, solid and great looking web-based product.

And mojo is most definitely not just about forms. We’re about to launch a Mojo app for your clients and another for investors, both of which are enquiry based web apps that allow you to display information using amazing smart widgets, all branded in your company’s own corporate image.

We’ve worked closely with customers to shape these latest products, and they build on Mojo’s base of getting perfect, approved data into the system to give you confidence to display the end result to your client or investor.