By Paul Rony on 10/27/2006 1:13 AM

I just got back from the Mono Meeting with a renewed vigor to create a self-contained SplendidCRM distribution on the Linux platform.  I must say that it was a great pleasure to be in a room filled with similarly passionate folks.  You can check out some of the slides from the meeting at http://www.go-mono.com/monologue/.

 

For those of you who are looking forward to our next release, the best I can tell you is that it will happen soon.  We are code complete and we are now testing the Import / Export features.  In addition to your basic CSV support, we are also going to permit the use of XML.  If you are a current SugarCRM customer, you will be pleased to know that we will allow you to import an SugarCRM database that has been saved to XML.

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By Paul Rony on 9/21/2006 1:03 PM

We are headed to the Mono meeting on October 23rd & 24th in Boston, MA. http://www.go-mono.com/meeting/

Let us know if you plan to attend.

 

By Paul Rony on 9/9/2006 12:45 AM

We look forward to there being an open exchange of ideas.

 

Check them out:

http://www.codeplex.com/Project/ListForums.aspx?ProjectName=sugarcrm

 

 

By Paul Rony on 8/6/2006 11:36 AM

This announcement is probably a bit premature, but we have SplendidCRM running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES).  We’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks, ever since the great folks on the Mono team created a VMware image of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) with a stable version of Mono and MonoDevelop.

 

Our first instinct was to copy the entire SplendidCRM project to SLED and recompile under MonoDevelop.  This worked very well, with MonoDevelop being able to convert a Visual Studio 2003 project into its own format.  Mono and MonoDevelop are incredible products and we were thrilled to see SplendidCRM running on a Linux platform.

 

There were a couple of things that we needed to fix in SplendidCRM, such as correcting the case on any images or files.  SplendidCRM is pretty tight, so there were only a couple of images that needed to be corrected.  We also needed to alter the way we initialize the culture settings as values like the CurrencyDecimalSeparator...

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By Paul Rony on 7/19/2006 10:18 AM

SplendidCRM 1.2 is now in public beta. The final release date will not be set until we can gauge the initial reaction to the public beta, but it is safe to assume that the final release will be toward the end of August 2006.



 

SplendidCRM 1.2 has added the following features:

    1) Full .NET 2.0 Framework and Visual Studio 2005 support

    2) Access Control Lists

    3) Reporting module using ReportViewer

    4) Preview of Contracts, Products and Quotes modules

 

In addition to the SplendidCRM 1.2 features, we were also able to release builds for Oracle, DB2 and MySQL on the same day.  Not a bad accomplishment if I do say so myself.

 

All of the database platforms we support are running on a single demo server.  The interesting thing is that the server is still very fast even though it is hosting the web server as well as the four database servers. 

 

For those of you who are interested, the demo hardware is as follows:

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By Paul Rony on 6/30/2006 11:47 PM

We have been looking for an alternative to SourceForge as a place to host SplendidCRM.  Our wait has seemed to pay off as Microsoft has just announced CodePlex.  http://www.codeplex.com

"CodePlex is an online software development environment for open and shared source .NET developers to create, host and manage projects throughout the project lifecycle. It has been written from the ground up in C# using .NET 2.0 technology and Visual Studio Team System on the back end. CodePlex is open to the public free of charge."

 

By Paul Rony on 6/20/2006 8:06 AM

It has been a while since my last entry.  I have been working so hard on the reporting module that I simply could not spare the cycles.  In any case, progress is good and we hope to have a beta release at the beginning of July.

The SplendidCRM Reporting module will use the Report Definition Language (RDL) that Microsoft created a few years ago.  RDL is an XML-based specification.  This is going to provide unsurpassed flexibility when it comes to report generation.  SplendidCRM will have a reporting module similar to that of SugarCRM, but it will also have the ability to import and export a report in RDL.

Microsoft has indicated that they will release Reporting Services as part of SQL Server Express, which suggests that there will soon be a free report designer. 

Eventually, we should be able to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with the reports stored on the server, but we will not do so on our first release.

 

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By Paul Rony on 5/3/2006 1:59 PM

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.

 

By Paul Rony on 4/21/2006 1:56 AM

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.

 

By Paul Rony on 3/22/2006 10:47 PM

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 prevented all of our functions in Oracle to compile fine, but be marked as Invalid.  This had a cascading effect of causing our views in Oracle to generate an compiler error stating that a dependent function was invalid.

 

After hours of research and experimentation, we narrowed the problem down to the use of the carriage-return line-feed pair (CRLF) that is common to text files used on the Windows platform.  Whereas the rest of the world generally treats the CRLF pair as whitespace, Oracle does not.

 

The solution was to simply replace CRLF with LF before creating executing the scripts in Oracle.

 

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