GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM » Product Demostrations

Fastest Web Application yet??

Nitin Jain — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:26:48 +0000

I just had to share this!

How fast do you think can you build a fully functional Web Application? A little bit of twist here. The Web Application must have the Session Handling facility through Java Session Beans. It can optionally make use of Java Service Facades (I am still wondering what in the world that is!!).

A month, 10 days, 5 days??

How about 10 minutes?
Shay Shmelter from Oracle is back with a miracle for us. He has created a fully functional Web Application using Oracle JDeveloper (part of the Oracle SOA Suite) and ADF bindings. Check out the video here. It really is a visual treat.

Is Oracle throwing out a challenge to everybody here?
Just a thought. What prevents this exact scenario to be simulated in other IDEs or RAD Tools? With a little background preparation and practice, a pro may just be able to simulate it in NetBeans as well.

Did I hear NO?? Be a little louder please. You are not audible yet!

Managing Intellectual Properties

Nitin Jain — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:24:45 +0000

hmmmmm.. Interesting!! Tell me honestly, have you ever thought of this aspect?

A very warm Hi to all the readers of my blogs here. I am expected to move in as a Business Analyst for an upcoming opportunity in NY State shortly. As a normal practice, I sat with the existing Technical/ non-Techie people of the team today trying to understand the application. Mark my words, it’s a complex maze of views, screens, integrations, lots of known / hitherto unknown IDs, and definitely, very colourful. I am sure it must be as per the client requests and a baby of the pretty abused term, the “Agile Methodology”!!

All in all, the application seemed very interesting. A thought struck my mind when going through this magnificent piece of art. I could see so many non-vanilla features in the application that I got thinking, “hey, are we tracking these anywhere?”. My point is, any application successfully going live (;-)), has an entire hive of people breaking their heads over it. The requirement could be as absurd as, hey, we don’t like the colour of the default application. Can you just make it just a little more greenish towards the top right?!! Don’t get me wrong, some really interesting and useful ones too!!

There are a lot of people working all through the chain, the developer’s slogging it out and making it technically possible in the end, the solution designers coming out with innovative solutions, the Business Analysts painting all kinds of rosy pictures to grab more and more business, totally unmindful of the poor people behind him when he is making wild commitments, or the business himself, who doesn’t really understand the technicality, but demands just out of intuition and his expected ROIs. Everyone is adding value to the entire process somehow at each step, one way or the other. In the process, they are coming out with some really nice features in the application which could be added as resouces in a separate repository, and pulled out to benefit the next implementation (yeah, I know. This is the shoddiest part of all. After all, this is the part which doesn’t add revenues in the short term to the company’s bottomline!!).

Well, if it is really innovative, and you really follow it up to lodge patents or something similar, you have actually created an Intellectual Property for the organization on the whole. So many of such innovations and IPs come forward everyday in an IT savvy organization. My question is, do you track them? How? What help do you take from IT for IT related IPs?

I understand that GAAP still doesn’t recognize them as Assets in Advanced Accounting, but all the same, the Reported and Actual Accounts are always differentiated.

A simple Googling brought up so many options for Software Solutions to manage these,
IP Menu
Decipher
Mindmatters
Protecode
Anaqua

In fact, a new term, IAM, or the Intellectual Assets Management has been coined for a broader coverage. I guess this is enough food for thought for the day. I will follow this up with my closing comments on what I feel of the entire subject.

Meanwhile, do feel free to put in your thoughts if there is anything you do in your workplace to build up such resources.

Highrise Customer Relationship Management

Nitin Jain — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:18:17 +0000

Hi,

This post should be a welcome break from the run-of-the-mill Siebel stuff. I had written about Doorbell CRM coming out of its beta a couple of weeks of ago. I got interested because somebody referred to Doorbell being a head-on to Highrise CRM by 37 Signals. So, we at GeeksBlogging@dotCOM sat down to take a stock for ourselves.

We went directly to Highrise CRM official website. Highrise comes across with a nice intuitive website which is catching to the user.

As Highrise itself puts it:
“.. Highrise is a great way for business to keep track of who talked to whom, what was said, and what needs to happen next ..”

Major sections highlighted as the strengths of Highrise are as follows.

Contact Page
Every contact in Highrise gets his own page. I could see several multiple tabs towards the top-right page, with many different names. I am assuming that the most popular ones are being listed on the top while I can get to the complete list of Contacts with the Contacts tab.

This is something that I guess even the major CRM vendors like Siebel, Oracle and others may take a cue out of. Though the page was simple, it has everything very neatly organized, and had everything that a Sales person, or a Complaint Handling guy would need it at hand. The photograph of the person is shown as an image straight away. It gets really cluttered in Siebel and Oracle. If I need access to some literature and stuff, I need an extra mouse click, which is at times annoying.

I am also equally sure that such an arrangement will not work if I make the things a little more complex with all the extra details. It would become more and more difficult to organize things on the screen. It is just a choice on what is the scale you want your CRM to work at. This is fine for Highrise if they don’t want to introduce new features in future. Now, is it really so?

Tasks
Call them Activities or Tasks, they are the most important job of any CRM system. I need to understand and remember all the past discussions with the customer. Else, the very basic premise of a CRM is broken. Linking of Contacts and Notes is a nice feature that I liked. But, hey, I can’t see the simple search box when I need to search in the plethora of phone calls I have made. I only see a filter on the top which allows me to filter based on the Task Status. This is a very important feature that is missing, and not too difficult to implement we feel.

Deals
This is something different than the general concept of Quotes and Orders. Highrise divides the Deals in Pending, Won, and Lost Statuses. It even has a filter on top to indicate it.

Once again, where is the Search box, sire’? Also, I sorely miss the concept of Leads and Opportunities. For the ones still wondering, there’s a lot of difference between these terms when it comes to business on the ground. Hey come on Highrise, even Sugar CRM has the concept.

Permissions
Obviously, no?!
It has some nice features. One allows me to create a new group and assign permissions to that one. I like this one. Can be more extensive, but, for a CRM this size, I am happy.

Contacts
People are the real things we need to interact with. This tab helps out here.

Color choices
Nice for the UI features. Users can set this as per their own feel.

Cases
This is a nice feature I felt. This is a grouping of all related stuff. Notes, contacts together related to a particular case. Some bells ringing at the back on my head. Are the people from the Public Sector and the Medical Industry listening? Highrise may be onto something serious here.

Poof!! It’s been a long post. Clear verdict is it, there is still lots of catching up for Doorbell CRM to do, if it ever needs to catch up with Highrise. Highrise in any case has the early mover’s advantage.

However, a still have the same critique as I had for Doorbell. Even if these CRM Systems are targetted for the SMB Industries, what about scalability? I am not even questioning robustness as yet here. As an Small Business owner, that is the one of the important things I would look at. I expect my business to grow, aren’t these CRM companies with me on this?

My review for Doorbell, and Highrise,
“.. Nothing like no Account Info, no talks of Integrations, configuring Products and Price Lists, automatic advising of new products on a Sales Call, Forecasting, integration with other Business Intelligence Systems, and many more.
..”

Pricing is another contentious issue. I would get some pretty robust and high quality CRM systems set up for slightly higher prices. I am sure tweaking the price a little bit, will go a long way for Highrise.

Moreover, Highrise has been made available from 37 Signals which in itself is a known brand with its famous Basecamp feature. The only thing that I believe in, if you really want to hit, hit hard!

Doorbell comes out of beta

Nitin Jain — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:48:26 +0000

All of us know that Siebel is by far the most popular CRM system on the planet. However, one of the biggest restraints on setting up Siebel is as a Siebel employee once put it up in his own words, “.. Siebel CRM is targetted only at companies with over $250m in annual revenues ..”. Though this has more or less changed with the launch of Oracle’s CRM OnDemand, the push is still there. Siebel is not something we can pitch to the small startup with 10 guys round the corner of our block.

CRM is HOT!! Aand, there is lots of competition around. Another new competitor in the space is the Doorbell CRM, which dropped its beta tag recently. Up till now, anybody could just reach out and sign up. Now, they have introduced pricing for the product, having come out of beta. Doorbell CRM is the first product from the Canadian startup, Smibs.

As a part of the experience, Smibs claims to have carried out a number of enhancements to the existing Product Lineup.

They claim to have introduced a brand new interface, which makes it easier to navigate around. I found the UI cute & nice with most of the important information displayed on the first page. Contact Info, Upcoming Tasks and History are prominently visible in the center of the page. Basically, the following sections are clearly demarcated:

Contacts
You can find out the details about a contact, list of all the contacts, History, Futures Tasks related to the contact, Background Info, the Contact’s phone and other contact details, and a few more features. Contact Detail Info and Connections are clearly visible.

Tasks & Notes
Displays Tasks Overdue, Tasks due soon, Comments related to the To-do task, among the other features

Opportunities
All of us want all the opportunities to covert into Orders, don’t we?
Well, this particular view here list all the opportunities, or as per the filter, Overdue opportunities, approaching opptys, and the like.

Groups & Tags
This is one interesting feature I found. The CRM has the capability to group our contacts into groups, vis a vis the email contact List. This makes it easier to implement certain functionality for a certain group of people all at once. The interesting part is that the group need not be related as belonging to the same Account or the likes.

Connections
This is another interesting feature. The CRM has the capability to link to the popular Social Networking websites like Twitter. At the same time, Smibs, has launched another interesting product, the Smibs Network. Check it out.

Permissions
This defines what all a contact is allowed to do. The most prominent feature being, who can access this contact.

All in all, a cute little CRM to automate the Sales Force.

Prominent flaws that I could see straight away, probably when you compare it with the other established players in the market. Nothing like no Account Info, no talks of Integrations, configuring Products and Price Lists, automatic advising of new products on a Sales Call, Forecasting, integration with other Business Intelligence Systems, and many more.

But then, this is just the beginning. I would guess there is much more to come. Keep watching!!

Till then, check out the Doorbell CRM homepage.

Siebel Sales Wireless on Google Android

Nitin Jain — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:55:34 +0000

The battle in the Smartphones market is heating up. The most popular contenders in the battle being Apple’s iPhone, Google Android based phones, Blackberry and the newly launched Palm Pre. Palm is hoping to turn its fortunes around with the Pre handset model launched recently.

All of us Siebel Professionals are equally keen to see how our very own Siebel, behaves on the various smartphones and Operating Systems. Dipock Das from Oracle has done us all the first favour by running Siebel Sales on what looks like an Android Emulator for demonstration.

In principle, with the Web Browser based approach that Siebel now follows, we only need to fire up the Web Browser and type in the Siebel URL in the Address bar of the Web Browser. However, the look and feel ought be different on different mobile phone browsers. Also, at times, some or all the features may not be supported owing to the mobile phone model in use, its operating system, or browser settings.

You can check out Dipock’s fine demonstration through the link below:
Siebel Sales Wireless on Google Android

Don’t miss the fantastic video Mr Das has published!

Note: Apple, iPhone, Google, Android, Blackberry, Palm, Pre are all registered trademarks of the respective companies. Any copyright infringements may be severely dealt with by the respective companies.