New website

I’ve finally updated my website today.

For now it is only in Dutch. Sorry for all you English speaking folk. I plan to get a multilingual version up in the next two weeks or so.

I got the design from http://www.freecsstemplates.org/. I could have spent a few euro’s on a custom design but I was happy with it so…

However, I did start from the downloaded HTML and converted it to use ASP.NET master pages and ASP.NET controls.

The content is not yet finished either but at the moment I’m very busy getting my new app out for Communication Management. I’ll write a seperate post on that shortly.

New Product: Communications Logging

A customer of mine log all incoming and outgoing comunication with his external relations in an excell spreadsheet. I find this a very good  thing to do. He confirms it has helped him numerous times in the past where his customer or vendor gets into a i-did-say-this argument. He can fall back on the communication log an say you said this and that on that day an such.

The spreadsheet did however pose some problems, keeping him from getting the efficiency he needed.

These were his problems:

• When multiple users accessed the sheet, they had to be very carefull not to overwrite each others entries.
• The master data for contacts is in their Microsoft Dynamics NAV system. It is a shame he has the same data in multiple places.
• He cannot run a report from the contact card in NAV to see a log of the communications
• Some users of the Communications Log do not require access to Navision. They don’t even want access. Fact is that NAV licence pricing is user based.

So, he came to me to see if I could address these problems. Of course I could. The first idea we had was to just write some custom solution in NAV. Then I started seeing an opportunity. Surely other businesses could benefit from such software.

Because we wanted to enable non NAV users to use the software we were pushed towards an external app anyway. So, I decided to write an app in ASP.NET. In this first release, I’m focussing on NAV as a the backend. The software is designed pluggable however. This means that I can write a module to access systems other than NAV in a jiffy.

As a marketing stint, I said to the customer that for avery lead he can generate that leads to a sale, he will get free services from me. I tend on pursuing this further for all paying customers.

The software is priced at 500€ ex vat. For every buying lead, I will give back 125€ ex vat in services on the software (such as customisation or maintenance or upgrades).

If anyone is interested in this, please contact me. I have other reward programmes in mind for lead generation.

Gaia Ajax Widgets

I’ve often said to achieve enything you have to invest. Either money or time.

Now, I don’t have tonnes of money to spend. Most of us µISV’s don’t.

So, what do I have? Time. But not a lot of it. I as an µISV want to bring my software ideas to market. WIll they sell? I don’t know. Who can? If I would be sure, I’d get some funding somewhere and build it.

What is my strategy then?

All my ideas for software, I want to make. I want to make them fast. Every piece of software should be good in terms of quality (or else it comes back to haunt you…).

But for that, I need tools to create software. I used ASP.NET Ajax control toolkit until now but I constantly ran into rendering and postback problems (among other). This was taking up so much of my time I wasn’t really getting to putting the software on the market.

Now a new customer of mine asked me to build him a peice of software to manage incoming and outgoing communication in his company.

I decided this too would make a great piece of software to add to my products list, so I set out on building it.

Recently I did a lot of research on other toolkit out there that could easily integrate with ASP.NET. I did not find anything that was remotly interesting. Last week I had another go at finding a toolkit. I happened to stumble upon Gaia Ajax Widgets.

MARVELOUS!!!

I’m using it now to build a user control (maybe turn it into a server control) to be a generic lookup form. I learned the UI style from my Nav days and it is truly wonderfull.

I will keep you posted on my progress.

Been a while

Sure has been a while since my last post… So what have I been doing?

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting work for a Dutch company calles Qurius.

The end customer was BIS Industrial Services. They do insulation, scaffolding and a host of other services.

What I did for them was create a portal for their remote employees for registering time spent on projects. They register time for about 3000 employees. This is done by about 35 administrative employees.

The technology used was ASP.NET 2.0 on IIS6. The backend was Microsoft Dynamics Nav.

Where am I going?

I’m doing a small µISV project which has allready been sold for a company in Roeselare. They want a small program that allows them to register communication between the company and external contacts. They have been doing this for years an see real added value in this business process.

Until now, they have been registering their communications in an excell spreadsheet. This of course has some drawbacks in a multiuser environment. Another major drawback is that their contact details are in their Microsoft Dynamics Nav System.

Yes, that Nav again. I did design the app to allow for a pluggable dataaccess though, so it can easily be coupled to other software. The app is in C# ASP.NET and I’m probably not going to use the ajax control toolkit but rather Gaia Ajax Widgets.

I will probably post about my experiences with those in the next few days.