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Founder Blog
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Author: |
paulrony |
Created: |
1/3/2006 4:38 PM |
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These are just a few notes that I've taken while developing SplendidCRM. |
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Moving to GPL 3 |
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By Paul Rony on
2/23/2008 8:16 AM
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We are considering moving the open-source version to GPL. This is an extremely tough decision because the ramifications would require that we more closely follow SugarCRM's approach of reducing the feature set of the Community edition. Features such as Reporting, Team Management, Access Control, Product Catalog, Quotes, Orders and Invoices would all be exclusive to the Professional edition. We would effectively follow SugarCRM's offerings http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html.
On the positive side, we would provide the SQL source code to the Community edition and w ...
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London |
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By Paul Rony on
2/21/2008 11:14 PM
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I've just returned from a visit to a client in London. If you have never been to London, then you should really go. The people are very helpful, from the Underground workers that provide directions with a smile, to strangers that graciously offer to help a confused tourist. The city is clean and I felt safe traveling, quite literally, from one end of London to the other end at 10 PM at night.
It also helps to have a wonderful host. On top of being generous, our host challenged us to add features that will be critical to their success. We like to be challenged, especially when the result benefits the SplendidCRM community. ...
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App_Browsers, a little used, but impressive, feature |
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By Paul Rony on
1/10/2008 7:35 AM
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First a little background. One of the new features of SplendidCRM 2.0 is the detection of a mobile-based browser. Within days of release, a customer requested support for a BlackBerry, and iPhone and an iPod.
Our first instinc ...
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Visual Studio 2008 |
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By Paul Rony on
12/9/2007 12:04 AM
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We had a customer that was having trouble compiling, so we decided to retest on all supported versions of Visual Studio. While we were at it, we decided to include all versions of Visual Studio 2008. You can review our < ...
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Something we should have done a long time ago |
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By Paul Rony on
12/3/2007 2:40 PM
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While working on the Saved Search feature, we decided to leverage the Field Layout editor to define the search dialogs. This is something that we should have done a long time ago given how easy it was. Besides being a feature that customers have requested, it actually simplifies the search code.
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Mobile browser support |
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By Paul Rony on
11/18/2007 1:31 PM
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A customer recently inquired about our support of a mobile browser. My immediate answer was no, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was one of the features we wanted to add after migrating to .NET 2.0 MasterPages. Feature creep is a terrible thing, so I'm not going to call this feature creep. I'm going to call it a re-prioritization of a planned feature.
The cool thing is that we were able to create a new master page for the mobile browser. This means that 95% of our code went unchanged. We did need to modify our dynamic view generation to separate fields by rows instead of columns and we were compelled to c ...
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PDF Invoices coming soon |
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By Paul Rony on
10/24/2007 7:27 PM
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We have a number of big projects that occupy our time, but we were able to slip-in one long-overdue feature. When we designed the reporting engine in SplendidCRM to be based on Microsoft's Report Definition Language (RDL), we knew that we would one day be able to import RDL files created by the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio. That day has arrived.
I'm happy to report that we are testing a build that allows you to create invoices using a full-fledged report designer, and import the report files into SplendidCRM for execution. SplendidCRM has a basic built-in report designer, but it is only useful to create tabular reports. With the ability to import report files, you can create freeform reports, like the kind typically used to generate quotes or invoices. These reports can even embed images so that your invoices would be nothing less than stunning.
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Importing language packs |
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By Paul Rony on
8/22/2007 10:05 PM
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Importing language packs just got easier. In the next release of SplendidCRM, we have provided the ability to download and install SugarCRM Language Packs directly from SugarForge in a single click. The SugarCRM language packs are not perfect, but they are a great start.
We have already updated our demo server and imported a number of language packs including Hungarian, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, German and Hebrew. We still have a little more work to do in order to support right-to-left languages, but the system otherwise looks great.
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Amazon Web Services |
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By Paul Rony on
8/10/2007 2:46 AM
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The day started with the goal of posting a new VHD that includes Visual Studio 2005 Pro configured to compile and debug the latest SplendidCRM build. The day ended with migration to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).
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Converting Web Application Projects to Web Site Projects |
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By Paul Rony on
6/27/2007 1:38 AM
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We had a customer that was having trouble with the prerequisites to load and debug the SplendidCRM project. First you start with Visual Studio 2005 Professional, then you add the Web Application Projects add-in, which incidentally requires a patch before it will install. It seems simple enough but this person was still unable to load the project without the pesky Convert dialog appearing. If configured properly, the SplendidCRM project should load with just a warning about being unable to attach to our version control system, so the presence of the Convert dialog suggests that the Web Application Projects add-in was not functioning.
Instead of wasting co ...
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