CaseySoftware has been working this past year to help business improve their processes by the intelligence deployment and use of tools. While we predominantly support back office operations revolving around Project Management, occassionally we have a product which sneaks out and interacts directly with the customer.

Under the cover of darkness these recent months, we've developed a module called Corridor which ties Angel.com's Interactive Voice Response System to SugarCRM and now I'm announcing its availability.

There are three primary Use Cases which were implemented:

• First, when a Customer calls in, their callerid information is used to immediately update their SugarCRM Contact record. Next, the call appears on a simple "Recent Calls" box on your SugarCRM page along with the information retrieved (Contact Name, Account Name, and timestamp). This allows a Customer Service Representative to immediately know who is calling before they answer the phone.
• Next, if a Customer decides to leave a voice mail, the above information is still added to the "Recent Calls" but the description of the call is replaced with a link to the .wav audio message.
• Finally, if a Customer simply wishes to know the status of their latest submited Case, the above logging happens and the system reads the Case resolution over the phone.

A call will stay in the "Recent Calls" list noted above until the Call is marked "complete". This allows your Customer Service team to know all the calls placed, see what actions the Customer took, and then respond or close each in kind.

In addition to the module itself, we've developed a small collection of "Call Pages" to demonstrate how to have the two systems play well together. While we consider this version of the module to be complete, additional suggestions on functionality are always welcome.

If you're interested in an integrated IVR/CRM solution, please contact Jason Hochman at Angel.com for more information:

Jason Hochman
Business Development Manager
703.286.2824
hochman@angel.com

The Domino Bridge has been made available for sale. The final testing is complete, all known bugs have been resolved, and final coat of paint is dry. ;)

If you're not familiar with the Domino Bridge, let me give you some quick background:

CaseySoftware and numerous other organizations use dotProject on a day to day basis to track projects, assign tasking, and manage the overall operations of their projects. I have personally been involved in dotProject installations supporting teams as large as 120 people working on 90+ projects throughout the year. It is a solid system supporting Gantt Charts, project calendars, integrated ToDo lists, and a host of other things. But don't just believe me, I'm a core developer and therefore biased. Go check it out yourself. SugarCRM is the leading Open Source CRM solution. Hundreds of organizations are actively using it to manage their sales forces, their customer accounts, and their on going opportunities. CaseySoftware is and has been one of those organizations for well over a year. We have a series of SugarCRM modules scheduled for release over the next 6 weeks, but I'll discuss that later.

I've written before about The Domino Bridge, but now it's official... The Domino Bridge has a release date.

The Domino Bridge acts as a complete data integration layer between SugarCRM and dotProject. Generally, when a task to integrate two systems is undertaken, most efforts take the view that anything that can be done in one system should be able to be done in the other system. In my humble opinion, this is a terrible idea. Unless you completely merge both codebases, you end up creating a huge duplication of code and/or wrapper classes that require constant tweaking as the respective systems improve.

I've previously written about Day 1 and Day 2.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I made it my goal to talk to people and see who was around. In order to do this effectively, I wore one of my dotProject T-shirts to "show my colors" without having to say it constantly. On a side point, have you bought your dotProject gear? If you're looking for a way to support the project and can't code, it's a great way to show some appreciation and get nifty shirts

Wow, things at CaseySoftware have been expanding and growing in ways I never quite expected. Starting on 02 May, we started offering our first official product: dotProject Hosting. In the meantime, we've been bootstrapping and supplementing this effort by building numerous customizations and modules for dotProject and various integrations and expansions of other Open Source Projects. It's been fun, educational, and we've worked with quite a few people, but it's about to get even better.

Next week, I will be attending the Power Your Business With PHP Conference and I am formally announcing our second Real Product(tm) offering which I have been hinting at and describing for weeks: The Domino Bridge

There are MANY powerful, robust, and flexible packages out there both for the desktop and the web. Software such as Apache, sendmail, iptables, and a variety of other things serve as much of the backbone of much of the Internet, whether users realize it or not. Along the lines of web-based applications, there are my personal favorites of phpBB, dotProject, SugarCRM, webmin, and Mantis. CaseySoftware hosts these applications for a variety of clients and team members in addition to writing customizations for them.

For those of you who don't know: there is serious dissention within the Open Source ranks over some recent moves by a new company called vTiger.