May 18th, 2010 By Rick Davey
I have been starting to really look at alternatives to the traditional BI tools. The one that most enterprise IT departments roll out to support massive amounts of data and users like Cognos, Business Objects cost plenty and take months and sometimes years to design build and implement a system. I wanted to see what was out in the market that could meet a few modest goals:
- Total cost of ownership had to be much less than the enterprise products
- Far easier to development and build out
- Have something usable in less time
- Make the user in control
I started to find out what tools are out in the market.. There are more then I suspected. After some time compiling a list I could see that they started to divide out for me into two groups; 1) Open source tools that were more like traditional tools, but at less cost (and perhaps with a lot less features), 2) data visualization products.
Open Source
This is just a small sample…
- Jaspersoft
- Pentaho
- Infobright
- Talend
- Birt
-
SpagoBI
Data Visualization and in-memory products
These products tend to be for the analytics person and/or a need that is for use on desktops.
- Tableau
- Qlikview
- Visifire
I will be taking a more in depth view of these later.
January 18th, 2010 By Rick Davey
I recently found and tried a great product: the WireframeSketcher (http://wireframesketcher.com )a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. I have used over time almost all of the techniques and tools that help web developers and designers create a high level web designs. All the way from notepad, PowerPoint to Visio to graphical programs. None have been my favorite although I have tended to use PowerPoint since it is the fastest way to create screen layouts. The two things that we must do for our clients is to present them with a web flow (the storyboard) and screen layouts (wireframes).
This is a simple tool to install and use yet it allows you to create wireframes that are detailed as you want them to be. I created a new page to house my first wireframe. Immediately the pallet of possible tools opens. There are divided into five areas: Containers, Text, Layout, Annotations and Input. Each have multiple tools to choose from. Just drag onto your page and add text or size it.
After about 10 minutes of design work I created a login screen wireframe.
Once you have create a series of wireframe screen, you then can create a page for the web story. Simply drag the wireframe pages onto the story and you then can show your client the series of screens that will be created. Once you have a set of wireframes and storyboard you can output to an image, PDF or print them for review and distribution.
Now that I have this tool, I’m going to do all my layouts and creative thinking right in my Eclipse IDE. Great tool and should save me time and allow me to create faster and better wireframes then before.
January 13th, 2010 By Rick Davey
I always try to take the time to review then evaluate CRM products. I like to see what vendors are doing, what they think is needed out in real world. One such product I’ve recently tried is OpenCRX http://www.opencrx.org/ . I t look like a nice product for small to smaller mid-sized businesses. I have a lot to learn my here are my first reactions.
More difficult to install then a straight Java based application. Especially when compared to a bunch of other open source java applications that install easily.
It requires a [...]
Continue reading Open Source CRM Product – OpenCRX
September 27th, 2009 By Rick Davey
One of the more frequent questions from marketers I hear is “what (or how) attributes (data fields) can we do segmentation on for our campaigns”. The answer is usually more or less this; almost all data in your CRM system can be available for use in the key process in many CRM software systems. Let’s take a look at the data for segmentation. Some of the data is straight forward and relatively easy to understand and acquire, but other data may take some deep thought and effort to produce.
Major Attribute Categories
In most CRM systems, they will [...]
Continue reading Segmentation Thoughts
September 9th, 2009 By Rick Davey
Subscription marketing is a bit different then marketing a non re-occurring product or service and you CRM system needs to be capable of handling these extra needs. While most CRM system can handle subscription products or service it will take some additional work to make things really hum. Let’s take a look at what can make a CRM system handle subscription marketing.
Subscription products and services and their needs
If you sell a subscription product you have several things going on that a non-subscription product does not have. [ We will use products in this article, but the [...]
Continue reading CRM Systems and Subscription Product Marketing
September 7th, 2009 By Rick Davey
By now most business people have an idea of what open source software is and how it is now considered an option when choosing your next solution for your business. The question is; is it right for your business especially if your business is small and doesn’t have a full time IT team to assist you. We will explore the issues surrounding choosing an Open Source solution.
Open Source Solutions have different origins and business models
Open source is a catch all for software solutions that provide the software for free. But they are not all created with the [...]
Continue reading Open Source for Small Business?
September 3rd, 2009 By Rick Davey
On September 2, 2009 Salesforce.com announced that it now has a new service aimed at very small businesses and individuals to manage contacts via Salesforce.com cloud. The price is $ 9.00 per month per user. Since it is a cloud implementation there is no software or hardware for the user to buy and install.
The service will include:
Contacts and Accounts Mangement
Outlook and Email Integration
Reporting -
Customization of the Contact Manager
Google Apps integration
What this all means is that Salesforce.com wants small businesses to get used to cloud computing for a minimum investment with the obvious hope that they can move them up into [...]
Continue reading Salesforce.Com adds new Service for Individuals and Small Businesses
September 1st, 2009 By Rick Davey
While I get to listen and talk to a number of business people about their CRM implementations, I decided to conduct some informal polls. I like to keep them very short, just a few questions so that folks will answer them without taking up their entire afternoon. This poll had two questions and was offered to LinkedIn users during the month of August 2009. We had just under 25 responses to date. I’ll place the link on more places to get a wider response and report back.
Question # 1 How successful would you rate [...]
Continue reading CRM User Poll # 1
August 30th, 2009 By Rick Davey
Microsoft has done very well in the single instance database marketing with their SQL Server product. They have been trying for several years to make a real foothold into large scale data warehouse applications. I would suspect that currently there are not many organizations that need to store petabyte range data that has tried to use a Microsoft product as their solution. Now Microsoft is creating a new product which is currently code named Project Madison to fill the large scalable data warehouse market. The product has its origins in a company that Microsoft bought [...]
Continue reading New Data Warehouse Product from Microsoft: Project Madison
Please…. No more 8080
Those of you who run many of the linux/java applications know that number “8080″. Right. It is the port address that almost every program that runs wants to use, http://localhost:8080/SomeApp. Unfortunately, only one can use the port at the same time. I don’t want to waste my time anymore finding and changing, then remembering the new port address that I was forced to change so I can run these applications simultaneously.
Seems like there is no imagination out in software land. Can’t software developers find other numbers to use… It’s really not hard to think of other numbers. I can even supply them some number if they want. Just write back to me.