Taist: sharpen the "clouds" by yourself

The post will be interesting to you if you : actively use any cloud services in work - for example, to manage development and projects - Trello , Basecamp , Asana , Megaplan , qTrack , for accounting and trade - MoiSklad , MoeDelo , for CRM - AmoCRM , Highrise , and any others.

It will be even more interesting if you do this :

• have already customized any software or website, that is, adapted it to fit their needs - for example, they changed the source code, wrote plug-ins or, especially, user styles / scripts
• or at least once wrote to the developers of the used services their wishes on the functionality

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What we do:

We make Taist - a platform for creating add-ons to cloud services to expand them to the needs of a particular business.

What problem we solve:

Cloud software need customization, but impossible.

Most of the standard, "non-cloud" software can be customized - either change the code, or write a new / plug in an existing plugin. Cloud software can not be changed so - the code is spinning on the server, you do not have access to it. Creating a system of plug-ins for cloud software is much more complicated and expensive, almost no company can afford it.

At the same time, it is practically useless to ask the service developers themselves to add a new feature - only a very small part of such requests is implemented, and then months or even years later, and there are also many objective reasons for this.

How to solve:

We allow embedding additional client code on the site page.

The code stored on the server cannot be changed, but you can change the one that is loaded into our browser — HTML / CSS / Javascript — respectively, you can change the appearance and the logic of the service.

This is what we allow to do: create and use add-ons - Javascript + CSS-code that changes the selected service to your needs.

It's amazing how much you can do with this - not only expanding the interface, but also adding your own logic to the service, and adding your own data fields with your own logic, and “seamlessly” embedding other services (including, for example, your backend) directly into the interface target service.

A couple of simple examples

1) we extend the interface by adding additional useful information: in the JIRA OnDemand cloud service, we display the description of the parent task when viewing a subtask - for quick understanding of the context.



How the addon appeared : my fellow developers are using cloud JIRA. At the last place of work, they used the classic JIRA, which they finished nicely to fit their needs, but even the simplest improvements could not be made on the cloud. Taking our project for beta testing, my colleague in one sitting made the necessary addon. In the second session, he polished it, making an excellent example of an addon for JIRA.
Source Code and Addon Description

2) we expand the functionality by embedding another service (Google Calendar) into the target service ( Wrike.com - project management system) - we add the ability to schedule reminders to tasks up to hours, with email / SMS reminder. Binding calendar events to tasks stored using Taist repository.


Source Code and Addon Description

How it works

To use add-ons, you need to install an extension to the browser - currently available only for Google Chrome . The extension tracks the change of the URL in the current tab, and if there is an addon for the current site that you have enabled, apply it.

The add-ons themselves are stored “in the cloud” - on our website, they are turned on / off in the same place.

Alternatives and our differences

The best alternative is to create a browser extension for a specific service and a specific task.

Than Taist is better than expansion :

• no need to understand the creation of extensions - only standard Javascript
• no fussing with updating the extension if necessary to modify the addon (especially when it is used by a large number of users)
• easier support and administration - there is logging and various other service functions, in the future, group management of users will be created
• there is a convenient out-of-the-box functionality — for example, a simple key-value backend — you do not need to raise your server to store additional data; support of cross-domain queries, etc. (will be expanded)

In general, if you want to solve your business problems as quickly as possible, safely and without hemorrhoids, Taist is your choice.

Creating and using addons

You can develop add-ons first locally using the file system, then upload to the server so that colleagues can use them. Read more - in the instructions for creating add-ons .

Addons uploaded to the server are available for everyone to view, use and copy. The specific licensing policy has not yet been chosen, but the essence remains. In the future, we will make it possible to create private add-ons that are available only to direct colleagues.

During the creation and use of add-ons accumulate know-how, knowledge of the subtleties of various sites, which is useful to share with each other. Therefore, we began to lead the wiki , on the basis of which we want to form a community of add-on developers.

Where to begin

• VERY IMPORTANT! Even if you can’t do a specific addon at the moment, please write down what services you use, what needs arise - the more the need is visible, the faster someone will create the necessary addon
• look for existing add-ons for example
• try to create your addon
• like our page =) - it is important for us to attract new users

For any questions, feel free to contact us: the best is to go to the forum , but you can also go to the page in FB , go to Google Plus or write to beta@tai.st

Our plans

We want to create a powerful platform for easy development of add-ons - unlike classic software, you can create a single platform for cloud. But the technical platform will not work without a powerful community of developers who would help each other and their non-technical colleagues by creating add-ons on our platform.
Therefore, we have two key areas of work :

1. development of the platform functionality for the wishes of the developers - write here your wishes
2. help in creating add-ons, filling the knowledge base - so please contact us on any issue, help!

A bit of history

It all started over a year ago, when we announced the first version of the project on Habré , when we still didn’t really understand what we were doing and for whom. Since then, we have been working on the problem of customizing cloud services from all sides, working with the service providers themselves, creating even paid add-ons - individually and individually, and small scalable ones, working with Russian and Western users. And gradually they began to understand how to create a truly useful product in this area, and what a big way to do this would have to be. But I will tell about it separately.

Let's discuss it all

We welcome feedback from interested users.