Web CMS vs Windows CMS (Contact Management System)

[Tim Schwallie]

Is this a contact management system or a content management system? In either case, a web based approach works fine if done well.

[MarkB777]

sorry, its a contact management system.

Mark Brock "We're definitely not going to make a G or a PG version of this. It's not PillowfightCraft." -- Chris Metzen Click here to view my blog

[Ennis Ray Lynch Jr]

When many developers simply shut down at the thought of developing windows forms based applications. They are easier, more efficient, and eliminate many problems. I think the real problem may be that 100% of the logic is hard-wired into code behind pages with no thought towards maintainability. Adding a windows forms component would require them to *gasp* refactor and use actual software engineering principles.

Need software developed? Offering C# development all over the United States, ERL GLOBAL, Inc is the only call you will have to make.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway
Most of this sig is for Google, not ego.

[Todd Smith]

We spent 19 months on a dead end ERP system and finally got wise enough to ditch it and find a proper replacment. It's not to late for you!

Todd Smith

[MarkB777]

Heh, its not my call unfortunately. I think i'll just sit quietly and let them come crying back to me when the adminstrators realise they can't do their job with the software that we've been provided with.

Mark Brock "We're definitely not going to make a G or a PG version of this. It's not PillowfightCraft." -- Chris Metzen Click here to view my blog

[Lost User]

You see it everywhere... the bigger the company - the more likely you'll be dealing with browser based apps. There are many advantages as far as distribution and maintenance, however - there are many advantages to client side apps. Somedays I wonder if we're not all headed right back to the mainframe era....

[Steve Echols]

The least they could do is encapsulate a lot of the logic and put it in dlls (er...um...assemblies, whatever we're calling them these days), that can be used by both win/web-forms.

---

- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on! A post a day, keeps the white coats away!

[Tim Schwallie]

ahhh. Probably run into screens that need to present lots of data in a table format. May be some dragging and dropping too. Perhaps a need to mark or do something like filtering and sorting and who knows what else. Been there, done that, still doing it...in ASP.NET. Just got to know what your doing.

[siena]

Hi, I did a contact management system about 12 months ago and did exactly what you describe. The users access the system via the web and the administrators access the system via a Windows Forms program which uses a web service. The Windows Forms program was written precisely for the reasons you allude to. It made administration a piece of cake and the time savings for the administrators were significant. They previously did it via the website but complained about the work and time involved. Note that the system also included a simple document management system as well with files being able to be managed (uploaded/downloaded) via the Forms program. I would suggest that the only problems are that it has the normal Windows Forms program issues attached (i.e. deployment and updating) and taking this approach involves two different (although related) systems to support. As somebody else who responded to your query pointed out, a lot of the work for the Windows Forms program is already done by the time you finish the website. Hope this helps. Rob

[reshi999]

I have developed several CRMs over the years and used to prefer coding them as windows form applications, far easier to get round the program model etc. However with the recent surge in development with AJAX tools (particularly since I started using the Telerik suite and DotNetNuke framework) - I have found web based complex apps far easier to code and there are little or no deployment issues. There are still a few things you can't do easily in a web page, but once you establish a communication framework between server and client without full postbacks its pretty straight forward. I share your pain though, sometimes managers lose sight of how an application will work in favour of the latest trends - Its always a bad experience for the developer because it seems that suddenly your experience is disregarded in favour of a magazine article that the aforementioned manager read the day before.

[zchira]

Company (where I am workking) works on CRM software that is java desktop application, but it communicates with centralized dataBase via webServices. Sistem is designed that it not depends on database structure and it can be configured to work with any data source... We think that is good way for CRM software. Here http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2008fall/147304.html you can see the presentation of this software :-)

[Brad Stiles]

Rene Pilon wrote:

Somedays I wonder if we're not all headed right back to the mainframe era

Does the way the web works not remind anyone else of CICS? Sure, it's not an exact match, but it's pretty darn close, in concept.

[Thelly]

Brad Stiles wrote:

Does the way the web works not remind anyone else of CICS? Sure, it's not an exact match, but it's pretty darn close, in concept.

I thought of it the other way around (being one of those "damn kids" who used to think punch cards went away when they did away with, err, punch cards... who knew they were alive and well under the guise of "JCL") but yes... I have been noticing a lot of similarities between when I was writing web apps and the mainframe systems I've been doing integration work with. The scary thing is, I've found I quite like the way a lot of things are handled by CICS (especially since you don't have to worry about such web-related things as "images" and such)... pity the mainframe world has been pricing itself into oblivion. On-topic: "Web better, thick client BAD!" makes me wonder about the quality of system you're buying... while you can make some very good systems to administer something like your CMS on the web I'm not sure you'll get that from developers who take a sledgehammer to a differing opinion rather than provide a counterargument stating why they feel their web administration utilities will be better than a client utility. Make sure they do some good use-cases with whoever will have to administer the system...

[STEBIN]

Brad, I agree with you that there are a number of functional similiarities between CICS and the web. Psuedo-conversational processing, as with CICS, is essentially how a web process works. Buffers, web state, transactions, sessions; call it what you will but in my 2 :-O 7 years of experience with computers the more things change the more things stay the same. Steve

[peterchen]

MarkBrock wrote:

In a meeting with them I suggested that the user side of the system could be kept web based, but the adminstrator side should be a Windows application.

I'd love to see a good CMS that builds on that principle.

Burning Chrome ^ | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighist

[kjmcsd]

siena wrote:

I did a contact management system about 12 months ago and did exactly what you describe. The users access the system via the web and the administrators access the system via a Windows Forms program which uses a web service.

Now this is the way to go! We currently have a Windows Forms CMS that is a bunch of crap! It was developed before I got here. It has an annoying limitation, that is currently giving us problems, that you have to VPN into the network to get updates! Sometimes you can get caught up in the web hype and it will mess up your design. Windows apps are still useful. Microsoft seems to be investing alot of time and money into it these days with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)

[kjmcsd]

Siena, How did you all handle offline mode? The way you described limits them to only being able use the CMS piece while online. Unless the Windows Form program also had the same functionality as the web app.

[siena]

kjmcsd, What you say is true. In the particular case described, web access was always available so it wasn't an issue. I used a dataset for the Windows Forms program which obtained the data on startup. After that all data access to/from the web service was done asynchronously in the background and the system works with nearly the performance of a local desktop database. If the system had required an off-line mode I would have worked it slightly differently for the Windows Forms program and used a locally cached version of the database (SQL Server Express in my case), similar to the way Mobile apps work when disconnected. Synchronisation of the data with the main program would have been done when connectivity was available again. Of course, this introduces its own set of issues. Rob

[Tim Schwallie]

perhaps http://www.freecrm.com/overview.html[^] can offer some ideas for the developing company and you folks. Also note, cms vs crm that can help in looking for comparable products.

[Joel Palmer 0]

In my last position, I wrote a data entry system to handle the processing of 90+ million rebates a year. There is no way I'd write a high volume data capture system using web technology. Yes, even if the system must be highly distributed. We had 4000+ users who were based in argentina, india, mexico and the US. We used Microsoft's ClickOnce technology and found it reliable enough to meet our needs . There are other ClickOnce-ish technologies out there which, in my opinion, eliminate much of the administrative nightmares client based systems are known for. If you're after effecient data entry, the client needs to be smart. Also, data validation should be as data is entered and should not require a round trip to the server for each entry. If you think validation on a page-basis is a good method then you've never really done data entry ;P . Using a windows form, where all the system's resources can be accessed, all data can be cached locally and the server need only be pinged once the entire batch of data is captured. This design made the system highly scalable. Yes, be careful how you cache the data from the security and disaster perspective. So, in this context, CMS/CRM systems do require some data entry but not at the volume I outlined above. I recommend (depending on the release timing of your project) that the product be developed using Silverlight 2. That way you get the best of both worlds where you can build some smartness into the form, utilize some local resource and still have browser goodness/familiarity.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer