Driving in Brazil is a bit different than driving in America. It is perhaps hard to understand these differences until you have experienced them but I will try to convey a few of the differences and then make some unique comparison with how it is similar to Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress portal development project.

While they have many of the same laws for driving, in Brazil, they are not as strictwith enforcing these laws so driving is a bit like the wild wild west. Every one seems to be beyond impatient and they are pushing to pass everyone and often "get nowhere fast vs. someplace slowly". There is an unofficial imaginary lane for passing where you are just expected to get out of the way if a car is passing and coming at you head on (Big Trucks included and there are many). Not a place where you can win "The game of Chicken". The biggest violators are motorcycles since they seem to dominate this 3rd lane even on the curviest roads with the busies traffic and inhibited sight lines for oncoming traffic. Driving a motorcycle though can get you to your destination often in a fraction of the time than with other vehicles. Though there are many accidents most folks drive bumper to bumper and fearless to the consequences. The first time I road as a passenger in Brazil I never let go of the upper right handle and I felt incline to say a sincere prayer prior to getting in to any vehicle. My 7 year old son has two words for driving in Brazil; "impatient and maniacs".

In the world of web development I see several similar contrasting approaches to developing a web site and the same "maniac and impatience" type of behavior. Most folks are in far to much of a hurry and they too drive their projects fearless to the consequences. I often see folks burn up a lot of time and money going too fast with little thought of the impact or steps involved to make the best decisions. I know everyone else is in just as big of a hurry but making a fatal mistake will leave you frustrated on the roadside as others pass you by. Technology and globalization are moving forward in near chaos as folks are trying to latch on to where they want to be in the world of the web, what lane to travel on and which vehicle to drive.

One of the things I like about the not so recent trend to use content management systems such as Joomla CMS, Drupal or Wordpress is that these sites are dynamic and allow you to respond quickly in real time. Joomla! CMS in particular is very flexible and offers over 6500 extensions. While this is a great opportunity, if you run off like a maniac installing every cool widget and extension you can find this can create a big mess and leave you on the sidelines starting over or cleaning up a lot of garbage. Our Joomla CMS team has many of times been tasked with transforming Frankenstein into sleeping beauty and it is not often an easy or an inexpensive feat once the monster has been created and presented to the public. On the contrary, since this is Open Source code and a global community of developers have contributed so much already, you can build just about anything imaginable with less cost and in shorter development cycles.  Make sure though you think through the features that are most important and research the components you are using for compatibility and usability.

One thing that Joomla CMS and other Content Management Systems do is they allow you to progress  like the unofficial 3rd lane in Brazilian traffic to charge in front of your competitors by getting information presented quickly and dynamically. However, you have to be careful as you scoot through the windy roads and limited visibility so that you do not lose sight of making sure your portal is secure with proper upgrades and support. In other words "wear a helmet and be careful when you try to pass". One fatal mistake is to think you can just "turn on your car and drive without caution." Folks with the most successful Joomla Drupal or Wordpress portals realize that ongoing maintenance is part of the cost of doing business online and they budget monthly for technical or development support and proactive security maintenance.

Building your Content Management System and presenting your content is also still a bit like the wild wild west since doing business online is now global in nature and while the technology allows us to connect and interact with each other the laws and governance are still being sorted out. There are a lot of maniacs called "hackers" that are trying to "Game the system" and disrupt your initiatives. This past year alone hacker activity is reported to have increased over 600%. There are though a growing set of web standards to prevent this and to allow developers to respond to vulnerabilities quicker. One of the most encouraging aspects of working with Content Management Systems in general and particularly in the Open source community is an incredible sense of collaboration and cooperation.

In conclusion, there are a lot of approaches to driving down the road of success and getting the right balance of speed to market with the thoughtfulness of ongoing security and maintenance. If you combined this with careful planning it will get you further down the road with less cost and risk. You need to be aware as standards and technologies evolve so you can protect your online investment and continue moving forward at a reasonable pace and in the right direction. Do not let impatience or some other maniac on this ever changing road of technical chaos dictate how you should respond to the marketplace or present your content. Best in my book to remain calm, aware, responsive, thoughtful and move with cautious aggressiveness.

 

 

 

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CRM Timeline tells how we made it to Social CRM

This past week I was contacted to review a CRM Timeline. This timeline covers many of the high points in the evolution of CRM and is very interesting for a general overview of the evolution of CRM (Know more now as Social CRM) as an industry. One of the recommendations I made was to include the open source movement for CRM that really began with the SugarCRM project. Since projects like Joomla! CMS have help to pave a way for open source and the adoption of Social Technologies for small businesses so too has the branch of SugarCRM called info@hand and it's powerful integration with the Joomla! CMS. This combination is an ideal solution for Social CRM or as we affectionately call it "Social CRBM".

Discovery of the Info@hand CRBM

Our company CNP Integrations jumped on this bandwagon of "CRBM" (Customer Relationship Business Management) early on just as Sugar was gaining momentum and generating buzz in the open source community. After using the Community edition of SugarCRM we found that it just did not have a complete solution so we started exploring other options that were more inclusive. It was then that we found Info@hand CRBM which  has more features useful for business management rather than just salesforce automation and it seemlessly integrated with Joomla! CMS.

Since this new CRM system integrated with Joomla! CMS as a frontend customer portal solution and I was already on my was as an evangelist for this amazing new platform, I quickly grabbed Michael Whitehead's book "Implementing SugarCRM" and a few others including Paul Greenberg's' "CRM at the Speed of Light" and I set out to become "An Expert". Well the journey I found to be quite significant and I will never gain the depth of knowledge a CRM guru like Paul Greenberg has, but I was able to become a power user of the info@hand CRBM platform and found that our experience was worth sharing with other customers to offer extended support as a VAR partner for the info@hand CRBM. Support for Info@hand was a natural addition to our portfolio of services to the Joomla! CMS community since we already had this expertise.

One great integrated platform is a lot to keep track of

Well that was four years ago and though the CRM timeline introduces the birth of SugarCRM they did not include the birth of the Info@hand CRBM solution in this evolution as they rightly should have.  Folks like Paul Greenberg have been keeping track of the massive complexities and ongoing growth and transitions of the overall CRM industry while we have been closely involved in the specific evolution with info@hand CRBM as a VAR partner.  Believe me, I do not know how Paul does it since we have our hands full with just staying on top of one mighty platform and what we believe it is by far the best choice for small b2b and b2c businesses that use Joomla CMS!.

Keeping Pace and Stride with the big players

We have watched a significantly smaller well focused development group at the Long Reach Corporation combined with a dedicated user group and partner network surpass products with big money behind them.  While many of the CRM platforms like Salesforce which have significantly deeper pockets both for   development resources and marketing, the Info@hand CRBM platform has been steadily growing in features functionality and stability to offer a competitive edge for features but significantly lower cost of entry for small to midsized business enterprises. With the gigantic buzz around Social technologies and "Social CRM" Joomla was the perfect marriage for info@hand since Joomla Now has one of the best platforms for building out Social Communities.

Time fly's when you are building any business

This has been a fast passed path and keeping up with the comparisons has been a rather time consuming process we are not always able to keep up on documenting but every time we do we see Info@hand clearly taking strides over their peers.   In our own info@hand timeline, we have seen the evolution of integrations with QuickBooks, Microsoft Outlook, and eCommerce transaction management (Sync with Virtuemart Shopping Cart System for Joomla! CMS) with inventory, shipping, and ERP functionality. Integration with DimDim conferencing and GoogleDocs, Calendars, event, email campaign and subscription management and much more...  Perhaps someday we will have the spare time to gather our own timeline and present it but for now we are just happy this platform delivers such robust features with a fraction of the overhead costs.

"Surf's up"

One day very soon this best kept secret of the Info@hand CRBM with Joomla! CMS is going to catch the right wave in popularity with the big boys and we will see small businesses flocking the call out of "Surf's up for Social CRM"

Drop buy http://www.learningcrm.com or http://www.crbm.net or http://www.joomladesignservices.com to dig into this a bit more.

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Education for corporate training and elsewhere is a big topic these days. Funding cuts in our schools and the high turnover in the workplace combined with the need to tighten our belts and refine business processes are all waking folks up to the value or improved and quality training resources.  It is proven that education in the workplace will improve efficiency and productivity and help your company or remain competitive in a global economy. These key factors are all opening the door for the Joomla Content Management System with Learning Management capabilities.

There are a lot of options for Learning Management but two top contenders in the open source world are Moodle and Joomla with the various 3^rd party Learning Management System (LMS) extensions.  There is even a "bridge" between the two systems that allows you to use both Moodle and Joomla for the same user base. CNP Integrations is one of the early adopters for this bridge on our http://www.givetoed.org  project where we integrated a host of tools for K-12 educators, parents and community leaders to collaborate and engage in conversations about the future of education and related topics.

There are a lot of tried and true systems used for traditional learning institutions and larger organizations but these are often very expensive solutions to implement. Until recently this has made them far out of reach for the small and mid size business or non-profit organization. What we have found is that by leveraging Joomla CMS (http://www.joomla.org) with LMS capabilities or Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) or combinations of both we can help deliver a reasonable scale of features and student tracking capability that puts the power of Learning Management Systems at the fingertips of small and mid-size businesses and non-profit organizations. Not only is this technology platform much more cost effective but all of the curriculum and training resources that we develop can be designed to be SCORM compliant and thus can be integrated with virtually any other SCORM compliant Learning Management System should your needs ever outgrow the platform. However, since the technologies continue to improve and scale with new features you may never need to look elsewhere.

If you are a small business training can help you deliver your products more consistently and position your company to be able to scale up or down to meet the needs in the marketplace and protect you from risk in employee turnover. If you are a School or educational institution it is important to segment your user types and track student progress.  If you are launching complex business tools on the web you need to empower your users to get the most out of your technology investments.  What this means is that utilizing the capabilities of Learning Management can offer benefits to businesses and organizations of many types and range in size. It also means that this may be a wise investment that can have short term and long term payoffs.

Since most of our team has backgrounds in education and training there is a lot of passion in our company for incorporating professional development and training as part of the value in our service offerings. We will be dedicating the Month of September as "Training Month" at CNP and moving forward you will see a lot more from us in training and curriculum development for educational products and services. We hope the articles and information that we present will generate conversation and help us find creative ways to help you engage your customers and better train your workforce using many of the cost effective solutions that we support.

If you would like to have a demonstration or more information of any of the Joomla based learning management solutions or training we can offer, feel free to contact us so we can help you assess if what we offer will fit your needs.

Additional information can be found at: http://www.joomladesignservices.com, http://givetoed.org and http://www.learningcrm.com

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Building a Joomla web site can be a daunting task if you realize all that the Joomla CMS framework is capable of. We have broken this down into seven easy to follow steps that can get you started in the process of achieving superior results with your new portal. We hope this can help ease your mind and provide a simple process and approach.

 

Step One: Defining your business goals.
The first step in this process is to clearly understand what the goals are for investing your time and money into this project. What quantifiable results do you want to achieve with this initiative and who else will be involved in the process of achieving these goals. Very much like starting any new business you want a clear understanding of your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).

Step Two: Defining your Project Plan.
Once you have a clear idea where you are going you need to develop a stratgic plan for getting there. Project plans need to consider where you want to go both short term and long term with this project. It needs to have a focused and phased approach that takes into consideration your available time and resources over time to sustain this project. It needs a timeline and content acquisition checklists that will help you stay on target and on focuse with your priorities.

Step Three: Defining the Look and Feel.
The firs actual development tasks with your Joomla Project are to define your design and choose your template or process of implementing one. There are three key parts of a template you need to consider.
1.    Graphical design elements: Colors and style
2.    Layout options: “Wireframes” or in Joomla terms Module Positions
3.    Features and Functionality: Standards compliance, special modules and capabilities.
It is important to realize that the Joomla template is a foundation for which you will build your site and you need to consider this decision carefully. However, you can easily change templates in the future with often little effort

Step Four: Defining Content and Navigation
Now that you know how you want your Joomla web site to unfold, both from a design perspective and from a roadmap ahead you can start mapping out the intended content and collecting any graphics or generating article copy. Typically you will want to bring every page of content into an offline document that can be edited prior to inserting into your new site. Sometimes if this is a site redesign you can cut and paste from an existing site. If you plan to get the most out of search engine optimization you will want to get targeted keywords generated and pass these on to your authors for consideration in developing the copy.
Now is a good time to think about the Sections and categories for which you will organize your content and how you want your users to navigate with the best possible user experience. It is a good idea to use a mind mapping tool to define your site navigation.

Step Five: Features and Functionality
With a clear understanding of the content you want to present and manage you will have a better idea of the types of Joomla Extensions that you will need to implement this. With over 4000 extensions and the list is growing every day, you may need to make lists of the options, compare the features and review the demos and reviews before installing them on your site. Once you have narrow this down you can then test them on your new site once you get it installed. Sometimes you may find that there are not existing components that provide the features or functionality that you need. This will require creating a development spec that clearly itemizes the features you want to add to an existing extension or for building a custom extension for your site. It is a good idea to get this sorted out early in your development process.

Step Six: Installation and Configuration
Once we have all of our objectives, a defined roadmap, site plan and specific template in hand we can begin the installation and configuration process. Some ISP’s have automated tools for installing Joomla but I prefer to get the latest release directly from the Joomla.org site and to install it manually. Once Joomla is installed we go through a process of configuring this specific for your needs. Installing extensions, installing the template and setting up the parameters. Once you get the baseline of your site configured with all of the components, modules and plug-ins and perhaps a couple place holder content articles and menu items it is a good idea to make a back up copy of this and there are inexpensive extensions that can automatically do this for you.

Step Seven: Populate your Joomla web site with content.
Having a good baseline for your framework in place and backed up prior to beginning to populate content and fine tuning the configurations helps you move quickly and safely through the content population stage in your project. This is the point where we provide training or you would go through tutorials on content management techniques. Once you get this underway most of the outcome is in your hands. With a good support team that is well rounded in both strategy, branding and marketing expertise as well as the technical support and programming expertise you can increase your effectiveness through a collaborative development approach. We highly recommend that you work with a qualified team to guide you through this process. In the end it will give you a much more professional web site, better train your team and give you the technical support to get the very best value out of your investment.

Moving Forward
Joomla CMS is a superior choice for growing a solid business online. There are endless extensible possibilities and freedom to expand this as a platform for success. There are many other steps you can take to optimize your content and leverage more in-depth capabilities of the Joomla framework over time but this should get you an overview of the initial steps for getting started. With a good strategic and tactical plan you can keep your focus. In a world fill with exciting possibilities it is very important not to lose sight of your intended business results. Regardless of your web expertise, choosing a qualified support team to help you build, launch maintain your project will give you the very best return on your time and capital investment.

Be sure to visit our new http://JoomlaDesignServices.com web portal for an example of a site built using this planning process and to find valuable resources for Joomla development.

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Social Media and Social Technologies have many new building blocks and take time to impliment

Keep an eye on these folks to learn the current trends in Social Web Technologies

The social wave just keeps getting bigger every time I look. Today I was building out my profile on Plaxo and found this great Web TV Show http://thesocialweb.tv/ If you are planning to work with a social community for your business then there are 39 and counting episodes that review a lot of the current trends and technologies in social media. These guys are sharp and have a lot of interesting guests and comments in their conversational format.

 

Couple thoughts on how I have positioned our use of social media.

My Social Framework

In addition to managing our 6 corporate portals and contributing to my blog, I currently manage several social network profiles; Facebook for connecting with family and friends, MySpace for my music profile, Plaxo and Linked In for business and professional networking. Then Twitter to communicate with industry pros and a community that connects with my Blog at www.cnpintegrations.com/myblog/ (so far around 20,000 followers). On top of that since we are using Social Media for part of our SEO strategy. We have accounts on Flicker, Digg, Stumbled Upon, Picasa, Delicious and many many others... to connect our messages and inter-link with each other. There are more that I will get involved with over time but this is plenty to keep me/us busy along with getting any real work done or saving time to spend with my family.

Careful with how you spend your time

This is such a time commitment and I see so many folks involved with even more than we are... I do wonder when they sleep. The trick is before you just start signing up that you think out a strategy of how you plan to use these tools to best serve your purpose and that will consider what will your best use of time. I had been advising folks to get active with a blog for years before I actually started posting regular on mine just because I did not have the time to commit to it. I knew the affect it could have on our site traffic but unless you are ready to be consistent then it could waist time since it has to grow over time and you need to continue to contribute content or you lose your readers and when you start up again you have to build a new audience from scratch. Make sure you establish your priorities and stay focused so you can get the best return on your time and talent investment. Each implementation is as unique as the individuals involved in making them happen. There are unique considerations for all of the social technologies that require thought and a keen eye on current trends if you want to implement them successfully or now waste a bunch of time. Remember all we have in this world is our time and once it is spent we cannot get it back.

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