Somewhere out there!

Compiere is one of the most active projects at Sourceforge. Until now the need for Oracle was the main hindrances to many people going beyond first looks of this ERP/CRM system. For a long time there was talk of porting Compiere to Postgres, although recently this fell by the wayside. With this news Compiere (Open Source ERP) now runs successfully on Daffodil DB, the way is open for many to look again serious at Compiere in the SME sector.

Daffodil DB is a J2EE-certified, JDBC 3.0 and SQL 99 compliant Java database. They have One$DB a version of Daffodil DB, which was recently released as OSS.

I’m looking forward to trying out Base an Access like application from OpenOffice.org. It has some potential.

For a long time I’ve been meaning to join the voip revolution and develop a solution with Asterisk for my personal use. Once I’d tested it for a while, my goal was to develop a decent voicemail-to-email solution rather than play a few thousand dollars for some black-box to be added to our business PBX.

Couple days ago I finally purchase a set of equipment as I could begin working on this goal. A set of OEM X100P – FXO cards plus an ATA device. This guy has purchased the OEM X100P card and had a good experience, so I’m expecting things to go well with the hardware.

One of the things that really interest me is Asterisk fax. Using spandsp its possible to turn the OEM X100P, which is a winmodem, into a software based fax. According to a FAQ:

The higher speed modems for FAX are encumbered by patents at this time. spandsp implements only unencumbered standards, so it may be distributed freely. The faster modems used for FAX – principally V.17, and V.34 – are supported by a surprisingly small percentage of FAX machines used today. The last time I checked the logs of a large public access FAX server, which supports V.29 and V.17, only a 2% to 3% of calls used V.17. The remainder used V.29. Unless a lot of your FAX traffic is with companies using high-end FAX machines, you problem won’t miss the higher speeds very much.

My second goal is to develop a stable inward fax-to-email gateway. Our business fax machine goes though almost 100 faxes per week, and about $100 per month of consumables.

Some useful information for NZ is located here: WLUG-Wiki – Asterisk, and Scoot has developed some really clever ideas with asterisk.

I’ve been thinking about putting together a basic documentation management system with python and subversion. Some python and cron to manage business documents stored in samba/nfs file shares, auto-injecting them into a subversion repository.

This article by the CVS homedir author about Subversion homedir has some useful tips about svn:externals.

I’ve been looking at using Big Medium for a company website for a while. Although I’ve never had the time to get it sorted. Recently I discovered Mambo. This looks quite good, although I prefer the structure of Big Medium for the job I need done.

Another thing to add to the to-do list.

Economics applies even to fish feeding.

Still considering which CRM product to use. Although it seems there is really only three good choices in the LAMP/OSS world.

SugarCRM has released a new 2.0 version. This time round there is some difference between the OSS and professional versions. Here is a useful review of this new version. One of its major new features is a Calender plug-in. There is a quotes modules in the professional edition. However, the main feature missing from the OSS version which the Pro version has is decent ACLs.

SugarCRM also has a plug-in to Outlook. Given how easy it is to development plugins to Thunderbird/Firefox it would be nice to see something like this for Sunbird whenever it gets a extension option.

Being purely OSS driven XRMS does not have such clear cut version releases. There is some comparison here of XRMS to Sales Force, although the comments can apply to any consideration. XRMS also has a calender plug-in, although it seems to be still under littler more development.

Dark Horse CRM has released a new 2.9 version and changed it’s name to Centric CRM. Seems to have a more open OSS license now, although its hard to tell if the user number is restricted like the previous Dark Horse Free version.

In all Centric is the most mature product, although the fact it is JRE oriented makes its difficult to maintain and develop. XRMS seems development pretty rapid, although its hard to tell as the online demo is obviously not updated as much as the its commercial competitors due lack of developer time.

I suspect I’ll finally get the time to development something in the next month. So I’ll be putting these products though some testing.

One unfortunately thing, is that none of them seem to have a good work flow management system. Although I think Centric is close to something. Plus for neither has a good system for tracking internal tickets/jobs associated with other work flows related to the business. It would be nice to integrate this, at least on a simple scale.

I find Daily Python-URL one of my best sources for new and interesting software. It had a link to an article today with mention of three “interesting enterprise-ready open source applications”, particularly SugarCRM. Following up on this application with freshmeat I found a reference to another CRM, XRMS.

Both these applications look good, not quite as functional as Dark Horse CRM but because they are LAMP applications easier to modify and upgrade. Neither currently has a calender modules, though there is some talk of adding Wed Calender to XRMS.

SugarCRM seems to have a nice interface and more features for building relations between contacts but no file attachment ability. XRMS has a cleaner interface with the ability to add plugins.

I’ll have to look closer at the code for both applications before I decided which is the better to use.

This site has a huge list of different CRM software. Its doesn’t mention DarkHorseCRM which is the best I’ve found so far.

Still looking for the prefect one though.

Amongst everything else, I’ve been meaning to investigate openoffice more. Particular integration with databases and simple forms. This seems to me with a bunch of simple templates it would be possible to develop some handy applications.

This guy particularly seems to have a clue. Sometimes I wish it was easier to find things like this out there.

I’ve also got to find some time to improve my cash management spreadsheets with some time series analysis. Probably should look at adding some OOo Statistics and Least Squares Fitting macros.

Also some stuff here. to check out.