I am starting a political mandate next month, and I would like to store various opinions and events in a (relational?) database online.
To make things clearer, I wish I can find a ready to use tool (not too expensive or free, and preferably open source) to
Maintain a list of politicians in the area.
Maintain a list of events in our local political life
Track political themes over time
Maintain a list of opinions from politicians about those themes
Track participation of politicians to events, like local councils
Link events and opinions to media articles, pictures and/or sound
Track party subscriptions of the politicians
...
Of course, part of this information should be stored on the fly during meetings (like who is here tonight and who is not?), while other bits might be updated off site (like summaries of speeches).
Does anyone now about a solution that would fit these needs? It might be called Citizen Relationship Management, isn't it?
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Online could definitely do all of that and more. It is on demand and you can get a free one month trial here - http://crm.dynamics.com/en-us/home
Dynamics CRM has been marketed as xRM for a while now for its ability to be easily customized to track any type of relationships.
Please take a look at some of my previous answers for more information on what it can do -
Any CRM platforms that have API access and an easy migration from Salesforce?
Can I use Dynamics CRM as a Shopping Website?
Related
Need some career advice, hopefully I am in right party
How can a contact center agent, from being CRM end user get into CRM consulting? I have theoretical knowledge of CRM implementation, job role of admin, support agent etc. Is there any specific skill that has to be mastered or there are lot of other things to go through than the existing skills.
enlightenment on this would be greatly appreciated.
You are in the wrong place, but I like your question and I have some suggestions.
As a CRM end user you have primarily been concerned with figuring out how to use a process within the system (customer support in your case). CRM consultants need to understand how that process was designed and the tools used to configured it.
A good first step would be to explore some of the tools within CRM. Understanding the Advanced Find is important for CRM consultants and will also give you more power as an end user. Use the advanced find to create personal views to enhance your user experience. Similarly creating personal workflows will enhance your configuration knowledge while potentially providing you with improvements to your user experience.
You will probably be limited in the system you use so I recommend you get access to a sandbox system to play around in. Microsoft provides access to free CRM online systems for exactly this purpose. Practice creating new entities, relationships, and fields of different types. Set up forms and views for your new entities. Create business rules, process flows and workflows to create a process around your new entities.
Taking an online class on CRM customization and configuration can be an easy way to get yourself started with consulting concepts.
Go apply for CRM consulting jobs. CRM consulting is a fairly niche industry and it is difficult for consulting firms to hire experienced CRM consultants. As someone who hires CRM consultants I am generally skeptical of end user experience, but if an end user shows knowledge and aptitude I am likely to hire them.
I've not only worked Tier 2 support for Salesforce but also have worked as a consultant. You need to not only understand business requirements, but implement them in the most efficient manner possible in Salesforce. Getting a job as a consultant typically requires at least a couple years experience as an admin, not an end user, an actual admin. It also typically requires certifications, At least the Administrator, Developer, Sales Cloud Consultant and Service Cloud Consultant certifications, and probably the Advanced Administrator as well. There are a lot of getting started info out there, Salesforce has done a great job. For instance, here is the Workbook
On top of that you need to have an understanding of different industries, for instance the financial industry or manufacturing industry, to understand their business processes. Working in a contact center you should look to gain a deeper understanding in how and why things work there.
As highlighted before, this is not the right place to ask this question as it is a place for more technically oriented questions. That being said, each and every one of us on this forum had to start somewhere, and often with far less experience that you have as a user.
If you're willing to accept an entry level position - and you fall within the age category - then your current experience is the cherry, but the cake will have to be about actual technical experience. Ie. IT engineering degree and/or proven participation in programming projects (open source or otherwise) and anything that may show that you have the foundation skills for an IT consultant.
As the company will be investing a lot and want's to have some certainty that it will have a return on it's investment.
In case you're looking for an above entry level position, then your new employer expects that you can be put to work right away without too much training. As highlighted by BattleCodez, experience with development processes, relevant application certificates and actual work experience are now must-haves. Based on your description, I don't think you have that.
As for a general career move you may want to opt for a Business Analyst role. This is a more Industry Process related role where the business processes are the expected experience. In your case how are calls handled, routed, and what does the client in your industry expect from as a customer. In this role you would be expected to have a deeper then average user understanding of what the tool CAN do, but not HOW that is created.
In this case become a key user, obtain functional admin privileges and move away from the actual calls, to an expertise based supporting role.
For WordPress's sister project BuddyPress, we are looking for relatively-reputable resources that manage a list of countries and regions. Due to the WordPress OpenSource philosophy, we are only seeking GPL-compatible resources.
If no such resources exist, we could possibly consider GPL-compatible services as well.
Or there could possibly be a GlotPress-like service (see http://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp/dev) wherein the community contributes and maintains the database which can be downloaded via a link or API.
So far all the databases/services I have found have either been commercial or otherwise incompatible with GPL.
It seems unfortunate to set off on another data collection effort when there are already volunteers world-wide contributing to the GeoNames collection that is available under a Creative Commons license. Does BuddyPress really want to get into the business of maintaining administrative area data that are always changing?
I agree GeoNames is a good resource. I would also bring up OpenStreetMap, which is under an Open Data Commons Open Database License (see http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/).
I am building car rental web-application software
I recently encountered a concern from a possible client; that they don't want the software company to see their data in the database. They load their rates contracts etc which are confidential and don't want anyone apart from them have access to this data, including our dba or some developer/tech person.
I normally do not sell the code of my application and only let clients run the software on their servers. I normally do maintenance and system updates to their servers on a bi monthly or so basis. So I do have remote access to their servers and such. Up to now this was OK, but I move into a market where there is a lot of competition and clients are very anxious about their data and having a server that only they have access to.
They proposed that I sell an exclusive version of the software to them so that they can carry on with maintenance and future updates in-house.
I do consider and brain-storm around business models that can revolve around that idea. But at the same time I think about if it would be reasonable/practical to support/update/maintain an application without accessing the database server directly at all..
Any suggestions appreciated..
Ps: Having a non-disclosure agreement is not enough for this situation.
Do they fully understand what it will take to get someone in their organisation trained to be able to maintain the application?
Make this clear to them.
What happens when an employee of the company who's had access to this information leaves?
This is a more likely source of data leakage.
Offer to sign a non-disclosure agreement which is standard in this sort of case.
Have you thought of Encryption techniques on database side....
You don't need the access to database for application maintenance. You don't have to service the database if they have the staff. If you need to change something in DB you can do it with scripts, or special one-time mini-applications. If they want the database let them have it.
In our SaaSy webapp we need to collect Google Analytics-like data (like, what pages were visited, how many 404s where there, etc.). I wonder if there are any best practices on what pieces of information should be collected (like, IP, User Agent, etc.) and how should these logs be stored. Requirements on what statistics we're going to display are not yet fixed, but I want to have a starting point.
Tracking for the sake of tracking is pointless. The point of tracking activity on your site is to answer specific business questions, such as how many people are buying your product, or how far are they getting in your sale funnel or other events like signing up for a newsletter, etc...What you should be doing is asking the people who make business decisions what it is they need/want to know, and go from there.
Having said that, most ad-hoc reports can be generated with basics like the URL and timestamp. Ability to parse specific variables from the URL and categorize them and their values is handy for campaign tracking. Tracking IP addresses are good for debugging and finding out what country/region/market the user is coming from. Referring URL is good for tracking where the user came from on the internet (another site, paid vs. organic search, a campaign, etc...).
And then throw a couple of variables into the mix. Allow for the ability to populate variables with arbitrary information (like product IDs, etc...) that can be sent to you and stored, so you can see things like how many times a product was viewed or purchased, how much it cost, etc...
But anyways, to answer your question, ultimately "best practice" is first sitting down with the guys in suits and ask what they want/need to know and work with them to find out if what they want to know is just silly or if it's actually actionable (for example, knowing things like number of pageviews is okay but how actionable is it really? What's MORE actionable is knowing how many of xyz is being sold, or where on your site people are abandoning you, so you can streamline your site, maybe decide your product or offer sucks and needs to be revisited, etc...).
I have to ask though...is there a particular reason you wish to create your own tracking tool as opposed to using or investing in one of the many tools already out there? There is Google Analytics (GA), Yahoo Web Analytics (YWA), Omniture SiteCatalyst, Webtrends to name a few. Some are free, some cost money, but it is an investment that yields real returns if used properly.
I'm coding a new {monthly|yearly} paid site with the now typical "referral" system: when a new user signs up, they can specify the {username|referral code} of other user (this can be detected automatically if they came through a special URL), which will cause the referrer to earn a percentage of anything the new user pays.
Before reinventing the wheel, I'd like to know if any of you have experience with storing this kind of data in a relational DB. Currently I'm using MySQL, but I believe any good solution should be easily adapted to any RDBMS, right?
I'm looking to support the following features:
Online billing system - once each invoice is paid, earnings for referrals are calculated and they will be able to cash-out. This includes, of course, having the possibility of browsing invoices / payments online.
Paid options vary - they are different in nature and in costs (which will vary sometime), so commissions should be calculated based on each final invoice.
Keeping track of referrals (relationship between users, date in which it was referred, and any other useful information - any ideas?)
A simple way to access historical referring data (how much have been paid) or accrued commissions.
In the future, I might offer to exchange accrued cash for subscription renewal (covering the whole of the new subscription or just a part of it, having to pay the difference if needed)
Multiple levels - I'm thinking of paying something around 10% of direct referred earnings + 2% the next level, but this may change in the future (add more levels, change percentages), so I should be able to store historical data.
Note that I'm not planning to use this in any other project, so I'm not worried about it being "plug and play".
Have you done any work with similar requirements? If so, how did you handle all this stuff? Would you recommend any particular DB schema? Why?
Is there anything I'm missing that would help making this a more flexible implementation?
Rather marvellously, there's a library of database schemas. Although I can't see something specific to referrals, there may be something related. At least (hopefully) you should be able to get some ideas.