This is a great guide. It also underscores why it is so difficult for young startups to unseat big incumbents like Oracle in Enterprise. Not only you have to compete with every corner case features, but also have all the other stuff done. Other things I would add to this list are: Accessibility and RTL readiness, configuration / implementation guides, Text replacement guides
Thanks & you're right these are all the things that are easy to overlook when eyeing up an incumbent. Accessibility - great call - did this at our last SaaS company (for mobile too!). A few questions... I'm unfamiliar with RTL readiness, can you elaborate? Same with text replacement, are you referring to internationalization?
As the poster said below, text replacement gives customers the flexibility to brand things differently internally. For example, the app label says "chat", but customers want to re-label that and say "conversations". This is at the basic level. You also have to think about internationalization - can you replace chat in Spanish with conversation in Spanish.
RTL = Right to Left. If the customer has operations in Middle East, they would need to display Arabic or Hebrew text, which unlike English, goes from Right to Left. Which means your screen orientation should be changed as well. If you have a screen with a picture on the left, for an Arabic user, the picture needs to move to the right.
I also should have added internationalization to my original comment. Asian characters, especially Japanese, can cause a lot of challenges.
Thanks for clarifying. Text-replacement makes sense in that context, definitely related to both white label & internationalization.
RTL... most browsers have some sort of RTL support, correct? `dir="rtl"` (I'm not an expert on RTL... I'm confident that given a piece of paper with Hebrew text on it I will still rotate it 3 times before realizing that it is not upside-down English).
Text replacement might mean changing a term throughout the application. Sort of like localization or perhaps more like white labeling gone wild.
For example, Prospective Customer Corp doesn't use the term "Manager", but instead uses "Team Leader" or "Coach" and wants all references to that to match their internal language.
As for easy branding, do you think that only applies a "must have" if the application has some sort of end-customer/consumer facing interface (ie Zendesk, Readme.io etc)? Or do you think that is equally important for applications that are used exclusively internally by employees.
It's a plus for internal apps: there's always some "company first" person in the chain who wants to get brownie points by having their logo visible.
It's also very easy to implement, so why not?
Auditing remains the killer though, if you build it in from the beginning then it can be effectively free because of how it affects your architecture. If not it can become a big maintenance headache.
> Custom fields makes sense... do you think those are part of making integrating with other apps easier
It's more about being consistent with other processes and applications that an enterprise already has. If your product is about generating reports, they'll want the button to say 'Generate TPS report' rather than 'Generate report'.
