Open source tips. CRM, ERP, CMS and open source tutorials.

Aplicor is the most awarded hosted CRM software and ERP/financial accounting solution in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry.
Online software unique strengths include ease of use, business process automation and business intelligence. Aplicor has the highest average user count in the hosting industry and is the only CRM and ERP hosting provider with a 100% uptime history.

The Aplicor software solution is a hosted, integrated, wireless and Web-based CRM software suite which includes Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, Project Office and Customer Support. The entire CRM suite is quick to deploy and easy to use.
Aplicor CRM helps organizations acquire, retain and grow profitable customer relationships by improving marketing effectiveness, increasing sales win rates, growing customer share, decreasing customer churn, automating sales and customer support activities and providing a holistic real-time view of the customer relationship across the organization.

Aplicor CRM

CRM Software benefits:

* The strongest EASE OF USE in the hosted CRM software industry as evidenced in 4 consecutive Users Choice Awards
* The most comprehensive Business Process Automation toolkit for significant staff productivity gains
* Flexible software configuration to adapt the CRM software system to your current and evolving business requirements
* A graphical Customization Designer to modify each page layout and achieve the most relevant and easy to use screens
* Built-in best practices content for suggestive instruction and sales coaching during the sales process
* A business intelligence (BI) information analysis suite which includes data warehousing, online analytical processing (OLAP) and predictive reporting

The company’s CRM applications are designed for mid-market organizations as well as divisions or departments of larger organizations who prefer a pay-as-you-go subscription purchase that includes all IT and support staffing instead of the high-dollar capital outlay for a software license and the additional funds required for implementation consulting services and the hiring of additional IT or support resources.

The company’s business applications are offered on an ASP hosting basis for a monthly pay-as-you-go rental fee. The product acquisition, implementation and time-to-production are achieved in a fraction of the time of comparable applications. Similarly, the acquisition costs are almost eliminated and the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a fraction of comparable solutions.

Tags: open source, Aplicor, CRM, CRM-ERP case studies, software

We all know about last three Summer of Code programmers made by Google, and now it announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest geared for youths.

Participants will become involved in following open source projects: Apache, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Python, Plone and SilverStripe.

The contest is for pre-university students, such as high-school or a secondary school and under contestants under the age of 18 will need to have their parent or guardian’s consent to participate.

At the end of this contest, participants will receive a t-shirt and certificate for completing at least one task and $100 for every three tasks completed, up to a maximum of $500 per participant. Not that bad!

There will also be 10 Grand Prize winners, who will receive a trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, as an award ceremony, for themselves and one parent or guardian.

Entries were opened on 27 of November and contestants can join up until 22nd January. The competition ends on 4th February and winners will be announced on February, 11.
Good luck!

Tags: Google, Open Source contest, open source news, Googleplex, contest

Product lifecycle management software developer PTC plans to buy CoCreate Software for $250 million. PTC plans to broaden its portfolio of PLM and CAD (computer aided design) products to include an impressive suite of modeling tools that offer product development capabilities, like: engineering calculations, dynamic publishing, visualization, high-speed machining, and enterprise content and process management. PTC, of Needham, Mass., will integrate CoCreate’s modeling software into its Product Development System.

CoCreate Software logo

In addition to announcing the acquisition, PTC reported its fourth quarter 2007 revenue, up 9 percent for the same year-ago period, to $266.7 million, and full year revenues, up 10 percent from 2006, to $941.5 million. PTC said fourth-quarter license revenues grew 14 percent from the same year-ago period, to $96.1 million. Total license revenues for the fiscal year were $296.1 million, up 12 percent from 2006.

CoCreate has about 5,000 customers, including the likes of: Agilent, Canon, Fisher Controls, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Olympus, and NEC. CoCreate also has 280 employees and annual revenues of about $80 million.

PTC logo

PTC President and CEO C. Richard Harrison said in a statement: “As experts in product development, we are constantly evaluating technologies that address the business challenges of our customers. This acquisition is compelling as it enhances PTC’s product portfolio while also contributing in a meaningful way to earnings and operating margin. We are committed to protecting and enhancing the investment that these customers have made in CoCreate solutions and we plan to also offer additional complementary PTC solutions in order to bring them even more value.”

The CoCreate acquisition is another step in a rapidly consolidating PLM portfolio. In the last year and a half, Dassault bought MatrixOne, Siemens bought UGS and Oracle bought Agile Software. And while there is a boatload of smaller PLM vendors in the market, the major players have consolidated to three: PTC, UGS (itself a compilation of acquisitions) and Dassault. Now ERP (enterprise resource planning) giants SAP and Oracle are in the game, too, increasing competition even more.

Tags: CoCreate, PLM, software, CRM News, ERP, SAP, open source

DragonflyCMS is a powerful, feature-rich, Open Source content management system which was based on PHP-Nuke 6.5 in the early “CPG-Nuke CMS” days. Subsequent development of DragonflyCMS has paid close attention to security, efficiency and reliability. The release of Dragonfly marked yet another exciting milestone in our history.

The preferred setup is to have:
- PHP 4.3 or higher.
- MySQL 4.0.x in versions up to 9.0.6.1 (not 5.x)
- MySQL 4.1+ and 5.x, PostgreSQL 7.4+ and 8.x are supported from current version 9.1.x
- Apache 1.3 or higher (other httpd clients are also supported like IIS5/6, Raiden, etc.)
- GD 2, ImageMagick, netPBM or any other image manipulation software

DragonflyCMS
DragonflyCMS

Unlike other content management systems on the net, it maintain a high level of security, so that you spend time managing your site, not patching it. Managing your site is easy with this powerful line of tools which include a debugging system, BBCode support in many areas, a built-in photo gallery, and a derivative of phpBB 2.0.x.

Dragonfly Resource Digest
* A comprehensive compendium of all add-ons, blocks, themes, plug-ins and other software resources.
* Must be suitable for DragonflyCMS versions 9.1.1 and above.
* Will not include non-specific DragonflyCMS resources.
* GPL products only listed for those sites providing free access to the resource.
* Commercial resources may also be listed (under consideration).
* Searchable database
* Open for author entries soon (the term author is generically applied as the manager of the resource).
* Initially some links will only be to the site - once the author edit flag is enabled, authors can update links to the specific resource.
* Entries must be Title specific, without special prefixes.

Tags: DragonflyCMS, CMS, open source, download, review, features, open source CMS

These are 5 useful Free Open Source Office - Business tools to replace MS Word, MS Excel, Access. create PDF files, etc.:

Open Source Office Tools

1. PDFCreator

PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application.

2. AbiWord

AbiWord 2.4.6 is an award winning, small, fast, featured and cross platform word processor.

3. OFBiz

The Apache Open For Business Project is an open source enterprise automation software project licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0. By open source enterprise automation we mean: Open Source ERP, Open Source CRM, Open Source E-Business / E-Commerce, Open Source SCM, Open Source MRP, Open Source CMMS/EAM, and so on.

4. MySql

MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database software, with over 100 million copies of its software downloaded or distributed throughout its history. With superior speed, reliability, and ease of use, MySQL has become the preferred choice of corporate IT Managers because it eliminates the major problems associated with downtime, maintenance, administration and support.

MySQL is a key part of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python), the fast growing open source enterprise software stack. More and more companies are using LAMP as an alternative to expensive proprietary software stacks because of its lower cost and freedom from lock-in.

5. PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows.

Tags: open source, free, tools, software, open source utils

Marc Benioff is the founder of Salesforce.com, in 1999. Now, Salesforce has started to look less revolutionary as larger, but more established companies have adopted its leasing model.
Benioff declared (few years ago) that Salesforce would be “the Microsoft of the 21st century”. It sounds very optimistic.
He’s company earned over the previous year what Microsoft earn in one bad morning.
Salesforce wanted to revolutionize the way business buy software, and to a large extent it has accomplished that in one market niche: customer tracking.

The innovation was in turning software into a service which is leased over the Internet, instead of something bought and installed on company computers.

For Benioff, that is not enough, because he wants to turn Salesforce into a platform for Microsoft Windows Operating System, a very popular product for software developers.
“In our industry,” said Benioff, the company’s chief executive, “the only companies that really make it big move from being a ‘killer app’ to being a platform.”

Salesforce

Few software companies successfully make the leap to platform status, so making that jump is critical to Salesforce and to its long-term success.
It seems that investors are counting on success beyond the market for customer- tracking software, that’s why its share price is three times more.

Many consider that it is normal for Benioff to try to use its beachhead in managing customer information to establish itself as a platform, a kind of Holy Grail of the Software World.
Salesforce increased competition in its core market at a time when it is focusing on selling itself as a platform. But, there is the competition from smaller companies (like NetSuite), which uses the same leasing model to offer full suite of applications it has built (billing, accounting, critical business tools, etc.).

Peter Goldmacher, which is an investment analyst for Cowen declared: “My concern is that this is a company letting itself get distracted”.
At its beginning, Salesforce was one of a group of start-ups exploring ways to capture a share of the lucrative business software market, using the leasing model, called “software as a service” of “on-demand computing”.

In the battle for a share of business software dollars, Benioff chose to focus on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, a very small corner of the market.
“CRM seemed a perfect place to start and prove our concept,” he said.
We will see what is going to be next.

Tags: Salesforce, platform, Bienoff, Microsoft, NetSuite, software, CRM News, open source CRM

absoluteBUSY is a web based system for contact management, marketing and sales support, project tracking and other CRM (Customer Relationship Management) related tasks.

absoluteBUSY web CRM software enables teams and departments to share a central - always up to date - customer database, an online contact manager and a project tracking tool, either over the web or within a corporate intranet. View and update contacts, customer histories, hot leads, projects and pending tasks, from anywhere, with any web browser.

Where can you apply it?

absoluteBUSY web CRM software can be used for: web based contact management, web CRM solution, online project tracking, web based project collaboration, marketing database, online customer relationship management system.

absoluteBUSY

Features:

· online CRM software on open source LAMP stack
· web based CRM and contact manager software
· web based project tracking software

absoluteBUSY CRM functions:

1. Companies (Contact Manager Module)
This is a kind of smart address book containing information about companies, accounts, leads an contact persons. For easy retrieval the contact-manager provides a bunch of freely defineable filter criterias (e.g. country, category, business …). An unlimited number of activities (tasks, memos, ToDo) may - optionally - be linked to each company, thus providing a complete customer interaction history, including documents, quotes and other files.

2. Projects (Project Tracking Module)
Projects can be used in many ways to track project oriented work. Projects are a way of grouping related Actions for a specific project, lead, opportunity etc. An unlimited number of actions may - optionally - be linked to each project, thus providing a complete project history documenting the complete project lifecycle.

absoluteBUSY

3. Activities (Task Tracking Module)
Activities can be stand alone or - optionally - be linked to a company, a person and a project. Activities are assigned to a certain user. On login all pending activities for the active user will be listed, thus providing an automatic reminder of things left to do. File upload is also possible for an activity, so it is possible to store quotes, drafts, contracts etc. and then easily find them again in the respective customer-history or project-history.

4. Sales (Sales and Opportunities Tracking Module)
Sales can be linked to a company/contact-person/project. Sales can have several sales stages, a sales data and a pending/won/lost result. The sales-pipeline is shown as simple list, ordered by prosepected sales date. On each company/person/project view screen a total summary of all pending/won/lost sales is shown + a list of sales details.
The sales reporting section lists top companies and top projects for immediately identifiying the most profitable businesses.

absoluteBUSY

5. The Reporting Module
The reporting module contains functions for generating reports, statistics and data downloads. Downloads in CSV format can be used for further offline processing. (e.g. generating mass mailings to all customers with third party mail merge tools).

6. The Administration Module
The ADMINISTRATION module contains functions for user management and access control. All administration is done through a web based interface. User access is managed by a group based profiling system, which allows different access levels for different users. Users can be locked on the fly, which will then prohibit any further transactions for this user.

Live Demo

Tags: absoluteBUSY, review, CRM, CRM news, open source, software, download

Customer Relationship Management Software, or CRM Software, is a large class of software programs essentially designed to help businesses manage their customer information. The concept of Customer Relationship Management Software is a bit unclear for most people and in today’s business environment the term CRM Software has broadly come to mean any program that can manage customer information.

Customer Relationship Management Software to most people means a program that helps manage customer information. This is true; but the same can be said of other types of programs. There are three basic groups of customer management software. The first group being Contact Management which allows businesses the ability to organize and manage their customers and accounts, track all the associated communication and events, and perform follow ups. The second group is Sales Force Automation (SFA) which includes all the abilities of Contact Management and adds features to track sales opportunities, review all related correspondence and events, and report on the sales pipeline and related data.
Customer Relationship Management Software makes up the third group and provides all the abilities of the first two as well as abilities for tracking invoices, integrating accounting, organizing order information, and more. CRM Software typically provides the ability to track and organize every aspect of a relationship with a customer from the point of first identification as a lead through and beyond the point that they are an ongoing customer.

Customer Relationship Management Software can be a major undertaking, with the cost for many systems over several million dollars and the implementation period lasting a year or more. Before making a commitment like this, every business should ask if they require a full CRM Software program. The key is to evaluate what the business needs are.
If the focus is to organize the customer and company information and be able to easily follow up with clients, then Contact Management Software will provide what is needed. For sales based businesses that need to track all customer correspondence and activities as well as tracking the sales process and performance, Sales Force Automation Software is likely the solution. For larger businesses that need to track customer and sales information as well as accounting, ordering, reconciliation, support, and all other aspect of customer contact then CRM Software may be the way to go.

CRM Software

As previously noted CRM Software can cost millions of dollars and take years to fully implement. This can, in part, be due to the complexity of the systems. Many provide every feature a business could need to manage all aspects of customer contact, including accounting, support, marketing, sales and so on. The systems can be so feature rich that users have a difficult time learning all the functions they are required to use. In many situations businesses find their employees working with only the sections of the CRM Software that are essential and entire modules go unused. This can be a source of frustration and create inconsistencies in the customer data. This often makes having CRM Software worse than not having it.

The first step is to evaluate exactly what the company needs to accomplish. Look at how things are done now, what things need to be changed, and what things need to stay the same. Evaluate all your options for CRM Software, and consider creating a system personalized for your business. If your accounting software is working well and you do not wish to change it, consider adding a Sales Force Automation program that will permit you to create your own custom Customer Relationship Management system.
Many businesses find that by carefully looking for the functionality they need, they can essentially create their own CRM Software system by putting together carefully chosen programs.

Tags: CRM, software, outlook, customer, relationship, management, open source

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.

One of the most important activities is as a standards body, maintaining the Open Source Definition for the good of the community. The Open Source Initiative Approved License trademark and program creates a nexus of trust around which developers, users, corporations and governments can organize open-source cooperation.

OSI logo

To summarize, the Definition model of distribution terms require that:

* Free Redistribution
No restrictions are placed on parties from selling of giving away the software.
* Source Code Availability
The software must include source code and must also allow for binary distributions when there is a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code.
* Derived Works
Modifications and derived works must be allowed, and must be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
* Integrity of the Authors Source Code
The distribution of modified source code must be allowed although restrictions to ensure the possibility to distinguish the original source code from the derived works are tolerated. For example, the possibility of using different software names.
* No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
* No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
* Distribution of License
The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
* License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
The rights given by the license must not be different for the original distribution and any other one even when it takes place in a totally different context.
* License Must Not Contaminate Other Software
The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

Source

Tags: open source, definition, OSI, software, programs, license, open source utils, terms definition

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

OpenLaszlo
Download

It is “write once, run everywhere.” An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems.

Open Laszlo Architecture

With OpenLaszlo 4, the OpenLaszlo architecture has been remodularized into a true multi-runtime platform. OpenLaszlo uses standard ECMAScript Release 3 with some ECMAScript Release 4 extensions as its scripting language. The compiler translates this script to an intermediate language that is then processed by multiple back-ends to translate into an appropriate format for the destination runtime.

The OpenLaszlo runtime library has been refactored into two parts: multiple kernels containing runtime-specific code, and a cross-runtime library.The cross-runtime (portable) part of the library is written in ‘extended ECMA 3′ (i.e., ECMA 3 with the extensions we added from ECMA 4). The kernels are written in the native dialect of the destination runtime (e.g., ActionScript or Javascript), which really turns out to be ECMA 3 plus the destination runtime API.

The core OpenLaszlo runtime library (also called the core LFC, for “Laszlo Foundation Class”) delivers a common baseline of functionality across all supported runtimes. This gives developers a rich environment in which to build full-featured web applications. In addition, OpenLaszlo 4 includes runtime-specific extensions so that the particular benefits of targeting a runtime are not lost to OpenLaszlo application developers. For example, extensions allow access to Flash’s streaming media capabilities.

Open Laszlo Architecture

Tags: OpenLaszlo, open source, code, runtime, download, review, open source utils