CRMs, Databases

Whether you realize it or not, you're doing CRM already. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a hot buzzword that all kinds of businesses desperately want.

What are the results you are trying to achieve? How can your web site help you get those results? These are a couple of questions we're starting to ask all our clients, and what we're finding often reveals some very easy things we can do to drive more results, quickly and easily.

If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?

If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.

If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.

Before doing any changes to your web site, the first thing to figure out are your goals. As a web development shop, we focus on building web sites that create measurable value for our customers, aligned with their goals.
Some common goals:

As we delve more and more into ways to make our customers' organizations run better, we keep an eye out for things we can do to make their jobs easier. One big problem lots of our customers have is out of date contact information for their customers, members, or audience.

I'm having a lot of discussions about CRM systems these days. What is CRM? To hear many talk about it, it's some magical program you buy and suddenly you start getting more business.

We have several customers interested in adding CRM to their Drupal sites, so today I hopped on a conference call with a working group developing CRM tools for Drupal 7.

Here at Freelock, we've been making the transition to using Open Atrium as our project management platform, and thus far I've been quite impressed with it.

As I got on the plane to Helsinki, I wondered if I had been duped. I was flying blind--I didn't know where I was staying, whether anybody would be there when I arrived, or if I would end up sitting in a hotel room by myself for three days. But when the well-known founder of a billion dollar company invited me to his home to help my business, I figured I'd better get on that plane.

Packtpub is running a sample from a developer's guide for customizing SugarCRM. The author describes how to set up hooks for particular modules to build a custom workflow.

I met Bruce Henry at an MIT Enterprise Forum event last night. Turns out we're both working on software for project management.