By Paul Rony on 2/13/2010 7:28 PM

We finally found some spare time to create training videos for SplendidCRM.  We call them Two-Minute Training as our goal is to provide a quick introduction to each topic in approximately two minutes.  Some topics took longer than two minutes, with the Installing SplendidCRM topic taking almost ten minutes.  We considered trimming the videos, or even going slower for some of the more complex topics, but this did not seem necessary as our viewers can easily pause, rewind or fast-forward.

 

The videos were created using Camtasia from TechSmith.  The software was reasonably priced and very easy to use.  We recommend it highly if you need to create your own training videos.

 

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By Paul Rony on 1/22/2010 11:06 PM

Every couple of years, we submit our application to Lionbridge for 3rd party verification.  The process is surprisingly time-consuming.  In the end, we agree with Microsoft that the process helps ensure a reliable experience.

By Paul Rony on 12/27/2009 1:11 AM

Along with the transition to VS 2008, we are also deploying our Professional and Enterprise products with SQL Server 2008 Express.

 

Your first question may be, "why did it take so long?"  Well, the problem is not Visual Studio 2008, but with deploying a .NET 3.5 solution.  Even though we love the .NET development platform, we hate writing the deployment application.  It would seem that the new the technology, the harder it is to deploy.  So, we have been resisting the move to VS 2008 and SQL 2008.

 

We were motivated to move to .NET 3.5 to take advantage of the latest ReportViewer, currently under beta in Visual Studio 2010.  This new viewer will be a major step forward and we wanted to take advantage of it immediately.  There was no real need to move to SQL 2008, but since we were already installing .NET 3.5, it seemed like a good idea.

 

We are currently testing SplendidCRM 4.1 and will be publishing it very soon.

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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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