Never Ending Thoughts…

This weekend I spent some time looking at some of the CRM solutions out there. We have personally used zoho and sales force, and while they are paid CRM solutions, and are really quite good, I wanted to try out some of the good open source and free CRM solutions that are available in the market. While there is nothing wrong with zoho and sales force and many other paid solutions out there, there’s something about open source and free solutions that attracts everyone (besides the fact that they are free). That is a) ability to have full control over the solution and customize it which ever way you’d want to; b) no fear of being locked in with a particular vendor or a particular proprietary technology; and c) in house deployment and thus not having to worry about and rely on a third party for the hosting needs.

So when there are so many benefits of an open source and free CRM solution, what makes them not so popular in this market where people are biting by the bit? I think the biggest problem is that most of the open source CRM solutions are written by highly technical folks. And most of the good ones like openCRX, sugarCRM are way too extensive for many people. The value that paid CRM solutions provide is first of they are extremely simple to use. For instance you can get going with zoho or sales force in literally 15 minutes. And if you don’t understand something, simply call up their 1-800 line and you will get the answer for whatever you’d be looking for within 10 minutes. Yes you have to pay for it; As they say “what you get is what you pay for”. In case of openCRX or sugarCRM, you will be at the mercy of 160 page Admin Guide and will be spending 2 days understanding the complex realm based security, multi-database connectivity and other things that you as a sales manager wouldn’t even want to worry about.

So where’s the holy grail then? I think the holy grail is really in coming up with the linux red hat kind of model. Let’s go back in time and see how linux was invented. The core linux operating system is still free and that’s how it was brought into the World. The idea was of a free and extensible operating system that almost anyone could use for almost anything they wanted to. And no doubt it’s a great idea and the Operating System in itself is great too. However, the fact that it was extremely tech centric, red hat spun a business concept around it and provided a full support based model and the concept of “enterprise version” of the linux operating system. Now, you had the liberty of still getting a free open source operating system, but at the same time you had a team of professional technical and business staff who were there to guide you in case you got stuck somewhere. Not even that, red hat went ahead and came up with their pre-packaged versions of the linux Operating System that businesses could simply use out the box.

I think something like this is still missing in the open source CRM solutions. Yes, sugarCRM has had good success coming up with a similar model, but there is still a huge market to conquer. And until the open source CRM providers follow the route that red hat followed years back, I believe companies like sales force, zoho and Microsoft will keep on enjoying the major chunk of the CRM market.

Have you tried any of the open source CRM solutions that you found were extremely simple and worth looking at? Share with us!

Project Management can become a horrendous task if you don’t have a good project management process and tools in place. In an effort to find out a good tool for our own company, I started with the obvious choice – Open Source and Free. Most of the good Project Management Tools are still paid and are based on proprietary technology. Since I wanted to start with something really simple and something I can modify and play on my own I resorted to the Open Source and Free Tools market. Furthermore, being familiar with the Java Stack, I wanted to focus on tools that can be easily installed on a Java Stack.

Prerequisites For Me

1. Open Source and Free Tools Market
2. Java and MySQL (or similar database) stack
3. Familiar and Standards based (preferably J2EE) stack

My Selection Critieria

1. Quick and Easy to install
2. Easy to understand by a “technical person” given that most of the folks in my team are highly techie.
3. Something that can be hosted within the Intranet
4. Easy connectivity with Jira or any other good bug tracking system
5. Time management and Reporting

My Findings

With these criteria in mind, I resorted to two main products: OpenProj and Plandora. I did evaluate 10 other solutions (including the famous ones like RedMine, Trac, Project HQ, etc.) However my criteria was to really focus on a solution that would plug into our existing J2EE stack much more seamlessly and so we spent quite some time exploring Plandora.

OpenProj pros and cons

OpenProj pretty much gives you a feel of a cut down version of the full blown Microsoft Project. It’s desktop based, but I still considered it in my evaluation just because of the fact it’s so closely similar to Microsoft Project. There are so many people who know Microsoft Project that having a tool something similar cuts down the learning curve a lot. The cons are obviously that it’s not a web based tool. OpenProj does have a hosted solution but we didn’t evaluate that.

Plandora pros and cons

We liked plandora and the concept a lot. The installation wasn’t that straightforward, especially because most of their documentation is in French. The product is extremely exhaustive and has probably more features than any other open source project management tool out there. It’s concept is better than even RedMine; however the place where I believe they fail is the UI. The UI is not very easy to use, throws ugly NullPointerExceptions if you don’t know what you are doing. In a nutshell, I found that we would end up spending more time managing our project road-map on plandora than actually working on the project! I really wish plandora team spends time on the UI and make it more streamlined and user friendly.

For now, I am still deciding if we should spend some time improving plandora UI or give RedMine a closer look, or simply live with OpenProj. What are your experiences?

There are lot of commercial grade email marketing tools available out there, but of course you have to pay to be able to use them. There are literally 1000s of Email Marketing Tools available in the market today so why write your own? The reasons are obvious:

1. Your own email marketing tool will give you as much flexibility as you need

2. All good email marketing tools solutions would require you to integrate with your CRM. And when you reach into that zone, you will most certainly have to spend significant amount of money in licenses and support

3. And lastly, it’s Free! Especially if it’s going to take only a day or so!

So what all do you need to start? You can pick any language of your choice. In this blog, we will take Java as an example. You can go as fancy as possible and create a whole Web2.0 style front end; but for the sake of keeping it simple, we will write a stand alone Java code. SMTP Emailing in general has gotten so much standardized that it’s easy to get pre-packaged frameworks that you can readily download and plug into any solution. For example, the Apache Commons Email API.

Once you have the Apache Commons Email API, all you have to do to be able to send a simple email from a stand alone program is:

SimpleEmail email = new SimpleEmail();

email.setHostName(“your.mailserver.hostname”);

email.setAuthentication(“your-email”, “your-password”);

email.addTo(“receivers-email”);

email.setSubject(“here goes the subject line”);

email.setMsg(“hello, this is my first email using Apache Commons API!”);

email.send();

And here you go! Compile and run this and you’ll see an email to the receiver! Now you can go one step further and convert this into a cron job that loads the list of receivers from a file and composes an email and shoots it out! You can go as complex and flexible as possible! After all it’s your own customized marketing tool!

It’s hard to put all the details in one single blog. The idea here was to share a method of Email Marketing and point you into one direction. I’ll be happy to assist and set this thing up in your environment. Just shoot me a comment!

Happy Coding!

Search engines lay the pathways to information on the internet. Without a good search algorithm, no matter how good an article or a piece of information might be, it will just get submerged under the millions of web contents spread and continuously growing all across the world. So when someone goes to a search engine to look for a particular information, what is he really looking for? Perhaps some opinion about a new restaurant in town, a paragraph from a book, may be the colors that are available for his car model, and the list goes endless. But look at it carefully and you will notice that all people are looking for is “information” and not “addresses of information”. What our current search engine technology provides us are “addresses of information”, better known as “URLs”. When you search something in google, yahoo or bing, what you get as a result is a set of URLs and not the actual information you are looking for. So in essence when people run searches in current search engines what they get are actually “Addresses” where they could find relevant information, but not really the information itself.

An actual “artifact based search engine” would be able to pull up “actual information”, perhaps along with the URL addresses from where it pulled the information.

But how will that be possible? Answer lies in the way data is stored, categorized and indexed. Current search engines are doing a great job indexing the available data based on complex keywords, page ranking and linking based algorithms. However until the data is really categorized and ontological relationships are built between various information islands, making search engines intelligent enough to be able to deliver information would be impossible.

With more research and development being put in areas related to Semantic Web, the ability to search for information rather than information addresses might turn into a reality.

With the complexity and the sheer size of the data that needs to be categorized and stored in ontological form, it would be close to impossible for any single company to make this transformation. In the coming months and years products like google search, haiku, ellipsis dive will work together and as more and more companies and people will join hands, it won’t be too late in the future when we will see real information based search become a day to day part of our lives.