Already known to be cutting edge, Black Diamond shoots for the bleeding edge with total rewrite of its software

Today Black Diamond Performance Reporting is releasing “BlueSky,” its next-generation portfolio management web application, after roughly two years of development including 12 months of writing code and six months of private beta testing with 15 firms. BlueSky is a complete rewrite of the Jacksonville, Fla.-based company’s PMS. The upgrade will be free for all of its current customers.

I was surprised to hear the company was doing this coding overhaul, because it is already known for being among the most cutting edge among portfolio management system makers. [I should note that competition is stiffer than ever: Orion, Advent, Morningstar Office and FinFolio have all been feverishly upgrading their products of late. See: A closer look at Orion Advisor Services’ software and what’s in store for its next release, RIABiz takes a peek under the hood of Advent Portfolio Exchange, and FinFolio looks to offer unprecedented flexibility and power, with an intuitive interface.] I was eager to see what advancements Black Diamond had made.

It turns out that the new platform is built more like a framework than a complete application. This is a good thing; all of the normal Black Diamond functionality is still there, it just comes in the form of modules, so that additional functionality can be added. See: Black Diamond is winning big accounts from Advent at an impressive clip BlueSky features many ways for the user to customize his or her experience, and will also allow Black Diamond to constantly enhance its feature set via additions to the library of three different types of modules.

Anti-tab workflow

Pretty much every PMS Heather Underwood and I have reviewed for RIABiz uses tabs to separate tools and data views. BlueSky has tabs for four main sections, but relies heavily on the concept of drilling into data within the current page instead of calling up secondary detailed pages. This means a user can manipulate a page on-the-fly to show whichever tabular or graphical representations of data are needed.

With each portfolio management system review that I have participated in [including all of Heather’s], I have noted this growing emphasis on putting the user in charge of how software works. The Black Diamond executives — Reed Colley and David Welling — who oversaw this BlueSky demonstration emphasized the ability to extend and customize the way the data is viewed.

In an earlier interview [see link above], Matt Abar of FinFolio, one of Black Diamond’s newest competitors, also made a big point of discussing the ability of the user to customize. He emphasized the ability to write your own functionality to augment out-of-the-box capability. He gave the example of a rebalancing software that was authored by another company and ran as a module on top of FinFolio, as if it were merely another feature of FInFolio itself.

In the software and web design world, the ability to move, customize and extend is not uncommon — particularly on desktop applications. But the number of companies that are allowing customization on web sites and doing it well enough to truly enhance the user experience is small. Black Diamond appears to be creating these new features in a thoughtful and effective manner.

Meanwhile, BlueSky also allows significant pre-configuration of how things are organized, via three clever features with three [fairly] clever names:

SkyBoxes

SkyBoxes are drag-and-droppable, add-and-removable boxes of content that are meant for keeping the most relevant and frequently accessed data on screen at all times. If you’ve ever used Google’s customizable homepage, you can think of them as Black Diamond’s version of those little content boxes that track things like the weather, news, and the latest messages in your inbox. For example, some of the boxes we saw during the demo were: “Intraday Quotes,” with market summary and current holdings; “Reports Queue,” which shows all reports currently being generated (more on this later); “Latest Portfolios”; “Search”; and “Top Holdings.”

These little boxes are very flexible; they can contain static content (like in the “Search” case), content related to the selected portfolio (like in the “Top Holdings” case), or content related to the user’s latest activity (like in the “Latest Portfolios” case).

The best thing about SkyBoxes is that the list of boxes to choose from will continue to grow. By developing new SkyBoxes to choose from, Black Diamond will be able to respond quickly to demand for new functionality within BlueSky without having to roll out a major release.

“It’s for what’s coming and for what we can’t see coming,” says Reed Colley, CEO and founder of Black Diamond.

Also of note is that the SkyBoxes part of the page can be hidden to free up screen real estate for viewing the main content.

SkyViews

SkyViews are homepage templates that can be tailored to display more detailed info that needs to be frequently accessed. These templates are chosen on the individual user level, rather than being the same firm-wide. Some of the SkyViews we saw during the demo were “Goal Performance,” “Account Allocation,” and “Asset Detail.”

At any time, the user can click the “Manage” link on his or her homepage to edit the list of SkyViews that will appear.

For the time being, SkyViews can be chosen from the default library developed by Black Diamond, and also created especially for a firm by Black Diamond, most commonly when the firm first comes on to the platform. In a couple of months, firms will be able to create their own custom SkyViews via an interface that Black Diamond will add to BlueSky, says Welling.

Update: A default list of SkyViews is typically created for a firm when first setting up BlueSky, but individual users have the option of tweaking the defaults and creating their own. To create a new SkyView a user can duplicate an existing one, and then rename it, customize the columns in the main table, and select which SkyBoxes will appear on the bottom portion of the screen when that SkyView is selected.

The SkyBoxes on the left are
site-wide, so once you set them
they will always be handy. The
ones on the bottom can be
set for each SkyView individually.

SkyPages

SkyPages are organized similar to SkyViews, but are built by Black Diamond instead of the firm or the user. Users still get to choose which SkyPages they want to see, and like SkyBoxes, Black Diamond plans to develop more SkyPages to accommodate the personal preferences of their clients.

For example, some of the SkyPages we saw in the demo were: “Target vs. Actual,” Attribution/Rebalancing,” and “Holdings.”

The result of this combo of custom boxes, views, and pages makes for a unique user experience; the tools and pages you don’t use won’t even appear as options within navigation bars, since those get customized when you choose which items to use.

A social element

Black Diamond will show the popularity and ratings of SkyBoxes, and plans to eventually support commenting on and sharing of the boxes themselves. This strikes me as a little unnecessary, but as the number of boxes to choose from increases these features will likely make for less work deciding which ones to check out. The concept can be likened to relying on user-submitted reviews when choosing which products to purchase on a website.

Asynchronous report generation

One thing older applications tend not to do well is multitasking. BlueSky has this one covered; with a few clicks, a user can fire off five reports and they will be processed in the background simultaneously. Compare this to the old workflow of having to wait for one report to finish before starting the next one, which can take much longer. I predict that even with the drastic changes in navigation that have been introduced in BlueSky, this simple capability will make the biggest difference. It’s the nature of things that when you need a report, you often need five of them — pronto.

“That ability to get data quickly is very powerful,” says Welling, chief solutions officer at the company.

A similar look

Even with all of the new features that BlueSky introduces, it still has the same basic look as the current Black Diamond Performance Reporting website. This isn’t surprising, since the older system follows the same philosophy of revealing data progressively and contextually.