Being a software making company, development is very important to us. Not only development of ORM Designer, but professional and personal development of each of our employees. And because we like to give a chance to young talents, we decided to take part in a project co-financed from ESF EU (European Structural Funds) aimed at providing work experience for college graduates.

Our interns, who worked for us as C++ programmers, were responsible for developing easier parts of the application. Jaroslav Šín, who decided to stay with us changed his focus into the production of technical documentation. Jakub Navrátil, the second attendee, is now poised to land a job as junior programmer in one of the many IT companies out there.

We would like to thank to both guys for wonderful five months spent together and we hope they will continue to hone their skills and doing work that they enjoy.

When your number of clients is growing, so are your revenues. But guess what, this goes hand in hand with what your users are expecting from you. To ensure that the quality of our services is going up rather than down, we decided to enrich our ranks with three new reinforcements. Namely software support, marketing specialist and sales representative.

The amount of work cut out for us, could no longer be managed in just four people. It takes time to go through the countless amounts of suggestions and clever little tricks you are providing us with (which we are always grateful to receive), to make for you the best possible product that we can.

Also, we are not growing in numbers, but in space too! Our current premises proved to be insufficient to suit our needs, so we extended our offices by another room. After all, we wouldn´t want to be called IT Crowd, because we are crowded in here.

The very beginning of enlarging

The new premises

How to fit in the tables

Tools used

Here you can see results of our work, how do you like it?

Thanks to the program of South Moravian Innovation Centre (JIC) and entering of Michael Rostock as our investor we have started to receive medial attention. If you are interested, and understand Czech, here are a few of them.

• http://byznys.ihned.cz/c1-60215550-mladi-programatori-z-brna-zdrazili-svuj-software-trojnasobne-prodeje-zustaly-stejne
• http://startup.lupa.cz/clanky/michael-rostock-poplar-investuje-do-startupu-orm-designer/
• http://www.tyinternety.cz/2013/08/06/clanek/rostock-poplar-investuje-do-brnenskeho-startupu-orm-designer/

We know, most of you aren’t Czech readers, so here is little something in English.

• http://goaleurope.com/2013/08/21/czech-orm-designer-raises-funding-from-angel-investor/

Being noticed on the local scene is nice, but we would like the world to be our theater. This publicity means a lot for us. So thanks to all authors for writing. And thank you, for reading.

As stated in the previous blog post, in spring 2013 we applied for Innovation Park program running by South Moravian Innovation Centre (JIC) in order to connect to specialist from different fields of business and also to raise ORM Designer funding.

As well as we have been accepted to the program as one of the most promising project, we have also succeed in investor searching. After a short time in the program, in Czech Republic very well-known investor Michael Rostock-Poplar approached us with an offer that couldn’t be refused.

It was settled that the finances from the investment will be fully used for PR activities heading to better recognition of ORM Designer within ORM frameworks communities. This includes such activities as brand building, creation of detailed project documentation, better presentation of core features and application benefits and other.

But Michael Rostock-Poplar hasn’t brought only the money to ORM Designer. He will also help us with important business decisions and coach us in fields in which he is more experienced than us.

In future we will keep inform you what the investment will bring us.

Here in Czech Republic start-up scene is strongly supported by government and community. That’s why there are a lot of programs that help start-ups to grow and develop.

In spring 2013 ORM Designer project was applied to one of these programs. The program is called Innovation park and it is running under the patronage of South Moravian Innovation Centre (JIC).

ORM Designer has been accepted as one of the most promising project with a huge potential to grow into a company with significant economic effects for South Moravian Region in a few following years.

Our primal goal was to raise funding from some Czech investor. But the program has brought us much more benefits. From all of these it is worth mentioning especially:

• Regular marketing consultations with Adam Hazdra, Milos Sochor, Jana Fleissigova and Lucie Bresova
• Help with press releases from Helena Tovarkova
• Financial co-financing for external consulting services from Jan Rezac (UX) and Karel Novotny (brand marketing)
• Workshop about international PR campaign with The Crowd & I
• Consultation about seed funding with all JIC team
• Pitch training with Lukas Hrdlicka

We’d like to thank all participants for their advice and effort and looking forward to our next co-operation.

And what happened with seed funding? Follow our blog and you will find out :-)

Since last year we have received many request to implement a support for Java JPA-Hibernate framework. So now we decided to come up to expectations and last week we started to work on implementation.

As Java ORM is slightly different from the PHP ORMs already supported by ORM Designer, we’re looking for some enthusiasts who would test a beta version when available. If you are interested, please contact us at [email protected].

We would also appreciate some JPA-Hibernate projects so we can run tests during the implementation. You will be very welcome if you send them to [email protected]. Each project will be treated strictly as confidential and no data or model parts will be visible to anyone else.

If you have any ideas about the implementation, you can discuss below.

For those who sometimes needs to show a project to his colleagues or customers, ORM Designer now offers a new free version. ORM Designer Viewer is time unlimited and enables to browse the whole model with its objects and associations. However, all editing functions  are disabled.

How to launch ORM Designer Viewer

Simply download version 2.2.1.734 from download page and install the application. After the installation and first start, the welcome screen with license activation appears. Now please select the third option - Free viewer only and click the Next button.

And that’s it, we’re done. Now you can use ORM Designer Viewer.

Is this free version interested for you? Will you use in your team? We would appreciate your feedback, feel free to discuss below this blog post.

As we are constantly improving the interface of the application, we have reordered items in the file menu. New order is a result of last user testing. Now they should help you work even faster and find required action more easily. We have also add new icons so they more precisely express the functionality of menu items.

Icons have been created specially for ORM Designer. But because we’d like to support also new applications and start-ups, we decided to publish PNG formats as giveaways. They can be used both for commercial and non-commercial use as long as they are not sold by themselves. We would be also happy if you inform us about using icons.

Download PNG icons with 32x32 pixels resolution

Download PNG icons with 64x64 pixels resolution

So what you think, do you like new file menu?

Some tasks in ORM Designer might be a little bit confusing while beginning with the application. To make these task more intuitive and quicker, from version xxx.xxx the new wizards are available. They will guide you during:

• existing project import,
• creating of a new project with or without ORM framework,
• import of a model from external modelling tools (DBDesigner, MySQL Workbench),
• attaching of ORM Designer module,
• import of ORM** schema file** into a project,
• import of model from DBDesigner or MySQL Workbench into a current project,
• license activation.

But not only the functionality of wizards is important. To make your work more comfortable we tried to create them nice and user friendly. So they have unified visual style and contains frameworks icons for better orientation.

Now lets take a look at a Project Import Wizard.

So what you think, will the wizards help you  work faster? And do you like it? Discuss below.

ORM Designer offers a lot of functions and features. However, for some new users it doesn’t have to be exactly clear how ORM Designer can help them and what the core features are. For those we have added new product tour to the application, which is available from version 2.2.1.734. Tour contains 10 graphical slide which should help better understand the work flow from the model import / creation up to the definitions export.

If you want to take a look at the tour slides right now, above is an online version.

1. Import or create new project
2. Model overview
3. Navigate through the model and edit items
4. Module editor
5. Entity editor
6. Associations
7. Inheritance
8. Many to many
9. Properties
10. Definitions export