Atlas-Tuesday

You may be wondering why I haven’t posted anything to this blog recently. Although I am busy getting married and taking care of a puppy; I must admit something. I am completely addicted to OpenTTD. OpenTTD is based on the original computer game Transportation Tycoon Deluxe. It’s a complete rewrite and has major improvements over the original. Although not widely played in the United States, there is a large following in Europe. There are always servers available to play on. For anyone who played the original, this is something you should definitely check out. I’ve wasted a massive amount of my time on this game, so I thought it’s high time I pass this addition on to others.

Sometimes you just can’t get enough of a bad thing. Here is another rant about page view licenses, specifically those implemented in Web Trends 7.5b. After continually fighting with their support staff I came to the realization framed pages are counted as individual pages. The site we’re attempting to process contains 9 pages inside of a framed page. This means for every single page view, we’re getting 9 page views against our licensing. The site should be well under our 2,400,000 million yearly licenses, but with this calculation we’re using over a million per month!

Once I found the source of my frustration I contacted Webtrends for a solution to this problem. They referred me to their professional development department to pay to have an application written to remove the pages from my log files. It sounds like this has been a problem with web trends in the past. This custom programming from webtrends was going to be very expensive. Why not development this small “frame stripper� application and integrate it into Webtrends!

Why should I spend thousands more dollars, and tons more man hours when webtrends has already written this application before. Why not simply include their completed code with the final product? I seriously doubt it would be hard to add-on to webtrends. My opinion is they are attempting to create another revenue stream. Customers either need to upgrade to WAY more page view licenses then they need to, OR pay for custom programming to fix the application. It’s a lose – lose situation.

I completely understand their desire to make money. I also believe if you have a giant website you should pay more for analytics. I feel as a customer I’ve fallen through the cracks and been overlooked. The situation which I am in is not that out of the ordinary. The same way a website needs to be accessible using different browsers, analytics programs need to be functional on different style websites, including frames.

Project Overview
For one of our larger clients we’ve decided to move their website / database / analytics to a dedicated group of servers. While this project was fairly straight forward on the surface it became a real pain when it came time to setup their analytics software. For this project the poison of choice was Webtrends 7.5b. Working for a marketing driven company I’ve had the chance to use nearly all analytics at one point or another, however this was my first experiencing using the newest version of Webtrends. It didn’t take long before I learned to hate this application, just like its parent programs. There is one word which all computer people have learned to hate. Licensing. Nothing can drive a person insane more then having all the tools to fix something, but not having the “permissions� to use them. The worst part is we’ve spent over $1000 to be back to square one. The problem is how Webtrends handles licensing.

Annual Page Views (and why they suck)
For our client we’ve ordered WebTrends 7 Small Business with an add-on of 1,000,000 annual page views to get them started. This should be plenty of page views per year right? WRONG. According to WebTrends you need to have licenses for all the page views you’re going to generate in a given year, which means, if I process logs from 2003 in 2005 those work against my 2,000,000 cap. Their solution is to call their sales staff and have them give me unlimited licenses while we import all the old data. Sure this might resolve the problem, but imagine how many people are out there ripping their hair out trying to import old data? This is the old application I know of which handles licensing is such an odd way. I believe WebTrends is more concerned about making money on their larger clients, then making their software user-friendly.

Interface Reviewed
Once I got the software working correctly, things started to look better. They have definitely created a very user friendly analytics solution. The user management seems to be top notice. I can tell they’ve pulled some ideas from their competition however. I see some similarities to both NetTracker & Urchin. The reporting layout is easy to follow, and makes better sense then many of the applications on the market. You can definitely tell WebTrends has been doing this for awhile. I can give them no fault on the application itself. They have definitely got their act together since WebTrends 6.0 log analyzer (which I still use for some websites).

Conclusion
Although the Interface is nice, the licensing is very poorly done. With that said, I cannot recommend this software solution. There are a number of other applications on the market which are more capable for significantly less investment. If you’re looking to buying WebTrends 7 Small Business I recommend you try NetTracker. If you still want to buy WebTrends be ready for a fight over licensing.