I'm sure everyone has heard the saying, "It if ain't[sic] broke, don't fix it."

Very sound and sage advice. But, what if it is partly broken? What if it works, most of the time, but not exactly right all the time?

Such is the case I find with the current version of FastDraft.

FastDraft is a document assembly tool which was produced and sold by Valeo Software. My consulting firm was the development and support arm of Valeo and when they ceased operations some existing users of FastDraft still sought me out to answer questions and get a little help when needed. The owners of the FastDraft IP knew and were comfortable with this and I was given permission to use FastDraft internally for our real estate investing efforts and to provide it, even sell licenses, to clients. I decided not to sell any licenses but have continued to answer questions from existing FastDraft users and we did make some modifications to FastDraft for our internal use. The idea was perhaps to offer subscriptions to the content for use by others.

The last time the version of FastDraft used by the Valeo customers was compiled was in 2005 and that was to remove the license verification code since the Valeo web site no longer existed. Other than that one patch, which was provided to any Valeo customer who contacted me, nothing has been touched in the code.

However, FastDraft was written in Visual Basic and while the VB runtimes still exist in Windows 7 that is the last version where they will be supported. This isn't much of a problem because for our internal use there is a plan in place to bring the parts we use from FastDraft forward into current technology. Since one of our goals is to make the assembly process available in a browser, most likely JAVA will be the language used to rewrite those parts we need.

But, for the current FastDraft users, that means they are facing a hard of life on the product. I approached a number of the ones who use FastDraft almost daily still. To say the response to funding adding the features they need to our rewrite to give them a fully functional replacement for FastDraft was lukewarm. Again, this is mostly a non-problem because FastDraft does still work, even under Windows 7.

Most of the time.

Earlier this year, I did some extensive testing of FastDraft under both Vista (which still sucks, btw) and Windows 7. There were some issues identified and I was satisfied they were minor and could be worked around. However, now that Windows 7 is out and FastDraft is being used on Windows 7 on a more regular basis the issue I thought was minor is growing.

Version 4 of FastDraft uses several third party controls. One of them has an intermittent problem under Windows 7. When the issue with this control raises its head, it will eventually bring FastDraft to a crawl and require a reboot of the operating system. To the best of my knowledge, it does not corrupt or lose data, but there are no guarantees.

There is another issue with the internal configurator of Form Volume content. The configurator is designed to be self-healing. Meaning, if someone accidentally does something they shouldn't in MS Word when creating or editing the content, the configurator will identify it and correct it. Well, it has a bug in this self-healing code and I know of at least one former Valeo customer affected by it.

Version 5 of FastDraft, which is the one we use internally, does not use this third party control. We do not have this problem. The bug in the configurator was fixed as well. While version 5 is mostly still in VB6 it was streamlined and significantly rewritten in anticipation of either being rewritten again in C# or JAVA.

I am not sure what, if anything, to do about the version 4 users out there. I could move them to version 5, but there are features we left out of version 5 existing users use. So, to move them to version 5 would require some development time and effort. I doubt there would be enough interest to cover the hard costs in doing that. The other option is to make the corrections to the version 4 code and make that available to the version 4 users. But, again, that would require hard costs I doubt I could recover from the user community.

Then there is the issue of going forward, there will not be a version 6 of FastDraft. Some of the technology and concepts may roll into a larger project with a licensing arrangement for the owners of the Valeo Software IP but FastDraft as the current users know it, is a dead product. This is why I approached the current FastDraft users earlier this fall. However, there just is not a large enough pool of users to recoup the development costs as an "upgrade" and the current users don't see enough value in FastDraft to step up and pay for the development costs to add the features needed to create a complete FastDraft replacement.