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| About
Robert Roll |
| Originally
from the Boston area, (Brookline), Robert moved to
San Francisco in 1989. Robert has always been interested in computers,
administration, and workflow processes. He began volunteering for
political campaigns at age 11, and
then at age 14 at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
Robert was
given the opportunity to volunteer in various departments within the
hospital. He worked closely with the administration, who were
managing the staffing
and procedures of the new inpatient and research center. He was
eventually hired as a inpatient unit coordinator when he was a Senior
in
High School. Robert continued his work at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute while enrolled at Boston University. Robert also attended Pace University, in New York City, which is known for it's accounting and business management programs. New York City was in the midst of a real estate and gentrification boom. Robert studied for and passed the test for a real estate sales license. He began working for a firm that specialized in loft sales in Soho, Tribeca, and Greenwich Village. Robert enjoyed the challenges and fincial opportunity of working in real estate, but felt he needed to continue his education. Robert returned to Boston and was offered a job as the Registration Coordinator for the Boston University Graduate Schools of Education and Theology. The Registrar's office was undertaking a massive project to automate the generation of academic transcripts; and to develop software to distribute registration and academic functions to the university's administrative staff. Robert began assisting with this project and a new position was created for him as the Training Coordinator and Software Development Assistant. In this position he received formal training in a mainframe database language ADABAS, and served on the Registrar’s software development team, that was part of the universities 100+ in-house programming and IT team. Robert developed and conducted training sessions as well as writing user manuals for the new software functions. Robert notes that the training sessions he conducted were partly marketing sessions to convince users that the new functions were improving efficiency, but not creating more work. The transcript project was successful and the administrative staff could now perform registration and academic tracking functions. Many manual and time consuming procedures rapidly changed because of Robert's involvement with this project. Robert discovered his talent for training software and working with end users. In 1989 Robert was offered a job as the Training Coordinator of the Corporate Publishers Classroom in San Francisco. The company focused on training desktop publishing to corporate adminstrative staff. In addition, the company was developing a desktop publishing program, Wordflair, for the Atari 1040 personal computer, which he also assisted in the testing and marketing of. On Robert's desk was a Mac plus with a copy of FileMaker installed. Robert learned everything he could about the Mac, taking classes, reading books and joining local user groups. Robert was intrigued by FileMaker, having had expereince with a huge mainframe database. Robert began reverse engineering a Filemaker student class registration solution in addition to learning all he could about FileMaker. In 1991 Robert was offered a position as the Director of Operations with a growing marketing events company, “Marketing Activities”. The company planned and catered themed marketing events for high tech companies, as well as direct mail campaigns. As the company grew the operations transitioned to that of a traditional advertising agency, the company was renamed as Miller/Kadanoff Direct. Robert was promoted to Controller overseeing the finances, office IT operations, and client communication systems. Robert found that the manual system of Excel and QuickBooks was no longer efficient and recommended the purchase of Clients & Profits. Robert contacted the developer of Clients and Profits, Mark Robillard, and began a discussion with him to develop new features. This process rekindled Robert's passion for training and software development, and he realized that he wanted to do this full time. Robert wrote a business plan, had it reviewed by business associates, and even visited a psychic to have his plans reviewed. In August 1994 Robert founded integral circuits and began his self-employed career. Robert also became Clients & Profits first independent consultant and trainer. Robert initiated a direct mail campaign targeting corporate training managers in San Francisco. This led to Robert obtaining his first client, the training department of Charles Schwab Investments. The training department required someone to support their Mac’s, since the Corporate IT department would only support PC’s. Robert began receiving referrals from Clients and Profits (C&P), to assist new users with setting up and training C&P. Robert began working closely with C&P to expand the consulatnts network, to establish regional user groups, and to develop new C&P features. In 1995 Robert was referred to the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (SBS) to manage a FileMaker project. The project involved coordinating a two day digital photoshoot of SBS incoming students, bringing them into FileMaker, adding biographical data, and creating layouts for a printer who produced a printed and bound document called "The Facebook" (A description of this project can be found here. SBS Facebook. Robert managed the Facebook project annually from 1995 - 2001. An interesting note is that In 1999 three Stanford Students scanned the printed Facebook pages, that had been created under my direction, and published the photos and accompanying biographical data online. The specific history of this event can be found at www.steamtunnels.org, and that in 1999 Mark Zuckerberg the “founder” of Facebook was a Sophomore in high school. In 2004 Robert formed an alliance with MMC Software and Ted Fehlhaber to support his FileMaker software solution for medical device manufacturing, Manufact Pro. Robert provides installation, training, form customizations, assist in the devlopment of new features, and functionality customizations. Robert also developed the code to allow Quickbooks to connect to Manufact Pro to read and import purchase orders and customer order and invoice data. Currently, Robert is excited by the integration of FileMaker and the iPad and iPhone using FileMaker GO. FileMaker Go allows iPad/iPhone users to connect to and use a FileMaker database hosted locally or on a “cloud” based server. This opens many new applications of the software, including the ability of FileMaker to easily connect to an SQL hosted database. |
