“Open Source” was the term coined that triggered a revolution in software.  Then came terms like Open Data, Open APIs, Open Architecture, and more. What do they all mean? Are they just like Open Source?

I spent time recently at the Open Source Thinktank in Paris, where we wrestled with this very question. Does the term “Open” have a clear definition? And in relationship to all these new “Open” terms, do they all have the same properties and expectations? We came to these conclusions:

1. The generic use of the word “Open” has no clear definition, thanks to marketing people trying to get an extra buzzword in to their product’s marketing materials. This is OK, as it’s probably a bad idea to control a word like that anyways
2. When using the term “Open,” you should really quantify what that means, and not just use it as a buzzword.

There’s something pretty important about #2 above. Think of how many times you have seen the word “Open” thrown around without any definition to it. Clearly they are just trying to piggyback on the term “Open Source” here, and using that to imply the standards they are imposing match those of open source. This can be a pretty big fallacy, depending upon what the person behind this truly has in mind.

Looking at “Open Source,” I think there are two important tenants that really define what is expected.

-       Accessibility, meaning that you have the ability to freely access the data in the application without any sort of restrictions

-       Freedom, meaning that you have full control and visibility into your data and your code for the application.

When you are looking at things claiming to be “Open,” most often the accessibility tenant is what is being implied.

But what about freedom?

This is too often ignored, as it represents a threat to the proprietary way of building and selling software. Companies would rather build a walled garden with small holes in it that you can barely get a glimpse through, as anything more jeopardizes their lock on their customers. And as a customer this hurts even more, as you are stuck in that garden with few to no options for getting out. It takes the control away from you and gives it to the software vendor. It takes the ability to have the application fit your business needs away, making you fit your square peg processes in the round holes they provide.

So when you are shopping for “Open,” make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. Make sure that includes both accessibility and freedom. Accept no substitute.

With more and more security being set up on mail servers across the globe by both Internet Service Providers and company IT departments, it is becoming all too easy to fall foul of the SPAM/JUNK filter, resulting in your mail being quarantined, marked as junk or, worse still, deleted before it’s even made it through to the mail server itself!

In order to help you avoid some of the commonest pitfalls in an effort to increase your hit rate to your targets I have created this “Top 5″ list.

1. Don’t sound like a spammer from the start.
Normally, email filters examine the words in the email “subject line”. This is the header that you see when an email shows up in your email box. A good subject line can encourage people to actually click on and open an email, but you need to exercise care when creating your subject headings to prevent filtering.

Frequently, more sophisticated anti-spam methods used by Internet Service Providers use a “points system” that identifies trigger phrases commonly used by Spam. If an email goes over the “points limit” it is filtered out and is never delivered to a customer.

Some of the more commonly used phrases that Service Providers and mail clients filter out include:

Free!
50% off!
Click Here.
Call now!
Subscribe.
Earn $.
Discount!
Eliminate Debt.
Double your income.
You’re a Winner!
Reverses Aging.
“Hidden”.
Information you requested.
“Stop” or “Stops”.
Lose Weight.
Multi level Marketing.
Million Dollars.
Opportunity.
Compare.
Removes.
Collect.
Amazing.
Cash Bonus.
Promise You.
Credit.
Loans.
Satisfaction Guaranteed.
Serious Cash.
Search Engine Listings.

There are other problematic phrases that can trigger some Spam filters, or start adding “Spam points” to emails sent out, which should be avoided. These include:

Act Now!
All New.
All Natural.
Avoid Bankruptcy.
As Seen On…
Buy Direct.
Casino.
Cash.
Consolidate Your Debt.
Special Promotion.
Easy Terms.
Get Paid.
Guarantee, Guaranteed.
Great offer.
Give it away, Giving it away.
Join millions.
Meet Singles.
MLM.
No cost, No fees.
Offer.
One time.
Online pharmacy.
Online marketing.
Order Now.
Please Read.
Don’t Delete.
Save up to.
Time limited.
Unsecured debt or credit.
Vacation.
Viagra.
Visit our web site.
While Supplies last.
Why pay more?
Winner.
Work at home.
You’ve been selected.

Using quotation marks, dollar signs and exclamation points in subject lines will frequently trigger mail filters, as well as using all capital letters (shouting).

2. Addressing.
Make sure you use valid ‘From’ and ‘Reply-to’ addresses. Clearly identifying the sender is one way to convince the filter you are legitimate. Using a generic address is also one sure fire way to get added manually to recipient’s spam lists. If you’re sending them information you think they want, then be upfront about who you are and make that connection count. Research shows that most users judge the legitimacy of an email by the sender’s name and email address.

3. Calm it down
Using multiple exclamation marks or capitals (SHOUTING) to get your point across is certainly going to annoy the reader. Assuming it didn’t get caught in the spam filter already, that is.

4. Link the Link.
It is quite possible that you created a tracker URL to see when people clicked through to your company’s website. However, there is a mistake which many people (myself included) get caught out by – linking the link. Put simply, this is when you’ve created a tracker to go to your company website (http://www.sugaruk.co.uk) and have used the same address as the hyperlink text within the email “visit our website – http://www.sugaruk.co.uk”. It’s something we’ve all done. We want the person to see our website address in the email, as it will then get magically lodged in their brain and they will think of it all the time.

However, because the tracker in Sugar is replaced with a unique URL in the code of the email to allow Sugar to track WHO clicked on that mail, some mail clients see it as spam because the address being referenced is not exactly the same as the address being displayed in the email.

So how do you get around it? Simple. Use something like “Visit our website” as the hyperlink text instead of the address. Sure, keep the address visible in the body of the email if you really want to, but link from some standard text not a different URL. That way, you can be sure your mail won’t get filtered for linking the link.

5. White lists.
Get your prospects to add your address to their “White list” (a list stored within their email program to say which email addresses they trust not to spam them). This can be as simple as putting a link at the footer of your email called something like, wait for it… “Add my address to your safe senders list” which can send them to a page on your website or blog explaining how to add an email address to their white list in common mail clients (Outlook, Googlemail, Hotmail, AOL etc.). That way, you know that even if their mail server has passed it through, it’s not going to get caught by the spam filter on their personal machine.

This tip was originally posted on the SugarUK Blogs where you can find a whole host of other useful SugarCRM tips.

Simply click on “Add Sugar Dashlets” at the top right of your home screen and click on the Web tab.

Enter the URL of the RSS/Blog feed (e.g. www.sugaruk.co.uk/blog/feed) into the News Feed box and click “Add“. It will now appear on your homepage for you to drag to where you want.

You can also add webpages/sites to your homepages too by using the Website box.

Not only this, but you can also change the dashlet’s height by hovering on the title bar of the dashlet and clicking on “Edit Dashlet“. You will then see amongst the options, the height option, where you can specify (in pixels) how high you want the dashlet window to be, in order to show more or less information in the initial view. In version 6.2 a new feature has also been added allowing you to auto-refresh individual dashlets at set intervals to save you having to keep refreshing the entire screen in order to keep up to date with your blogs etc.

This tip was originally posted on the SugarUK Blogs where you can find a whole host of other useful SugarCRM tips.

For example, which word should take precedence?
Merely by its name it would appear that the ‘Customer‘ is the primary focus, probably due to the doctrine that “The Customer is Key”, ‘Management‘ is the end result of how we store the information about the transactions we have with them and the ‘Relationship‘ is how we connect those records to the customer.

However, if we turn the order of the words on its head and think about Managing the Relationship with our Customers we suddenly get a clearer view of how CRM should perhaps be viewed.

We Manage our data (track communications, schedule calls and meetings) in order to form a Relationship with our prospects in the hope they will become Customers.
But CRM is about more than simply being a metaphoric sales pipeline of getting the fish on to the hook and landed into our corporate net.

Once you have the customer, that’s when the hard work should start. Fishermen don’t call the place they put their caught fish a KEEP net for nothing!
Sure, it’s no easy task for the sales team to get the customer on your books in the first place and that is something that should not be underestimated or under valued. But in comparison to the length of the professional relationship your organisation is hopefully going to have with that customer in the long term, it almost mirrors the effort going into the process of convincing someone that they want to go on a date with you, compared with the hard work and years of commitment on both sides to keep the relationship working for more than just that first night.

Relationships of any type are difficult and take effort. Whether it be the one we have with our siginificant other, or with our children and the understanding that that requires, or in the business environment with our customers, we must never lose focus of the fact that we must strive to be the best we can, to help the other party be the best they can, with our support.

In the same way that a teenager keeps a secret diary containing all their dreams, aspirations and events that have happened to them (good or bad) and gets their friends round on a Saturday night to watch films and drink, so a valuable CRM system should allow you not only to keep a record of those crushes (leads), the ones they had dates with (conversions) and the events that led up to them (history log). It should be an ongoing documentary of what you are still doing with them (activities, calls and meetings); a secret diary, if you will, of what business desires (opportunities)you hope to secure with those leads and customers, as well as a way of putting together those invitations in the form of email campaigns.

It’s true that while teenagers develop, with the right input, over time into (one hopes) a valued member of society, so too your CRM system should develop, with the correct data and use, into a priceless part of your organisational procedures and practices.

Did you know you can get SugarCRM to only show you your own items?

It often comes as a surprise to some that there is a very simple solution to this problem.

Follow the instructions below to achieve this.

On the Basic Search bar within each module of SugarCRM you will see a tick box called My Items.

If you put the tick in this box, then the results which appear below from that point on will only be results assigned to your user login. Such a simple thing, but can make such a big difference.

Why not try it now?

This tip was originally posted on the SugarUK Blogs where you can find a whole host of other useful SugarCRM tips.

Example:
Entering ‘mor’ in the search field would give results such as Morgan, Morris and Mortimer
Entering ‘%mor’ would also include Claymore, Humorous and Immoral in the results.

You can even use the wildcard in between words to search for multiple keywords.
Example:
Entering ‘mike%pass%out’ would allow us to search for the record titled “Mike’s Password for Outlook” without needing to know all the title.

This tip was originally posted on the SugarUK Blogs where you can find a whole host of other useful SugarCRM tips.

In our discussion I made an analogy that I wanted to share. We were talking about how SugarCRM has not been all that vocal about our enterprise or general upmarket strategy – but we’ve been killing it in the SMB space for ages. But I think that we are going to make a lot of waves in larger enterprises thanks to Sugar being an amazingly scalable yet cost-effective platform to do…well, just about anything process or data-oriented.

That’s when I made the parallel between the real estate industry in the downturn and how SugarCRM can and will bring major value to enterprises.

For most people buying a $200,000-$350,000 home in 2011, that home was probably as high as $550,000 in 2005 in the height of our collective insanity (AKA the sub-prime mortgage world). That is a great value today and many people love that they can have the American dream without paying an arm and leg. That is the typical SugarCRM value proposition – a strong, logical value over the proprietary alternatives.

But in the enterprise, things are different – in a far more profound manner. Enterprises are like the much more affluent family buying a home valued at $2 million – which would have been $5.2 million in 2005. In comparison, this is a FAR greater value – even with a still seemingly high price tag.

SugarCRM is lucky to be both – the platform is so flexible, scales both up and down, and is intuitive for all users and developers. So, the smaller businesses get a great, ready-to-go solution, while enterprises can take advantage of the extensive platform and build amazing web applications and user/customer experiences to drive loyalty, save $millions and differentiate in their markets.

So, maybe it isn’t the best analogy – but it is worth noting that Sugar is a rare platform in its ability to be so well-suited for the smallest to the largest organizations. Pretty cool.

When I think of where CRM is going, or at least where I think it should be going, I really like that technologies like Riak are out there. The explosion of data, from social media, to email and more generic web activity – which can and should be tracked in a CRM context – causes headaches for most traditional, relational-database CRM models.

Let’s face it, CRM for the B2C set has always been a touchy subject. The data volume for large B2C organizations made for a lot of anonymity along the value chain, and a lot of sales and marketing decisions were made with guesswork or statistical data. Imagine, being able to base your market decisions on real data, analyzed more effectively and faster – oh, and with very little data loss along the chain.

NoSQL databases are an evolutionary step in building frictionless, agile web applications and total web platforms/experiences for large organizations. I am excited about where concepts like Ruby and Riak can take CRM.

Think about it – what would you do if you knew you could collect ANY data around your prospects, customers; emails, web activity, files, activities, web meetings, chats, Tweets etc. – and manage that with no data loss in an intuitive UI which helped you to identify your clear advocates, problem areas and untapped opportunities?

A more fluid approach to CRM could be coming – we are just now seeing the tools that we all might consider de facto standards in a few years. One thing I love is that SugarCRM is built with flexibility and agility in mind, so a Sugar on top of a NoSQL data approach might not be too far off.

Just stupid.

The post implies that open source will not grow in the cloud because enterprises want the tried and true expensive and inflexible nature of the Oracle database.

Wait…what?

While I will not argue that the beauty of the true cloud is that you can port any environment over to it (thus big companies will put their Oracle-driven stacks in the cloud) that is only a small fraction of the what the cloud is about.

This post is a great example of the kind of short-sightedness in some enterprise IT departments that can hold true innovation back. The real value of the cloud is being realized by the smartest companies and the most innovative – building scalable, fluid web properties and flexible, custom applications.

What are these next generation cloud stacks built on? Not Oracle, that’s for sure. The leading cloud environments and highly scalable web properties in the cloud are being built using Ruby, and Riak-based tools.

The relational database will very much be part of the cloud – but Oracle will only be a part of the story. For scalability and flexibility – open source is the only way.

Or, companies can keep using outdated concepts in the cloud and see how long the remain competitive.

Many have probably seen that Salesforce.com has acquired web conferencing tools provider DimDim for $31m. (The rumors of this deal had been percolating since before Dreamforce so for many this was no surprise at all.)

The deal pits Salesforce.com in many ways against some big companies and very popular products – Citrix’s GoToMeeting and Cisco’s Webex, in addition to IBM’s Lotus Live set of offerings. With its recent platform buy in Heroku, and this new move, it is funny to see Salesforce continue to add competitive concerns and look to enter in large markets where it has no clout, rather than look to live above the competition in one market where it already does well. Confident move?  Yes. Smart move?  Well, we’ll just have to wait…

And while the DimDim acquisition clearly places SFDC in competition with the likes of WebEx and GoToMeeting, Salesforce would like to look at this differently. Salesforce instead sees this as a pocket acquisition to bolster its Chatter functionality – a tool it is already basically just giving away to gain some stickiness for its actual paid apps. So, if SFDC does not really see much future for DimDim save for part of what is now a free add-on, then the $31m price was not a huge price to pay to make a cool new collaboration feature a little more robust.

But again, if Chatter is basically free at this point, why buy DimDim? The product was open source under the GPL. Couldn’t SFDC simply create an integration to the free tool and offer up that integration along with a simple installer to add video and screen sharing tools to Chatter?

I think the answer here is two-fold. One, I have not yet seen SFDC do anything that resembles open source. Yes, they have opened up their toolkits and platforms for developers, but everyone does that. There is just not that type of culture alive at SFDC in my opinion. This is a company steeped in the grand history of proprietary software.

The second reason (which is definitely intertwined with the first) is that due to SFDC’s multi-tenant model, adding DimDim-like resources without wholly owning the code would be problematic. As we know, in order for SFDC to really have a tight handle on anything its users touch, it has to run on its monolithic platform. This makes upgrades and other things easy, but does set limitations on how SFDC can go to market with technology it doesn’t own.

It will be interesting to see if the nature of a GPL licensed piece of software sitting inside a huge multi-tenant database has any effect on the way in which Chatter users are empowered to make, own and redistribute changes.

All in all, this is chump change for SFDC, and while it plots them theoretically against big names like Webex, I can’t see Salesforce actually making any huge headway into standalone video conferencing with the DimDim technology (After all, Cisco’s Unified Communications suites are pretty awesome and light years ahead of where a DimDim-powered Chatter tool is today). Most likely, Salesforce.com will only relegate the functionality as a nice add-on to Chatter.