Re: CRM on Demand

>So what's the next application?

It's funny you should ask that because my wife and I were just in the car this afternoon and she said "Huz, you should develop a website for Bridges (our Elementary School) that allows me to fill out forms online vs. doing all of this paper forms stuff."
I told her there was already somebody in the K-12 space (you Nathan) that this would be a perfect project for :-) Put the app together, put the ROI marketing together for process automation/cost savings, and you have a great seller of an app for K-12 for the next 5 years. I would make it a SaaS type solution where it is all hosted and all they need to have is an internet connection and pay their annual maint.
I must admit I envy you that you have found a framework you can settle with to develop web apps. I am still searching for a comfortable framework (and I need to find one soon, because I have some work to be done in the first quarter that needs to be browser based on the AS400). Right now I have the following on my radar: Valence, IceBreak, ExtJS-GWT, EGL, PHP.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com


Nathan Andelin wrote:

OK Nathan, I gotta ask ...
why are you still planning on reinventing the wheel?

My wife asked me that, and I fumbled through an answer. I was tempted to ask Richard Schoen the same question.
I guess I'm still in the thinking stage. That's better than dwelling on yet another 5250 client, written in JavaScript, that we were discussing before Christmas. Or yet another 5250 bridge. I'd better leave that to Niels, Aaron, Pete, Zend, the open-source community, IBM, etc. ;-)

To make matters worse, I don't have any marketing plans for a CRM solution. I'm mostly interested in offering better service to customers, and better integration with internal accounting records.

CRM is kind of likely addition to a portal, which I'm very deep into. Every application in a portal shares a common infrastructure (authentication, authorization, availability, access, navigation, utilities, etc.), and there's virtually no limit to the number or type of applications that one can deploy under a portal context. I think there's a practical limit to the number of applications one can deploy under Outlook, in contrast.

I'm now in the mode of cranking out new applications, as opposed to working on frameworks. So what's the next application?

Nathan.