Well done Xero, and I’m mostly sorry for moaning
About a year ago I hit publish on a blog post, which was actually more of an angry rant, about how Xero needs to improve whilst it had been down for several hours.
Last week I went to XD19 — the Xero Developer Roadshow, an event put on for their developer partners (of which I am via Claimer), which aims to provide the latest updates on all things Xero — with a developer twist.
The upshot? They have come a long way in less than 12 months.
Taking place at the relatively recently opened RockSpace in Islington, the event kicked off with hilariously sarcastic kiwi Ash Gibson, followed by an introduction by Edward Berks, Xero’s EMEA Director of their Business Platform. Ed explained how much the company has grown particularly in the UK over the last 12 months, before they started taking about the really interesting stuff.
Xero had already improved from a user perspective before this event — the UI and navigation has dramatically improved, there’s better support for advisors managing multiple companies, and they have introduced more user friendly reports, amongst other things.
But at the event we learnt more about what they’ve done — and will carry on to do — for the developers that enrich their applications with Xero’s API.
They announced will be doing a lot more to support their partners through a new ‘partner ecosystem’, a brand new marketplace, and if they deem you successful enough, even having your app integration highlighted within Xero’s own marketing. The new ecosystem is great news, because the old marketplace was frankly pretty hopeless — not really adding much value at all for partners.
Xero’s Dan Young spoke for about 30 mins on what was new from a developer point of view, and there was lots of good stuff too. The highlights for me were the introduction of OAuth 2 (using the Open API spec, previously called ‘Swagger Specification’) and a ‘sign in with Xero’ feature.
The introduction of OAuth 2 makes the API more secure with more flexibility for API integrations, and a better user experience for authentication.
The Xero sign-in feature is very welcome. Much like the Facebook and Google sign-in buttons you see on websites, it will be fantastic for their API partners in making the whole end-user flow much more seamless on their apps, and I’m really looking forward to playing with it.
The sign-in feature combined with the marketplace should increase the utilisation of the marketplace, which aside from increased traffic/leads to partners, will in turn provide other added value benefits — such as improved SEO.
After the talks was a chance to network with the Xero staff and other attendees (alongside a free t-shirt, pizza, and beer — at this point a trope for any enterprise company’s developer event), which was really quite good, and the variety of partners was quite surprising.
There were companies that focus on back-office tools for the retail sector, software development houses, middleware solutions for companies that want to connect their apps to different bookkeeping software, but probably the biggest surprise was meeting a kiwi director of a company that supplies clothes for animals. I did think he was kidding at the time, but apparently there is a Xero connection — he uses the software and wanted to find out what developers do with his data, so snuck in to the event hoping to find out!
All in all it was a very well organised event, and considering the somewhat dry subject matter, was very enjoyable. Well done Xero!
