It's All Geek To Me - February 2nd 2005

Web Provides CRM on a "Budget" by Ross Lasley I remember the late 80's fondly – they were the glory days of my super cool red Members Only jacket and daily use of serious hair gel to get that “feathered” look. In the technology arena small businesses were running into this “computerized accounting thing” more and more often and it was a great deal of fun to watch entrepreneurs understand the possibilities of a program called Quicken. They were amazed that by simply entering all their checks into the register it could do things like produce profit and loss statements.

Today that is an amusing bit of history – between Quickbooks being used for inventory management and tax preparation software – the application category of financial management is something almost all small businesses use now. It is rare to find an entrepreneur that doesn't understand their power.

Today we have something similar happening with CRM.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management – and it has become a very misused acronym. A great number of people don't seem to understand what it is all about, and very few entrepreneurs understand the power of this category of application.

CRM – simply put – is any piece of functionality that uses a database to help you manage customers. There are many large applications you have probably never heard of designed for big companies. Many people are familiar with the battle between Oracle and PeopleSoft, but very few of them have actually seen the applications the battle is all about.

ACT – a powerful address book – and some features of Quickbooks Pro are CRM type applications, but they miss the point that the real power of the application category is integration.

So if a CRM system is just a database that supports forms and queries – what does that really mean? A database is not hard to understand – records for each customer address , phone number and other information. “Forms” means an interface to work with this information – a screen to enter that address or other info. “Queries” is literally the ability to ask the system questions, and this is where the real power lies – show me customers who bought something in the last 60 days that live in Massachusetts; show me employees who were late to work more than once per week in the last month; show me the purchases a particular customer made last month. The list is potentially bottomless.

This is how CRM resembles financial software – if you enter everything in that electronic check register correctly, you can find out all sorts of interesting info to help you run your business well. Same thing with CRM.

The Web rocks at this – this type of functionality is the real killer app of the Internet this decade, no question. There are a number of commercial models – salesforce.com is a good example. The web eliminates the problems associated with running software on your own computer (crashes, etc) and provides at least equivalent capabilities vs desktop software.

The open source nature of the web is part of what makes the possibilities so powerful – custom built applications can be had for comparatively small dollars. Online apps used to not be very stable and they were unproven – hardly the case anymore. Frankly, the backend of a shopping cart system is technically CRM – you are processing orders, sending emails, doing all sorts of lovely integrated stuff.

To give you an example of the kind of practical impact all this can have, I'd like to tell you a bit about the CRM system we use here – KISSdata.

KISSdata has evolved over many years and actually didn't start out as a web based application. It is an excellent example of an evolving custom solution and today it has a long list of capabilities. One of the advantages of a web based solution is that full access exists for people that are not physically located in Eastham. We are always working on improving it.

The first thing this CRM system does for us to keep track of client information is to break each client record into 7 tabs.

Account Info – name, address, phone, last activity date, stuff like that.

Domain Info – keeps track of client domain names and their expiration dates

Hosting Info – keeps track of client hosting accounts with details

Products/Services – stuff clients bought from KISS (like search engine listings)

Projects – Literally a “to do” list

Strategy – A page or two on what the client is trying to achieve

History – old strategies and assorted stuff.

The next thing KISSdata does is provide a “to do” list for everyone – our tasks are organized by client and due date and provide a way for us to track the time we spend on tasks.

The calendar system is the central place where we set internal meetings and client visits.

Then, there are the admin functions – where you'll find our leads system, time cards, job logs, billing function including the ability to charge customer credit cards, expiration checks, shared documents on procedures, renewal systems, and the day log.

The search functionality allows us to ask the system any question, and if it is something we ask often it becomes a “report” - essentially a saved question.

The final piece of KISSdata is the dashboard – the screen we all see when we get to work each morning. It shows the day's calendar, the “to do” list at a glance, the timeclock status, and the daylog.

If you are an entrepreneur, you need to be familiar with this category of application and what it could do for your business – custom web-based solutions are amazing, powerful, and often the very best choice.

Guide to Open Source, Part Two by Michael McGrath What can one expect from a Linux distribution? Is it magic? Is it an enchanted experience? I'd like to help keep your expectations realistic, so let's look at your computer system in some very basic ways.

Will your computer be able to run faster or jump higher, like PF Flyers, with an open source system? Well, run faster, probably, but will it be able to perform feats better than a Windows-based computer system? I would dare to suggest yes. Your system will be more stable with Linux as an OS and far less likely to freeze or crash. Productivity will increase as a result, and frustration will diminish when you don't have to reboot, reboot, reboot. In this sense, your open source system will “run faster and jump higher” for you.

Open source applications, though, simply function as they were intended to function. OpenOffice, a comprehensive suite of products that includes a word processor, a spread sheet program, and a data base management program, among others, simply works. It is, for the most part, Microsoft Office compatible, although admittedly a little less feature-rich. However, for the average user, it is a solid package.

GIMP is an easy to use image editor and developer that includes all the tools you'd expect to find in such an application, and compares favorably with Photoshop. Mozilla proper, as well as its offspring, Firefox, are excellent browsers, the former being a comprehensive suite that includes both an email client and an online chatting client, while the latter is the latest and greatest browser that you've all been reading about. GAIM is an excellent multi-protocol instant messaging application, much like Trillian, that allows you to chat online using ICQ, AOL, Yahoo, MSN and other services. Multimedia applications, including CD players, CD burners, MP3 file managers and players and internet radio players, are too numerous to recount, and compare quite favorably to any in the Windows-based world.

Those of you with basic computer system needs would be well-served by an open source system that included something from each of these categories, and a very good system could be built quite easily and quickly with these simple applications. Let me remind you, also, that each of these are free, as is the operating system. Installation instructions are clear and easy to follow, far less “geeky” than they once were, and getting better all the time. Much, if not most, of the fear of leaving the Microsoft world for the open source community has been eliminated. The end result is a system that is stable, immune to all viruses developed to destroy the Windows world, smooth running, and every bit as capable in functionality as a Windows-based system.

One of the major criticisms of Linux is the sometime difficulty with hardware recognition. Each piece of hardware in your system, motherboard, monitor, printer, video card, sound card, network interface card and such, requires a little piece of software to work with your operating system and with each other. Those pieces of software are called drivers. It has taken a great deal of time for hardware manufacturers and the open source community to develop drivers for the Linux operating system. Terrific progress has been made in the last two years to catch up, and for most of the most common pieces of hardware, drivers do exist and work well. Those drivers are included with every Linux distribution, and configured to recognize hardware automatically in the set up process. Once the hardware is recognized the appropriate driver is automatically installed. It remains problematic for the very newest hardware versions (although more and more manufacturers are including Linux drivers with their hardware) and for the more esoteric peripherals. In a spirit of candor and disclosure, I want to make sure to mention one of the knocks on the Linux operating system.

As discussed in earlier columns, this is the one where you get to try out your curiosity. KISS is offering a free CD with a full Linux-based operating system and some basic applications. The system will work from the “live” CD; there is nothing you will need to install on your computer. It will be necessary only that you be able to “boot” from your CD-ROM drive. Once booted, you will be able to use the system simply from the CD, and that will include all of the applications thereon, like OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM and multimedia applications for your music.

If you are interested, please provide your name, email and snail mail address. It will take us a couple of weeks to prepare the CDs and ship them to you, along with a list of the applications included. We'll be hoping to hear from you after a month or two of experience with your open source operating system and open source apps, and will include that feedback in future columns.

It won't seem like magic, or anything really special in actual use. However, when you think about how it has come to be, a community-based effort to produce well-crafted software applications that work well, and all absolutely free, you have to admit that is really special, and almost magical in this age of cynicism.