Month: April 2005

IBM presentation

I just came back from a two hour presentation by IBM that they gave in our office. They were mostly talking about their OpenPower servers, TotalStorage storage and backup solutions, and, of course, about their BladeCenter.

Overall, the presentation was slightly boring and a bit too long. I learned little except for the names of product lines. I was also repeatedly told that IBM is getting cheaper more affordable and more open.

I was also surprised as to how often the word “Linux” came up. I mean it was used almost as often as “IBM”. Every ,and I mean every, slide of the presentation had the word “Linux” written at least once. They even had a picture of tux on a couple of pages. And they mentioned a few times that IBM currently works with Red Hat and SUSE.

The funny thing is that almost every time one of the presenters used the word “Linux”, someone from our guys was turning around and looking at me. I was the biggest Linux and Open Source Software advocate present there. Some people can still remember similar presentations from a few years ago when I would ask about Linux support and presenters would just nod their heads negatively. There has been surely an improvement. Those who don’t support Linux, don’t even come to our office anymore.

The resume of the presentation is still the same as it always was though – a nice fairy tale that you have to sell your organs to live in. You don’t need organs in the fairy tale anyway. The sales people were trying to convince that the situation with expensiveness changed dramatically, but watching how comfortably they were operating with tens of thousands of dollars, I tend to think otherwise.

Managing customer relations with open source

If you are looking for CRM software, make sure you try SugarCRM. It is professionally done piece of software which is available both as a commercial option and free software.

Free version has practically all the functionality of the commercial one. Commerical version features more reports and statistics, interface translated into a number of languages, and some more plugins and extensions. It is also officially supported by the company.

SugarCRM is written in PHP and works nicely with MySQL and Apache. PostgreSQL is not currently supported to the best of my knowledge. The interface is professionally designed and is also very flexible with themes and menu configurations. The installation is very straight forward and troubleless. I didn’t even have to read a line of documentation to do it. There is an option to fill the database with sample data, which makes understanding all the features so much faster.

SugarCRM supports management of contacts, appointments, phone calls, clients, bugs, notes, and a whole other bunch of stuff that is needed in the business world. Projects and leads are organized by the customer and makes it really easy to see what has been done with the client and up to what degree.

SugarCRM also features nice portal building utilities with RSS feed integration and website bookmarks, which can be either private or global. It comes with an excellent selection of about 400 feeds that one can start reading immediately. These can be, of course, edited and delete, while the new ones are easy to add.

One of the surprising features is the plugin for MS Outlook. It allows one to work with SugarCRm from the familiar interface of MS Outlook, as well synchronise meetings, contacts, emails, notes, and other stuff.

Overall, it looks like a very nice piece of software. I really wish there was support for PostgreSQL backend and LDAP authentication. Other than that everything looks perfect. I will probably be spending some time with this software in the near future. I’ll let you know if I will find any other strong good or bad sides to it.

SCIgen

SCIgen is an automatic Computer Science paper generator. It is one of those tools you wish you had in the first year of college, when a whole bunch of useless homeworks were given to students of you class just to drive some of them away.

SCIgen is very easy to use. It asks only for the names of authors for the paper. After these are submitted, it generates a complete paper with graphs, charts, and analysis. The papers are so good, that they could have actually improved my CPA back than. I know, you have to be nuts, to read one from the beginning to the end, but what can I do – I had a few nutty professors.

Update: Apparently, papers generated by this tool are so good that one of them was even accepted for the conference. Slashdot coverage is here.