Starting your own company or venture is like being on dope. The stress(mental and physcial) can take its toll if not careful. I am not taking care of my self with overwhelming commitments towards my clients. I want to get into a fitness regime from monday - Spend 1 hr in the YMCA gym.
Yes, the most exciting news - I will be working with Linux foundation on some projects. That is the best thing that has happened to hooduku so far.
Linux is like the mother of all open source - So working for Linux even for a small project is a big deal. More than excitement, am keen to provide our value prop to community. It is important to be good books of community. As usual - before start of any project - I have some jitters.
Major problem am trying to solve for a client in migrating a CRM data from older version of SugarCRM to new version. Because the prior implementation of SugarCRM was not upgrade safe - am going through a intense drill to safely migrate alldata, relationships module by module - Just to be careful.. BTW- This client was my first client who signed me up and hence some additional precautions.
Few weeks back, I have also started collaborating with my partner in business crime - Greg Parrish. A Staffing consultant and who hired me for small job to develop a CRM app for a insurance client. The project fell through -but our relationship persisted.
We have some complementary skills which could be leveraged for a greater good. I found him to be very geeky- but does speak about solving problems for clients.
I think there is some synergy in the sense that both of us want to solve our client problems adopting open source products and solutions rather than expensive commercial products. I hope we can pull off few good deals. That is all we need to move to that next level.
After much delibration, one of our non-profit client finally aceepted our offer on delivering and implementing CRM solution. This was a great challege to be accepted. I am hoping we can deliver a quality solution and gain some additional projects from them.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Most recent adventures - Part 1
It has been little over two years since I last actively blogged. There is no excuse for the reason. It is just that, I have been busy on handling two or more projects at a time. What was challenging is the fact that, I was handling projects with varying degree of complexities and technology platform. Many of my peers and friends know me as a Java geek. One of earliest professional manager wrote me a reference "To plagarize coke, Sudhi eats, drinks, and sleeps Java...".
That was eactly around 9 years ago when Java was hot as coffee :)
Though I enjoy Java, I have branched out to different things. I will discuss on this little later.
Last few years, I have been struggling to convince many of my fellow co-workers that as indiviuals, we have to go above and beyond technology. Over the years, technology is just a co-incidence. The real dope is in solving the customer problems. Technology should just be an enabler or tool nothing more than that. Let me give you an example. Recently, I have been helping couple of my customers to adopt, and implement an open source CRM called SugarCRM.
SugarCRM is a open source product developed, and managed by SugarCRM ommunity. There are also enterprise and professional versions available, many just prefer opensource version. Simply because it is free and no upfront licensing costs.
One of the biggest issue the customer faced - The Email Interface in SugarCRM was not user friendly at all. So my customer asked,if I can provide her an alternative. I knew there was this Thunderbird - Open source version of outlook. I configured Thunderbird to send and receive my emails - Btw I have my complete email infrastructure hosted on Gmail. It was simple and straight forward.
Set the outgoing SMTP - smtp.gmail.com - port :587
Then set the inbound and user email address.set the password with ssl.
One shot, everything worked like a champ. Now, I also figured out there is a sugar Plugin for thunderbird. I wanted to try that too. So downloaded the SugarCRM lugin for Thunderbird. Installed the plugin - Configured the Plugin to point to my Sugar installation hosted on http://flexcollab.net - Voila, I could just create accounts, leads from my desktop. I thought this was a cool feature. Called the customer, helped download, install and configure Thunder Bird and Sugar Plugin - Established my account with customer - convinced the customer to go with my sugar installation on flexcollab.net.
This is just an example. Technology should not be complex for business folks. It should be made simple. In a commercial version of Collaboration suite like MOSS 2007, it has already been made quite simple and flexible. The realdeal with cost cutting and all that, it makes sense to adopt open source tools. Take a look at the kind of tools we have. We have opensource CRM, Opensource ERP (so many of them - OpenBravo, ERP 5), Open source ETL (Pentaho) List is end less. Open source is a lucrative market. Might not be as lucrative in terms of professional services billing as commercial products, but still a good way delivering quality services to customers.
Another customer was looking for some key issues to be resolved and also a custom module development in SugarCRM. Before giving me the job, he said, I have worked with many people who have not been able to solve my issues. He was very pessimistic about my capabilities. I said to him - "Hi, I am not promising that am going to solve your issue. But let me try and figure out what the problem is". He gave me access to his dev machines where Sugar was installed.
Issue 1 : When you export the accounts and leads the custom columns were never populated in the CSV file. Easy, just go and override the Create_Export_Query in.php to include all the columns including the custom columns. It worked finee.
Issue 2: The pop up defnitions were not working fine. He wanted customized one. This was a hard one. Tooksome time, took help of a Sugar developer in London, got a solution which worked. sudhi@hooduku.com for detailed solution>
From these two customers, I have not made tons of $$, but the kick is that I have signed customers on an ongoing basis - selling my Solutions as a Service model.
That was eactly around 9 years ago when Java was hot as coffee :)
Though I enjoy Java, I have branched out to different things. I will discuss on this little later.
Last few years, I have been struggling to convince many of my fellow co-workers that as indiviuals, we have to go above and beyond technology. Over the years, technology is just a co-incidence. The real dope is in solving the customer problems. Technology should just be an enabler or tool nothing more than that. Let me give you an example. Recently, I have been helping couple of my customers to adopt, and implement an open source CRM called SugarCRM.
SugarCRM is a open source product developed, and managed by SugarCRM ommunity. There are also enterprise and professional versions available, many just prefer opensource version. Simply because it is free and no upfront licensing costs.
One of the biggest issue the customer faced - The Email Interface in SugarCRM was not user friendly at all. So my customer asked,if I can provide her an alternative. I knew there was this Thunderbird - Open source version of outlook. I configured Thunderbird to send and receive my emails - Btw I have my complete email infrastructure hosted on Gmail. It was simple and straight forward.
Set the outgoing SMTP - smtp.gmail.com - port :587
Then set the inbound and user email address.set the password with ssl.
One shot, everything worked like a champ. Now, I also figured out there is a sugar Plugin for thunderbird. I wanted to try that too. So downloaded the SugarCRM lugin for Thunderbird. Installed the plugin - Configured the Plugin to point to my Sugar installation hosted on http://flexcollab.net - Voila, I could just create accounts, leads from my desktop. I thought this was a cool feature. Called the customer, helped download, install and configure Thunder Bird and Sugar Plugin - Established my account with customer - convinced the customer to go with my sugar installation on flexcollab.net.
This is just an example. Technology should not be complex for business folks. It should be made simple. In a commercial version of Collaboration suite like MOSS 2007, it has already been made quite simple and flexible. The realdeal with cost cutting and all that, it makes sense to adopt open source tools. Take a look at the kind of tools we have. We have opensource CRM, Opensource ERP (so many of them - OpenBravo, ERP 5), Open source ETL (Pentaho) List is end less. Open source is a lucrative market. Might not be as lucrative in terms of professional services billing as commercial products, but still a good way delivering quality services to customers.
Another customer was looking for some key issues to be resolved and also a custom module development in SugarCRM. Before giving me the job, he said, I have worked with many people who have not been able to solve my issues. He was very pessimistic about my capabilities. I said to him - "Hi, I am not promising that am going to solve your issue. But let me try and figure out what the problem is". He gave me access to his dev machines where Sugar was installed.
Issue 1 : When you export the accounts and leads the custom columns were never populated in the CSV file. Easy, just go and override the Create_Export_Query in
Issue 2: The pop up defnitions were not working fine. He wanted customized one. This was a hard one. Tooksome time, took help of a Sugar developer in London, got a solution which worked. sudhi@hooduku.com for detailed solution>
From these two customers, I have not made tons of $$, but the kick is that I have signed customers on an ongoing basis - selling my Solutions as a Service model.
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