By Paul Rony on 3/19/2007 12:55 AM

We are finally ready to show version 1.4.  We have been taking our time to release it simply to gain confidence in all the technologies we have integrated. 

Converting to MasterPages required us to edit every ASPX file.  We should be able to duplicate all the existing SugarCRM themes, but we have been more focused on stability.

WebParts required that we write a Personalization Provider.  It was surprisingly easy to integrate ASP.NET 2.0 personalization into our existing user and role management. 

AJAX was a last-minute inclusion.  Microsoft recently released ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and we could not resist taking advantage of the technology.  The beauty of ASP.NET AJAX is that it takes very little code in order to implement.  Actually, with version 1.4, we are just testing the waters, so we have only sprinkled a little AJAX on the home page and the dashboard.  In the near future, we expect to take advantage of the hover control and auto-complete.

 

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By Paul Rony on 1/21/2007 3:54 PM

We've been busy the last couple of months integrating SplendidCRM with Great Plains Accounting, but we took some time out to update the Web1.4 tree. 

 

We started the Web1.4 node many months ago to take advantage of some of the major advances in .NET 2.0, such as MasterPages, Themes, WebParts and AJAX.  Most of the MasterPages and Themes work was completed a few months ago and needed just a little more work to get the menus to function properly. 

 

Using the new ASP.NET AJAX framework, formerly Atlas, was a breeze.  I just a couple of days, we were able to add AJAX features to the charts on the Dashboard and to the Report editor.  Feel free to make suggestions in our Features Forum as to areas that you would like to see AJAXified.

 

We are also making progress with WebParts.  We have migrated all pages to use WebParts to manage the left Sidebar, and we have migrated the entire home page to WebParts.  This will give SplendidCRM the same kind of functionality as SugarCRM's...

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By Paul Rony on 11/10/2006 4:08 AM

We have been planning this migration for more than a month.  In that time we have been upgrading our servers with bigger hard disks and more RAM. 

The migration did not go as smoothly as we had hoped, but at least we can breath now that the migration is complete.  The main problem we ran into was with one particular node in our project tree that was not accessible from the COM interface that SourceSafe provides.  After several failed migration attempts, we finally followed a tip on the SourceGear forum to backup and restore the SourceSafe database using SourceSafe utilities.

Sadly, the import utility was not able to migrate all of the labels. 

 

By Paul Rony on 11/8/2006 9:11 AM

The focus on 1.3 has been on Import and Export. You now have the ability to import or export from the core modules using the most popular data formats, including XML Spreadsheet, XML and Comma Delimited. You can also import an entire SugarCRM database, so migration is painless.

We also have added some Team management code in the Admin area, but we do not currently support assigning items to teams or filtering by teams.  Team management will be in our next release.

Speaking of our next release, we are expecting to have full support for .NET 2.0 MasterPages and Themes.  Ideally we would also support WebParts, but there still are a few unknowns to resolve.

 

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."