My Little Voice

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

We are going through an interesting time at OpenCRM looking at the roadmap for new features and considering the user interface (UI) for the next generation version of the product.

Consultation has led us to be told that we should store up all of the new features, from now until the release of the new UI, to give a bigger Wow factor. This I understand, but what about all the current, paying subscribers?

Having given us their confidence over the years, how do we hold back for 6 or 9 months until the new version is available, especially when we are used to quarterly updates for users?

I guess its more of a head change for us rather than our user base. There was a time when we could consider making everyone a beta site, so they were all involved, but those days are far gone, just too many now :0)

So, questions about when to feature freeze and how to manage the UI changes all need to be taken soon, but first we need to get the rebrand out of the way…. more about this very soon.

I have just purchased the new HTC Desire Android phone.

I am running this alongside my loved iPhone, until the 4G comes out.

First impression is that it is a real contender, very very iPhone like.

I will post a full review shortly, but better than I expected, and that coming from an iPhone freak.

I read this article and just wanted to share it with others. Email marketing, in particular the creation of email templates and marketing pieces,is a science, its not guess work any more, there is a wealth of information on the web, including our own FAQ section for OpenCRM users, the following information is a sound foundation when considering the image aspect of your email marketing.

Happy reading……

The Big Image Myth
Why your email newsletter shouldn’t have too many images, even if they look great on your screen!

In This Article…

If you are just starting to send marketing email and need advice on how to design an email template, or if you are currently sending email but aren’t satisfied with the click-through or deliverability results, this article explains why using large, graphic images in an email template will actually make your email less successful and detract from its overall performance.

Why Should I Second Guess Using Images?

Without a doubt, the number one error we see in companies who want to begin an email marketing program is the desire to design an email that looks exactly like a webpage or, worse yet, like a print postal mailer.

Everyone understands why email designers like images.  An email, just like any other piece of marketing material, looks better when it’s got appealing images in it. If it displays properly to the end-user, it probably converts better as well. The problem, as you’re about to see, is that most end-users won’t see your graphics. As an added bonus, including graphics can get you sent to the spam folder.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone that knows me knows that I try to stay out of political debate, not because I am not interested, just that I don’t have time to analyse the arguments in the depth that I would like, if I was going to argue a case, so when Laura Ashley-Timms from Notion Business Coaching sent this email, from Gary Cousins of Cousins Business Law, I thought… good summary and wanted to share this with anyone that might be interested….

So firstly, thanks to Laura http://notionltd.com for circulating this and of course Gary – http://business-lawfirm.co.uk.

————————————————————————-

As election fever sweeps the country, we (Cousins Business Law)
have taken a look at the manifestos of the three major parties to
see what they promise to do for small and medium businesses.

Our view is that real steps need to be taken to support SMEs through
the recession and recovery process, and that means taking measures
to help SMEs get the finance they need at a reasonable price, reduce
regulation and red tape, and reform the tax system. Big businesses
certainly seem to be siding with the Conservatives, as you might
expect, but who do you think is most likely to deliver for SMEs? Read the rest of this entry »

OK I succumbed, I installed Opera Mobile for iPhone, just to see how it runs in comparison to Safari.

I have never been a great Opera fan, but I know of a serious Opera user, one of the development team (I should keep his name off this site in case of retribution :0) and he loves it. But I thought I would give it a go.

It installed very quick and I was up and running easily.

First reaction when I took a look at some sites, not that good really, rendering was out and just felt clunky. However on sites that did look OK it was quick, especially the revisits, cache is very good even on the limited iPhone resources.

When I logged into OpenCRM, again not that impressed, looked a bit odd, but once I was into using it, quick, and I like that one click zoom.

I turned off images to see how it ran and this did seem quite a bit better than Safari, which if you are using a browser to access OpenCRM with non 3G coverage, would make a difference.

Verdict, will I stop using Safari, probably not, but I might be singing along with Opera as an alternative!

I read this article and thought that it raised a number of issues

http://bit.ly/9QjNJU

This was just some comments posted for moderation;

Interesting article, which given more time I think there are a shed load of comments that I would love to make, however in the interests of bevity, some “food for thought”;

You comment that (paraphrase) “popular hosted systems may look good at first, but support may not be what you expected”. Well that’s a broad brush! Some of us in the hosted CRM Market are very proud of the support and service levels we deliver, and in fact, our support, it could be argued, is better with a hosted client as there is less variable under the clients control, so is better in terms of fix time!

You also mention “salesforce and how this may not be customisable”, honestly, have you looked at the market? Salesforce.com are our main competitor, and we do very well taking clients from them, so I don’t want to shout too loud about their merits, but come on, what about the force.com platform and the many add-ons already written in the app store. It is true that we win business from Salesforce because we can offer a more flexible solution, but that’s a commendation to OpenCRM, not a slight on salesforce. Flexibility is as much about the relationship and how you can work with your chosen application and it’s author, but I would not say that salesforce fail for their app being ‘inflexible’.

Lastly, for any SME that I talk to, budgets are always an issue, however I agree that getting some third party assistance with your selection is a good plan, however, I would caution on two points, firstly, getting someone that knows what they are talking about is less easy than you might expect, I spend a great deal of time educating ‘consultants’ about CRM and the pro’s and con’s of hosted -v- in-house, and second, ‘consultants’ often eat up so much of the valuable budget, that projects start lean, in some cases too lean, and can be in danger of failure before they get going. So, yes, engage with the right people, but don’t assume that all CRM providers are just out to sell you their solution, some of us, especially the successful providers, might actually be honest and have a high degree of integrity, only wanting to sign up solutions that work for both parties! It’s never in a suppliers interest to ‘stick it to a customer’, they always find out and when they do, boy will you get it with both barrels, more hassle than any up front payment could justify. As I say, good suppliers want to forge a good, long term relationship, never more so than the hosted market, as the revenue only comes in if the customer stays with you.

Regards

Graham Anderson
Managing Director
Software Add-ons – The Home of OpenCRM
http:\\opencrm.co.uk

Another comment worth considering is the license costs for an on-site installed application is likely to be in excess of £30,000. That’s a lot of OpenCRM development time, not withstanding the development costs that would be needed on-top of your installed app if you wanted to go down this route!

So, Google have announced today, that they are to phase out support for IE 6, no big suprise there, given the conflict with Google and China (that’s the country, it’s not a new search product thst you have missed, before you jump off your seat to see how this new search engine works), and of course quite justified, but the real news for companies like ours is much better.

As a web application development company (hosted CRM Software), with the major part of our application development being contained in the browser, having to cater for older browsers is a real drain, on developer motivation and resources.

Now, if I had suggested to our OpenCRM client base that we need to drop support for IE 6, there would bean uproar, however when web sweetheart Google announce this change, that’s OK, it must be for very good technical reasons, so everyone nods sagely and agrees “it’s all for the best”.

Trying not to sound too bitter and twisted, it does not really matter, honest, so long as we can follow in thier footsteps, it achieves the same outcome.

So from Monday 1st February 2010 Software Add-ons – The Home of OpenCRM will be set to phase out IE 6 – Hooray!!!! (baloons and party games in the office).

I can’t imagine that Silicon Alley will be sending over a reporter to uncover the full indepth story, but it will be a big day for us.

Here at OpenCRM we migrate dozens of customers from competitive products, it’s one of the things that we do really well, sometimes the migration is due to cost, often it’s because our customer wants a more flexible technical solution or a stronger relationship with their provider, that’s us.

Whatever the reasons we have become very good at managing these moves, some sites are small and just require some data manipulation skills and then they are ready to go, others need a full system analysis to achieve their goals.

This article, published independently, gives in my opinion some solid ‘no nonsense’ advice for people wanting to move systems provider, worth taking note of the comments if you are looking to change.

Sales pitch : needless to say at OpenCRM we tick the boxes, I will summarise the advice in a separate post so that any interested company, looking to move to OpenCRM, can see how we stack up. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought this Huff Post article was interesting.

The recent hack of the website RockYou exposed around 32 million user passwords, which data security firm Imperva has analyzed to create a list of the worst passwords.

Want to know what terms to avoid?

Here are the top ten most commonly used passwords (see the full list of the top 20 in the charts below):

1. 123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. Password

5. iloveyou

6. princess

7. rockyou

8. 1234567

9. 12345678

10. abc123

An attack that exposed 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords yielded similar findings.

According to a researcher who examined the leaked data, “123456″ was the most frequently used password, appearing 64 times in total.

Wired adds,
Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from “a to z”; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters.
Many of the top 20 passwords used were Spanish names, such as Alejandra and Alberto, suggesting that the victims were in Spanish-speaking communities. Nearly 2,000 of the passwords were only six characters long. The longest password was 30 characters — lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo.

Interesting huh? I was pleased that mine does not show up, does yours?

One of our company New Years resolutions (yes we really do have them), is to send out a customer satisfaction survey. This is a first for us (in a structured way).

We are keen to see how well we do in the mid ground of our customer base, which accounts for a good number of our customers. We will always be acutely aware of the small number of projects that are hard work to keep on track, as well as the ones where we excel, in both cases customers are very vocal and (because of the project management escalation and communication around these projects), the implementions are very visible, so we want to use this survey to gauge our success levels for all of our users.

This is one way to measure our customers satisfaction, however, the second area we are keen to explore, which is a direct spin off from the results we will receive, is to develop further our referal program. This will reinforce the levels of customer satisfaction we are achieving !

So, two ways to monitor what our customers think, firstly ask them, then ask them to refer us, that will uncover who is willing to be associated with our business, an interesting project for us which I am happy to post the results for everyone to see.

I guess as a sidepanel to this excercise, we will pick up a host of issues to address and more items for the OpenCRM wishlist, both of which will no doubt raise areas for future discussion here.