By Paul Rony on 10/16/2009 11:04 AM

A press release will follow shortly.

 

By Paul Rony on 9/17/2009 10:06 AM

On the one hand, this should not be big news as it is very easy to create an Amazon EC2 Windows-based server and install SplendidCRM.  The news is big because we are running fully on Microsoft's new Azure cloud service.  The database is being run off of Azure SQL and the web application has been deployed to Azure Windows.

 

The effort was reasonable and would have been negligible had we not used SQL Server techniques that have been deprecated for years.  This is important because Azure SQL does not support any of the SQL Server deprecated features.  Still, the process was not that difficult, we simply replaced code that used dbo.sysobject to determine if an object already exists with code that uses the cross-platform view INFORMATION_SCHEMA.

 

If you would like to experiment for yourself, please visit:

http://splendidcrm7.cloudapp.net/

Login: will

Password: will

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By Paul Rony on 7/7/2009 11:21 PM

Finally, a competitor to AdWords.  We stopped using Google AdWords a couple of months ago when, in their infinite wisdom, decided that we were not following the terms of their service when we put Google banner ads at the top of our Community Edition product.  It seemed like a really dumb thing to do considering that we paid Google 10-times more for the AdWords service than we received from their AdSense service.  Part of the problem is that Google provided no details as to why they were shutting us down, nor was there any dispute mechanism to help us understand the issue and correct the problem.  The funny thing is that our sales have not dropped since we stopped using Google AdWords.

 

In any case, we are going to experiment with Microsoft Advertising and we encourage you to check them out as well.

https://adcenter.microsoft.com/?lc=1033

 

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By Paul Rony on 5/8/2009 9:30 AM

SugarCRM’s CEO, John Robert’s exit is probably a good thing. When we started SplendidCRM, we thought that the folks at SugarCRM would be open to suggestions. Our path has always been to cater to the developers that only want a Microsoft-based solution, so we really did not see SplendidCRM as competition to SugarCRM, but more as a complement to SugarCRM. Apparently, John Roberts did not see it the same way. Instead of embracing the whole open-source mantra, he threatened us with a lawsuit. Such threats are empty because the whole point of open-source is to encourage others to build upon the platform; in fact, the accompanying license specifically encourages this.

By Paul Rony on 12/17/2008 11:12 AM

SplendidCRM 3.0 Enterprise has the ability to integrate with PayPal.  You can configure your PayPal merchant account to send notifications to your SplendidCRM site and have all transactions automatically inserted into the CRM.  You get full account, contact, order and invoice information, including the ability to match line items with products in your catalog.  SplendidCRM also allows you to import old PayPal transactions, so if you have been using PayPal for years, you can easily bring in all that data.  Of course, the reason you would want to do this is to simplify the effort of sending email newsletters or announcements to all your old customers.

 

You can even go one step further if you sign-up for PayPal Website Payments Pro.  PayPal charges an extra $30/month for this, but if you have this service, SplendidCRM can be used to create invoices and charge customer credit cards through PayPal's gateway.  Using PayPal instead of a Visa Merchant account is significantly easier to setup and may be less expensive, but it depends on your sales volume.

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By Paul Rony on 12/1/2008 6:39 PM

While I like our Silverlight charting implementation, I would much rather take advantage of an implementation provided by Microsoft.

http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight

 

By Paul Rony on 12/1/2008 6:29 PM

We have a new reason to hassen our adoption of .NET 3.5.  Although I've done little more than look at a few samples, this charting package looks very interesting.

 

Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=130F7986-BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en

 

Samples Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart

 

 

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By Paul Rony on 11/29/2008 10:07 PM

The SplendidCRM Workflow Engine is finally out the door. It has been a long hard road, but we were able to achieve all the goals we set. Aside from the expected requirements of being able to run just about any action based on just about any event in the CRM, one hidden requirement is the ability to track an error in the workflow back to the source. There is nothing worse than having a problem and not know where to look. Actually, this is a bit more important for us as only a fraction of the SplendidCRM users will create externally developed workflows. But, this might affect you if you need to do some advanced things in workflows, such as integrating with the Alphanumeric paging Activity from http://www.nsoftware.com/workflow/. /n software also has some other interesting activities such as the FTP Activity, the ZIP Activity or the Amazon Activity. Another complication with workflow is preventing circular workflows. For example, if you create an Account...

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By Paul Rony on 8/14/2008 12:34 PM

If you were wondering why it has been so long since my last entry, the answer is workflow.  I have been working on the integration of SplendidCRM with Windows Workflow Foundation for several months.  Workflow is a critical component of any CRM, but it is also one of the most complex.  By leveraging Windows Workflow, we are hoping to simplify while maintaining the flexibility.  No official release date as been set, but judging by the progress, I would expect that we are a month a way from a beta.  Here is a preview:

By Paul Rony on 4/25/2008 10:57 AM

SplendidCRM has had the ability to import an RDL file for more than a year.  Six months ago we added support for parameters to an imported RDL file, which effectively allowed you to generate an invoice.  The one thing we were missing was the ability to generate the PDF invoice at the click of a button.  With the new DynamicButtons feature of SplendidCRM 2.1, we are finally able to put it all together.  You can now create a button and have it run a report, using any of the parameters of the current record.  In this case, we added a PDF button to the Invoice Detail View and we run the Generic Invoice report with the current INVOICE_ID as a parameter.

 

We are going to start included sample RDL reports in SplendidCRM.  If you have any suggestions as to what kinds of samples we should create, feel free to post them on our forum or send them to our support staff.

 

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