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Filed under: Finance, Productivity, Open Source

Sugar CRM updated to 5.0

SugarCRM has just posted a much-anticipated, much-tested update to its CRM software. Already one of the leading CRM clients in the field, Sugar also has the honorable distinction of sporting the majestic and rare feather of open source in its illustrious and award-laden chapeau. Management for the masses, if you will.

Sugar 5.0 includes improved security, the ability to easily create custom modules, an AJAX email client compatible with the POP3 protocol, and hot new dashboarding capabilities.

Following the old carpenter's adage of "measure twice, cut once," the Sugar CRM software was put through three beta cycles, and was tested over 30,000 times. In other words, if you think you've found a bug in the Sugar CRM software, it might be the one that splattered on your glasses as you cruised to work on your Vespa scooter.

SugarCRM is available as a free Community edition, as well as two commercial editions: Professional and Enterprise. Professional costs $275 per user per year; Enterprise costs $449. The Sugar website offers a wealth of demos, both hands-on and hands-off.

[Via InfoWorld]

Filed under: Business, iPhone

Salesforce.com coming soon to an iPhone near you

iphoneThough NASA and other large enterprise institutions have previously decried the iPhone as "not enterprise ready", it appears Salesforce.com has a different opinion of the buttonless cell phone device. Even as Apple reported a substantially positive quarter, the avant-garde CRM company let it slip that they're working on adding iPhone-specific support to their hugely popular web application suite.

CNN's analysis speculates that Salesforce.com users may be looking to the iPhone as they grow weary of their traditional Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. This is consistent with Salesforce.com's user demographic. Though they count some Fortune 500 clients, Salesforce.com's customer base is comprised mainly of small to medium sized businesses, where enterprise grade development tools (which the iPhone lacks) are less important than out-of-the-box functionality (which Salesforce.com prides itself on).

One wonders if Salesforce.com is one of those recipients of an advance iPhone SDK, or if the Salesforce.com integration is going to be online and web-based, as other third-party iPhone "apps" have been thus far.

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Shareware

A Mac-user's Salesforce.com survival tools

If you work in the Fortune 1000, chances are pretty good that you've dealt with Salesforce.com, the web-based Customer Relationship Management service that has exploded in popularity over the last year or so. Salesforce.com provides a (very useful) plug-in for synchronizing Outlook contacts, tasks, and e-mails with the web site's database for reporting and federation... Which makes Salesforce.com a dream for Windows Office users.

But if you have a Macbook under your arm, you probably aren't using Outlook. More than likely, you're using the suite of apps Apple provides for personal information management on Mac OS X--Apple Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Fortunately, there are some gnarly tools for synchronizing your Mac-based data with Salesforce.com.

The first of these is a great utility called SF3 from Pocket Soap. It will synchronize tasks and events from iCal and contacts from Address Book with your Salesforce.com account. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet support limiting the synchronization to certain groups of contacts--important if you mix personal and business contacts within Address Book.

Pocket Soap also makes Maildrop--a script for Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage that will copy messages to Salesforce.com--very handy. You'll also benefit from Trapdoor, which allows you to store your Salesforce logins in your Mac OS X keychain, and SFDCFuse, which will mount your Salesforce document repository as a Mac OS X volume.

Filed under: Business, Internet, Security, Text, Utilities, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services, P2P, Social Software

Zoho Browser Based Word Processor Tools

zoho browser based word processor tools

Zoho offers a complete line of powerful office suite and productivity tools, all through the use of a browser.

The Zoho toolset includes:
  • Zoho Show - online presentation
  • Zoho Writer - word processor
  • Zoho Sheet - spreadsheet application
  • Zoho Virtual Office - email, document and calendar
  • Zoho CRM - CRM
  • Zoho Creator - create web applications
  • Zoho Planner - Online organizer
  • Zoho Chat - chat
Zoho also has a set of online utilities including website monitoring software, and online poll solutions.

Online applications that run in the browser is part of this whole Web 2.0 social software era, and it looks like Zoho is in the forefront with a great complete application list. They have almost any application you would require to run your business directly from your browser. And Free! Zoho produces pretty much all of their applications with a $0 price tag.

They do give access to demo versions before you decide to signup and try their browser based tools. So check them out, they look really good!

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Web services

Sidewalk: Easy form builder for your web site

SidewalkSidewalk is a nice-looking Ajaxy web form builder. While it doesn't have very advanced validation options (just "required" or not), adding and arranging form elements is fast and easy and setting up a new form from scratch really does take just minutes. The drag-and-drop positioning, though becoming passé in the age of Prototype, is still cool, and Sidewalk forms can be embedded in any web page just by copying and pasting a bit of JavaScript, which I think is one of its greatest selling points. When someone fills out your form their answers are e-mailed to you as well as added to a web-based database where you can search the responses and export them to CSV. Sidewalk isn't without its limitations, though. One missing feature that might be a show-stopper for some is the inability to edit fields once they've been created. For simple text fields this isn't a big deal, but for radio groups or drop-downs with many options it's a pain to have to re-create the whole thing just to make one small change. Another limitation is that, unless I'm missing something, it's only possible to create one form per account. Sidewalk is free to try for 30 days, after which time your forms will remain active and editable, but responses will only stay in the database for one day. A more permanent account will cost you $7.99/mo.

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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