OK, we've told you that Accelerate HR is a work in progress. So why are we asking you to sign up now? And why on earth would you want to?

For exactly the same reason that you might sign up early for a property on a prestigious new development. As an owner you get to tour the site, follow work in progress, make suggestions. And because you've signed up early, you get a better deal.

In fact, it's even better with Accelerate HR. We won't be asking you to make any committments. And you won't need to take out a mortgage. We'd just like to have you around and find out what you think.

Just a word of warning. Don't sell your old HR database and move all your employees in yet - not till we've got all the utilities switched on and working. Just bring a few of your people, and test out the facilities. Does it seem right for you? Then come again next week, and see the progress we've made.

Now here's the deal. If you sign up while we're still in development, you and your company will have a year's free use of the Accelerate HR database. In fact more than a year, because the period will start from the time of our official launch, planned for the beginning of February 2008.

So why not sign up right now, and take a little tour of the site?

Questions and Answers

Q: So Accelerate HR will be free for the first year. How much will it cost later?

A: If you're using the standard web version, there'll be a monthly fee. For most businesses, this will be as little as half a Euro/employee/month. Details of the planned monthly charges are here.

Q: If we sign up now, will we be committed to purchase later?

A: Absolutely not. And there'll be no email warnings or reminders from us either (unless you ask us to send them). There'll be no pressure from us - any decision that you make to use Accelerate HR must be initiated by you.

Q: Then why are you asking me for my email address?

A: It's a means of verifying your identity and helping you in emergency. For example, if you forget your user name or password we can mail you a temporary password to set you back up again.

If you'd like to read our Privacy Policy, it's here.

Q: Our business doesn't have anything to do with construction. Will Accelerate HR still be useful?

A: There are some special considerations for construction. For example, the workforce tends to be fluid, adding new people quickly, or shrinking if the number of active projects falls. Accurate manpower planning and attendance reporting is critical so that management can monitor the ebb and flow of a project. In the payroll, we need to deal with the issue of sub-contractor payments. Accelerate HR has been designed to meet these special requirements of the construction industry.

At the same time, construction businesses face all the standard HR issues that other businesses face, and you may well find that Accelerate HR meets your requirements too. There's one sure-fire way to find out. Try it!

Q: Are there any plans to release versions for other sectors?

A: Not what you could call plans, no. But we are most certainly interested in building parallel versions - certainly for other sectors and perhaps in different languages too, if there's sufficient interest.

Q: Is Accelerate HR too heavily slanted towards the geographical region you're working in?

A: Not for our current clients, no. Accelerate HR addresses all the HR issues of businesses in the Arab Gulf and the Mid-East - especially in coping with a largely expatriate workforce. That's what we've been asked to do.

If the question is really whether we'll need to localize the site for other regions, the answer is probably. Again, we'll be guided largely by what our clients tell us. And we'll be depending on people with the necessary local knowledge to make active contributions to the work. First things first though: right now we need to get the core product ready for the market.

Q: Is our data secure?

A: Your password is very strongly encrypted - so that even we can't unpick it. And we never expose your password on the Web. Each of the pages that contains company information needs authentication - in other words, your data can only be viewed by people from your business who have a valid user name and have entered a valid password. But we must warn that during the development phase, we may sometimes release pages where authentication is not yet fully operational. That's why - until the formal launch or we tell you otherwise - you should only enter test data, and nothing that's sensitive.

Q: Can we install Accelerate HR on our own intranet?

A: The finished version, yes. But there'd be one serious downside. We'll be continuing to develop and improve Accelerate HR long after launch. We believe in the principle of permanent beta - learning from our customers and engaging in continuous product improvement. If you have your own private version, it'll be difficult - though not impossible - to give you the benefit of these improvements. That's why our fee-structure would be different (i.e. more expensive!).

Would you be willing to customize Accelerate HR for us?

A: Yes - but the same caveat applies as in the previous paragraph. If you have your own version installed, it'll be harder to keep you up to date and therefore more expensive. But contact us, tell us what you have in mind, and let's see what we can come up with. And if your 'customization' is something everyone would like, we might just put it in the core product anyway.

For the future, it would be good to publish an API - essentially a design specification for third party programmers - so that your own experts could make your customizations for you.