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

Avidian decided to better leverage the time in Outlook by turning the personal information manager into a full-fledged sales CRM application.
Prophet 4.0, the latest version, offers what the company calls advanced contact management features plus expanded search and platform capabilities.

Avidian built Prophet into Outlook, which gives sales people an application with one database that covers sales, contacts, tasks, e-mail and calendaring — in a format they already know how to use. 70% of CRM programs fail because people within an organization simply won’t use it.

Prophet for Outlook
Avidian

4.0 Features

Like any good CRM program, Prophet lets you manage contacts, track and manage sales opportunities, share sales information and generate pipeline, forecast, summary and even custom reports. Version 4.0 also offers the following features and capabilities:

•Sales CRM Automation
Set specific follow-up actions at each stage of your sales process. Create automatic discrete e-mails, tasks, reminders or appointments for each step.

•Expanded Search
Prophet Toolbar lets you find specific contacts or opportunities with a single search from anywhere in Outlook.

•Expanded Platform Support
Prophet 4.0 supports Microsoft Mobile Devices and Terminal Server along with Windows Roaming Profiles.

•Usability Improvements
Add date/time stamped notes to contact files, ability to re-size company and opportunity windows and new Sales Data Importing Wizard.

•Improved Report Creation
The advanced report wizard includes more templates, filters and report types plus simple sales forecasts, account details.

Avidian designed Prophet 4.0 for small businesses with anywhere from one to 200 employees.

Tags: Avidian, Prophet, Outlook, software, CRM, small business

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

Development Cycle

Sugar CRM is changing the game by finding a better way to make software.
Sugar CRM offers Sugar Open Source to a community of 2,400 CRM developers and experts to use this software, and also provides feedback and develops extensions to the Sugar.
Many more motives were made Sugar CRM to be translated in 24 languages in less than 18 months. This distributed development cycle produced software that is of a better quality than closed vendors could ever produce and is more innovative. Just think those 2,400 CRM experts understand CRM market better.

Tags: open source CRM, Sugar CRM, CRM experts, software

This is an impressive video presenting testimonials from people who used and still uses Microsoft CRM. With this video you can learn how it helped their business become more productive and efficient, and what it can do for you and for your business.

Microsoft CRM

Tags: open source, Microsoft CRM, video, open source CRM

SOLIS- automation of business processes

SOLIS is an informatics system, a complete solution, web integrate for selling and customer relationship management for import and distribution companies. SOLIS appeared as a desire to relieve and optimize company’s work, which are on import and distribution market. SOLIS integrates the link clients-offer-order-delivery-supply-supplier, being a real success for the person involved in these processes. The SOLIS project was created four years ago, and until now was and it is a continuing development, that results by the customer’s needs.
SOLIS is a powerful instrument which can help for the communication process, between the company’s departments or between the company and clients or suppliers. This can be done by it client-server technology that they can offer. This technology permit introduction and visualization of the information, by who is interested, in real time, no matter or the station number, and no matter if they are in the internal company network, or if they are connected truth the internet.
SOLIS system has a unique data base, accessible in real time, with products, clients, contacts, personalized offers, commands and command checks, reservation, contracts, bills, pro-forma’s, expedition notices, etc. and permit fast looking for clients, visualization of the real situation (send offers, processed commands, contracts, service activity, pay situation), offering a fast answer to clients solicitations, received by phone, e-mail or fax.
SOLIS can be a great solution for selling administration and customer relationship management.
Download

Tags: open source, SOLIS, selling administration, CRM, open source CRM, CRM case studies

Oracle Coherence

Oracle Coherence is a modern data grid solution for clustered applications and application servers. This program makes managing and sharing data in a cluster very simple, as on a single server. This is possible by coordinating updates to the data, by using cluster-wide concurrency control, distributing and replicating data changes across the cluster. This is made by using the highest performing clustered protocol available.
Any developer can take advantage of Oracle Coherence featuring, by using the standard Java collections API to modify and access data. You can use the standard JavaBean event model to receive data change notifications.
Download

Tags: Oracle Coherence, open source, solution, clustered applications, cluster, updates, protocol, Java, API, JavaBean, open source utils

Compiere ERP

Compiere is a great Open Source ERP software application, which is capable of fully integrated CRM software solutions.
Compiere ERP is also a fully integrated business solution for small and medium enterprises, all over the world and it is based on business process more than departmental boundaries.
Overview

Tags: Compiere, Open Source ERP, Open source CRM, software, application, solution, business

SOA (Service- Oriented Architecture) seems to be a solution for dummies. To implant SOA you have to make some organizational changes (cultural and technological) on multiple levels and this will take from 6 month to 6 years.

SOA solutions

SOA is a hot topic in the IT world and it seems that SOA is inevitable for companies and IT support. The SOA concept can offer productivity, greater efficiency and collaboration and enable competitive advantage and growth.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) defines SOA as “a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains.”

Why SOA?

With SOA you can get anything you want, it is so simple, only to put together the pieces.
Also, implementing SOA in your organization you can enable business users to understand what IT is doing and to judge the relative merit of things and helps on decision about what you should focus on.

Tags: CRM, SOA, OASIS, CRM News, Open Source CRM, solution