We have just completed development on the ACL system.  ACL is a critical component of any CRM, so we are pleased to be able to offer it so soon after the release of our 1.0 product.

If you are interested in a preview, please send me an email and I will see if we can included you in our private/internal beta testing.  Otherwise, look for a public beta in the next two weeks.

We were making great progress porting SplendidCRM to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 15.0, right up until the Sybase provider failed. 

The hard part is usually converting the SQL scripts to the Sybase format.  It was a bit painful writing SQL functions in Java, but we did it.  And we resigned ourselves into accepting that Sybase does not allow stored procedures to accept a text field as an input.  But it is always frustrating when we have to debug another company's product.

The Sybase ADO.NET driver has a problem when parameters are used through the IDbDataParameter common interface. An Input/Output parameter throws an exception when the Value parameter is accessed after procedure execution.

We have posted a bug on the Sybase site, but we are not optimistic that they will fix the problem any time soon.  Until they fix the bug, we cannot continue.

While working on a component that will allow the SplendidCRM installation utility to update an existing database, we ran across an obscure Oracle bug.  Here is the error:

            PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "" when expecting one of the following:     return

The error ...

Here is the quote from their web site:

"Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer."

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

We are currently testing against Oracle 10g Release 2, so we are not expecting any additional development effort.  We will, however, need to create a new VMware instance and regression test against XE.

It is a good thing we are developing a regression testing tool, because we have a bunch of databases to support:

• SQL Server 2000
< ...

We are hoping that the hefty installation requirements will not limit its use.  The worst part is all of the license agreements that you must navigate through during installation. 

SplendidCRM Plug-in for Outlook 2003 is almost identical to the plug-in from SugarCRM, but adds the ability to use Windows Authentication when communicating with SplendidCRM.

The only ...

Special thanks to Keven Goldman of Goldman Design.

It has been an exciting week as we build our infrastructure to support regression testing.  We got a couple of HP/Compaq ProLiant DL360 G4s with support for 64-bit Windows.  On top of them, we installed VMware GSX Server 3.2.1 and proceeded to build testing operating systems to test SplendidCRM against SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, Oracle 9i, Oracle 10g, IBM DB2 Express-C and MySQL 5.

VMware GSX is not as powerful as VMware Workstation 5 when it comes to managing snapshots, but we needed a better way to run multiple simultaneous operatin ...

On January 30, 2006, IBM released a free version of their DB2 UDB database. Here is the quote from their web page: "DB2 Express-C is completely free to download, develop, deploy, test, run, embed, and redistribute."

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/udb/edition-expressc.html

I simply could not resist the temptation to add support for DB2.  This was a personal challenge as I have never developed for DB2, but had wanted to ever since they added the ability to support stored procedures a few short years ago.  SplendidCRM now supports all the major database platforms; this is something that SugarCRM has yet to accomplish.

So, for the last 4 days, I've been working on porting the 110 tables, 20 functions, 190 views, and 290 procedures from SQL Server to DB2.  Althoug ...

I got to see some early logo designs from Goldman Design http://www.goldmandesign.com.  If all goes well, we will release the new logo at the same time we release version 1.0.