Barking

The new site for Tactile is now available at http://www.tactilecrm.com/.

At the moment it is the application for the private beta, so feel free to visit and sign up now!

Tactile is our new product based upon our award winning Open Source EGS software.

What is Tactile?

A web-based CRM product, Tactile is aimed at businesses looking to easily manage their customer contacts, opportunities, activities and sales team. Using Tactile you can easily manage the interactions and sales processes that various teams within your organisations are involved in. Tactile offers:

• Clients - organisations you work with
• Leads - organisations you would like to work with or are currently negotiating new work with
• People - the all important people who work within the organisations
• Contact Details - addresses, phone/fax/mobile numbers, email addresses
• Opportunities - easily track new or exisiting sales opportunities with clients and leads
• Activities - manage your day to day activities on clients, leads, people or opportunities
• Notes - store, track and manage information on clients, leads, people, opportunities and activities
• Sales Pipelines and Reports - graphical dashboard with graphs and pipelines to easily see what is going on
• and much more…

The Plan

Over the next few weeks we will be releasing previews of Tactile and are looking for people to join our private beta.

The Previews

10 previews, 4 weeks. Each preview will reveal a little more about the product, its structure and how you can use it.

Can’t Wait?

Sign-up for our private beta by emailing beta@tactilecrm.com - help shape a new software product with your ideas and feedback, and be first to use one of the hottest new products.

There are a limited number of spaces so apply now to avoid disapointment and don’t worry if you don’t make it first time, we will be opening more places on a weekly basis to people during the beta/preview period.

Interested? If you could include the following in your email it will greatly increase your chances of making it onto the beta:

• Name
• Email address
• Company name (if applicable)
• A brief description of why you think you would be a good beta user

As a thank you to all of those joining the beta we will be giving away a free three month pass to all beta users after the trial has finished. In addition to that, those who make an outstanding contribution on the beta will be given an extension to the free trial above the first three months and entered into our prize draw to win a special prize!

So we are just about to release a new website for EGS, and Tactile will follow shortly. One of the key requirements for both is some forum software. We spent a while looking around and although there are lots of forum solutions out there all of them are quite bloated apart from Beast.

The problem with Beast is that it is built on Rails and we really wanted a PHP solution. So a cunning plan ensued!

Patrick started on Monday and we needed to bring him up to speed on EGS and the framework, so Greg and I thought writing a new forum would be good. In addition to a light weight forum solution, Patrick will be documenting the process for us internally to train new starters on EGS and externally for people to start using the framework.

It is now Wednesday and we have just spent the afternoon skinning the first version and will be releasing it soon (under the GPL of course). So watch this space and keep an eye out for Critter soon (we liked Beast so much we thought we would use the layout/functionality as a basis for the software so Critter is our nod in Beast’s direction to say thanks!).

<rant>

I am 27, my parents told me how to go to the toilet (bathroom for our American cousins) so I do not need the management at the office building were I work to put up new signs in the mens room telling me to flush the toilet once it has been used and then another reminding me to wash my hands.

What is the world coming to?

</rant>

So I gave a talk about my experiences so far of running an Open Source business at PHPWM and mentioned LoopFuse (and did my bit to carry the LoopFuse torch!) as a really neat idea and concept that looks like it works really well for Open Source companies.

Several people have been asking about it since then so I have put this post up with the details so hopefully the LoopFuse guys will see the referrals in their system!

• LoopFuse Website
• LoopFuse Blog

I have had the opportunity to talk to both Tom Elrod and Roy Russo over at LoopFuse and had a demo of the Enterprise version. As I have said a great concept and product, and definitely one we would like to get involved with - using, integrating and perhaps more?

OK, so its take a few days since Tuesday to get these up but I have my reasons! For those that are interested here are a copy of the slides that accompanied my ‘Open Business’ presentation at PHPWM.

I have also upload an OPML file of some interesting RSS feeds I read that are listed at the end of the slides.

Here is a list of sites that I read that might be useful to people since wordpress thinks that XML/OPML files does not meet its security guidelines:

• Open…
• OpenBusiness
• The Open Road
• The Open Source Advocate
• TechCrunch
• Asay the Alfrescan
• Seth’s Blog
• Joel on Software

After many months of planning next week will see the launch of the new Senokian website, so I was particularly interested in an article published in the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), The Marketer magazine about the Top Website Turn-offs, and I was relieved to confirm that we have addressed exactly these issues:

• Text heavy website
• Cluttered and confusing homepage
• Clunky checkout procedure
• Slow Internet connection

These turn-offs all contribute to a staggering 60% of on-line shopping trolleys being abandoned before the consumer reaches the checkout…Now imagine 60% of supermarket shoppers abandoning their trolleys on a busy Saturday afternoon - utter carnage! However we know that such a scenario is unlikely to ever happen as off-line shoppers feel confident, in control and fully understand the buying process. On the other hand it is clear that many on-line shoppers feel frustrated by the buying process and crave a simple, straightforward buying experience.

The CIM article goes on to make the point that many technology company’s are naturally driven by the technology itself, rather than the end-user. At Senokian we’re forever asking the questions; What’s in it for the user? What does the user need? Does this new functionality make it easier for the end-user? We work on the principle that the more advanced the capabilities of your technology department the more questions the marketing, sales and IT departments need to be asking each other - At Senokian the list is endless but as a result we stay focused and grounded on developing the technology that our customers actually need!!

Last night was the July meeting of the PHPWM usergroup (http://www.phpwm.org) where four members, including myself and Jake, gave ‘lightning talks’ on different topics. At Senokian, we rely on the Prototype javascript framework and so I volunteered to give a (very) quick introduction on some of its features and uses.

The talk covered the main parts of the framework, namely the Utility Functions ($ and friends), extending elements, Ajax, Enumerable, Events and Classes, finishing off with a short example of combining a few different things.

The slides I used for the talk can be downloaded as an S5 presentation (runs in your web browser): Quick Introduction to Prototype.js.

My talk followed those of David and Sam from Pale Purple. David talked about Propel, which looks like it might be worth a look, while Sam has been working on a web-based implementation of the ‘Turtle’ concept, used to teach programming. This looks like it could grow into a really useful product, well worth keeping an eye on. There’s a copy online at http://turtles.onaserver.org/.

Senokian are on a business park on the east side of Coventry and there are a lot of businesses in the area on the same business park as us. I have noticed that a lot of companies have a “dress down” policy on Fridays. What is the point of this?

At Senokian the only dress code we have is pretty much “no ripped jeans” (this doesn’t apply for visiting clients when business casual is the norm, only in the office). My feeling on the matter is that the clothes people wear doesn’t help them do their job in the office so they may as well be comfortable - so for us everyday is a dress down day.

So back to the point of “dress down fridays” - if you are happy for staff to dress casually on a Friday, why not every day? I can’t imagine companies organise no meetings etc. on the Fridays, so if you are happy to do a dress down Friday, why not make everyday a dress down day.

Just my two pence worth!

The Open Source Showcase I spoke at the other week has been written up at Open Advantage by Elliot who helped organise it.