Modern Customer Relationship Management

At April's Tech Talk Tuesday, we previewed six Modern Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems.

There are hundreds of CRM systems available. To focus on 6 , we looked for modern tools meet important criteria:

• Web based 
• Customizable 
• Documented APIs 
• Social Media Integration 

The six we experimented with are all excellent choices for managing customer databases. When it come to choosing one, the answer lies in choosing the right tool for the right business.

Highrise

Highrise, from the makers of Basecamp is a Simple tool that works great for any small to medium size business. It integrates well with Basecamp, so for a typical web development shop that already uses Basecamp. this is a natural choice.

Salesforce

In the presentation above, Salesforce is referred to as the 800 pound gorilla of Cloud CRM.  Salesforce is widely implemented, and even has it's own programming language for customization. (APEX).

Zoho

Zoho is the value play in choosing a CRM, giving you a feature rich CRM system and affordable pricing.  Zoho implementations are increasing faster than any other solution listed here.  They'e the rising star in Cloud solutions.

SugarCRM

SugaCRM is is ideal for clients looking to host their own CRM system.  But there's also a hosted solution available.  The product uses what they call a "commercial open souce" license.

Insightly

Insightly started of as a google app, and as a result integrates well with thing like Google Calendar.  Clients familiar Googles ecosystem should look closely at Insightly.

Nimble

Nimble is a newcomer, and has a more modern feel than other CRMs listed here.  Nimble has some impressive Social Media integration features, allowing users to easily associate customer with online profiles. A cutting edge startup would play well with Nimble.


It's been a while since we created The App Train infographic, but these are the CRM systems we are looking a t now. Thy're a just a few of the many available.  What are your favorite CRM tools?

Exploring Datomic by Øredev Conference

Datomic is a new database with an intriguing distributed architecture. It separates reads, writes and storage, allowing them to scale independently. Queries run inside your application code using a Datalog-based language. Spreading queries across processes isolates them from one another, enabling real-time data analysis without copying to a separate store, opening full query functionality to clients of your system, and more. This talk explores Datomic's architecture and some of it's implications, focused entirely on technical details.

Running Speedment ACE on Amazon EC2

Speedment ACE is a Graph Database Converter, and a powerful software development tool.  A Graph Database  is a NoSql database that performs best when the relationships between nodes of your data are the most important (and frequently accessed) part of that data.

Speedment ACE builds a Graph Data Grid (GDG) automatically, either from existing tables, or using the Ace Front end to generate those tables.  A great way to check out Speedment ACE is to install it on Amazon Web Services.  Here's how to get going with Speedment in 10 easy steps.

1)  Create an AWS MySql Instance.  

Note the database endpoint, name, username and password then connect form a MySql client.

2)  From the Speedment Programmer's Guide, 

Create a test schema and sample users table:

CREATE SCHEMA speedment_test; 
USE speedment_test; 
CREATE TABLE `speedment_test`.`user` ( 
 `id` INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `name` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
 `surname` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
 `email` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
 `password` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`), UNIQUE INDEX `Index_email`(`email`),
 INDEX `Index_name`(`name`)
) ENGINE = InnoDB;

3) Create an AWS Windows Instance

Be sure to associate the instance with a key pair so you can connect using a Windows RDP Client.  Then in the AWS Console, Launch your new instance, and generate a password using your private key. Also make not of the IP address of your new instance.

4) Connect to your new Windows Instance using an RDP client.

If you have Google Chrome, you can use the 2X Client for RDP/Remote Desktop.

5) Internet Explorer on your new EC2 Windows Instance will ask you

to add every URL you visit for your permission.  You may want to install another browser  to avoid this.

6) Download and install the JSDK 1.7.  

After installing set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the bin directory where the 'java' executable is located.

7) Download and unzip the Speedment Ace Front End .  

Run it from the ace.bat file located in the bin directory.

8) After registering, Create a new Project.

9) Right-click on the new project and select “Add DBMS”.  

Add the info from the DB instance we created in step 1.

10) Starting on page 28 of the  Speedment Programmer's Guide, 

you can now explore capabilities of the Speedment Ace front end.  This includes the ability to generate code for rapid application development, and building a Graph Data Grid (GDG), the core of Speedment's optimization capabilities.

0802 - Intro to Graph Databases by Neo Technology

Join this webinar for a high level introduction to graph databases. This webinar demonstrates how graph databases fit within the NOSQL space, and where they are most appropriately used. In this session you will learn: Overview of NOSQL Why graphs matter Overview of Neo4j Use cases for graph databases

Running HBase on Amazon EC2

1. Create an Amazon Linux EC2 instance. 
2. Log into your EC2 Instance using ssh.
3. sudo yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk
4. wget http://www.apache.org/dist/hbase/hbase-0.94.13/hbase-0.94.13.tar.gz
5. tar xfz hbase-*
6. vi .bashrc
7. Add this line at the bottom of the file JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default
8. sudo vi /etc/hosts
9. Comment out the localhost line: #127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain
10. cd  hbase-*
11. Start HBase ./bin/start-hbase.sh
12. Check log files cat logs/hbase-*