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.

SplendidCRM Software became a Microsoft Certfied Partner today. 

Just last week SplendidCRM Open-Source 1.0 passed the Windows Server 2003 Platform Test and the SQL Server 2005 Platform Test.

Beta 2 was released to the public today.  This is a significant event as the ability to customize fields and layouts are critical to most businesses.

I am particularly pleased with our implementation of custom layouts as it is data driven.   This is dramatically different from SugarCRM's approach of editing HTML files.  The big advantage to being data driven is that the upgrade process does not risk over-writing your customizations.  There are also benefits when it comes to validating the layouts against the database schema.

The terminology system is also data driven and has similar benefits when it comes to editing this data and preventing over-writes during the upgrade process.  We have also provided a feature to allow you to import your existing SugarCRM Language Pack.  Very slick!

During our testing, we have imported a number of SugarCRM Language Packs and i ...