What is a good language and database to build a small size vendor CRM?
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0 down vote favorite I am current in an Asian city and the retail business here are getting better and better, as a in house programmer with years of experience, I am thinking to start a CRM business. My goal is to have a small size very easy customize for myself as a vendor to sell my crm to small to middle size customers, then help them to customize it. Very likely they will ask for modify the flow of my default crm, add report and business analysis. How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution. Would php is good solution? Asp.net can easily work with crystal report which can easily generate report, can I do the same with php + mysql? Java is good for big scale of project with very complicate structue, seem like not a good idea for my case. Since I will base on my small crm company to live, so it will be a close source but not open source kind, while seem like it is not easy to keep php code secret if I need to install the source in customer computer. Most of the people run windows in this city, so the database has to be installed in windows, I think most of the customers who is looking for an affordable solution would just install in their windows computer. Well desktop PC is so cheap now so it is hard to say. Linux would be a much more stable environment then can prevent customers to call it and have good reputation for long run. Please share your thought. My years of in house programming support weren't a very good experience since IT industry is not a good industry as a career in general over here. I hope I can use my skill and have a company to focus on what I like to do and make a living out of it. My current company always force all staff to do horrible crazy long hours sales tasks which are totally not related to IT but good for company's profit.
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0 down vote favorite I am current in an Asian city and the retail business here are getting better and better, as a in house programmer with years of experience, I am thinking to start a CRM business. My goal is to have a small size very easy customize for myself as a vendor to sell my crm to small to middle size customers, then help them to customize it. Very likely they will ask for modify the flow of my default crm, add report and business analysis. How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution. Would php is good solution? Asp.net can easily work with crystal report which can easily generate report, can I do the same with php + mysql? Java is good for big scale of project with very complicate structue, seem like not a good idea for my case. Since I will base on my small crm company to live, so it will be a close source but not open source kind, while seem like it is not easy to keep php code secret if I need to install the source in customer computer. Most of the people run windows in this city, so the database has to be installed in windows, I think most of the customers who is looking for an affordable solution would just install in their windows computer. Well desktop PC is so cheap now so it is hard to say. Linux would be a much more stable environment then can prevent customers to call it and have good reputation for long run. Please share your thought. My years of in house programming support weren't a very good experience since IT industry is not a good industry as a career in general over here. I hope I can use my skill and have a company to focus on what I like to do and make a living out of it. My current company always force all staff to do horrible crazy long hours sales tasks which are totally not related to IT but good for company's profit.
A trade secret in my part of the world for low-cost systems (such as you envision): Comma-delimited PigLatin^ Do Asian languages have commas ?
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0 down vote favorite I am current in an Asian city and the retail business here are getting better and better, as a in house programmer with years of experience, I am thinking to start a CRM business. My goal is to have a small size very easy customize for myself as a vendor to sell my crm to small to middle size customers, then help them to customize it. Very likely they will ask for modify the flow of my default crm, add report and business analysis. How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution. Would php is good solution? Asp.net can easily work with crystal report which can easily generate report, can I do the same with php + mysql? Java is good for big scale of project with very complicate structue, seem like not a good idea for my case. Since I will base on my small crm company to live, so it will be a close source but not open source kind, while seem like it is not easy to keep php code secret if I need to install the source in customer computer. Most of the people run windows in this city, so the database has to be installed in windows, I think most of the customers who is looking for an affordable solution would just install in their windows computer. Well desktop PC is so cheap now so it is hard to say. Linux would be a much more stable environment then can prevent customers to call it and have good reputation for long run. Please share your thought. My years of in house programming support weren't a very good experience since IT industry is not a good industry as a career in general over here. I hope I can use my skill and have a company to focus on what I like to do and make a living out of it. My current company always force all staff to do horrible crazy long hours sales tasks which are totally not related to IT but good for company's profit.
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Why would you ask them to install anything? You can host the whole thing and provide it as a service.
I assume you mean just providing the service with internet and have them access my web program through browser and even let their whole database store in my company server. More than 50% of the small/middle size companies may not have internet access for every user in the company, especially the retail with a shop kind. It will affect the speed a lot too if everything need to load from internet, it would be kind of not acceptable for retail kind business requires immediately input and everything. So have their own database and program in their local server seem like the most "boss acceptable and happy" solution. I can just sell the server too.
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I assume you mean just providing the service with internet and have them access my web program through browser and even let their whole database store in my company server. More than 50% of the small/middle size companies may not have internet access for every user in the company, especially the retail with a shop kind. It will affect the speed a lot too if everything need to load from internet, it would be kind of not acceptable for retail kind business requires immediately input and everything. So have their own database and program in their local server seem like the most "boss acceptable and happy" solution. I can just sell the server too.
Not sure what you are exactly trying to do, but if you want to sell web based solutions (you mentioned PHP, APS.NET database servers), your clients will have to have a functioning network, Internet access must be the simpliest part of it. Otherwise for micro applications one store, one computer, you may just use MS Access.
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0 down vote favorite I am current in an Asian city and the retail business here are getting better and better, as a in house programmer with years of experience, I am thinking to start a CRM business. My goal is to have a small size very easy customize for myself as a vendor to sell my crm to small to middle size customers, then help them to customize it. Very likely they will ask for modify the flow of my default crm, add report and business analysis. How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution. Would php is good solution? Asp.net can easily work with crystal report which can easily generate report, can I do the same with php + mysql? Java is good for big scale of project with very complicate structue, seem like not a good idea for my case. Since I will base on my small crm company to live, so it will be a close source but not open source kind, while seem like it is not easy to keep php code secret if I need to install the source in customer computer. Most of the people run windows in this city, so the database has to be installed in windows, I think most of the customers who is looking for an affordable solution would just install in their windows computer. Well desktop PC is so cheap now so it is hard to say. Linux would be a much more stable environment then can prevent customers to call it and have good reputation for long run. Please share your thought. My years of in house programming support weren't a very good experience since IT industry is not a good industry as a career in general over here. I hope I can use my skill and have a company to focus on what I like to do and make a living out of it. My current company always force all staff to do horrible crazy long hours sales tasks which are totally not related to IT but good for company's profit.
crunchor wrote:
How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution.
You could use Mono/MySQL; it runs ASP.NET nicely, although you'd have to keep in mind that you're not running under Windows. OTOH, if you need a CRM, why create a new one from scratch?
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] They hate us for our freedom![^]
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Not sure what you are exactly trying to do, but if you want to sell web based solutions (you mentioned PHP, APS.NET database servers), your clients will have to have a functioning network, Internet access must be the simpliest part of it. Otherwise for micro applications one store, one computer, you may just use MS Access.
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crunchor wrote:
How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution.
You could use Mono/MySQL; it runs ASP.NET nicely, although you'd have to keep in mind that you're not running under Windows. OTOH, if you need a CRM, why create a new one from scratch?
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] They hate us for our freedom![^]
Thanks for talking about Mono and seem like it is very useful. How is that and can I use the Microsoft user friendly virtual studio with it or it has similar function? I need to create my own CRM instead of open source because my own one can be totally customized to anyway I want base on customer need. My simple plan now is just creating a very basic one and ready to customize then base on specific customer to customize it. In long run then I can use whatever I did for customers to make lives easier and have more customers. Another reason is open source is like aline thing in my city, so no one would believe that or even try to use it in normal people point of view. So having my own and sell it would make more business sense in this culture and what they get used to. USA is very high tech and people get used to open source, but not like an Asian city like mine.
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0 down vote favorite I am current in an Asian city and the retail business here are getting better and better, as a in house programmer with years of experience, I am thinking to start a CRM business. My goal is to have a small size very easy customize for myself as a vendor to sell my crm to small to middle size customers, then help them to customize it. Very likely they will ask for modify the flow of my default crm, add report and business analysis. How about asp.net? But with asp.net then I would need to ask customer to install MS server which is not cheap and that is against my goal to provide very affordable solution. Would php is good solution? Asp.net can easily work with crystal report which can easily generate report, can I do the same with php + mysql? Java is good for big scale of project with very complicate structue, seem like not a good idea for my case. Since I will base on my small crm company to live, so it will be a close source but not open source kind, while seem like it is not easy to keep php code secret if I need to install the source in customer computer. Most of the people run windows in this city, so the database has to be installed in windows, I think most of the customers who is looking for an affordable solution would just install in their windows computer. Well desktop PC is so cheap now so it is hard to say. Linux would be a much more stable environment then can prevent customers to call it and have good reputation for long run. Please share your thought. My years of in house programming support weren't a very good experience since IT industry is not a good industry as a career in general over here. I hope I can use my skill and have a company to focus on what I like to do and make a living out of it. My current company always force all staff to do horrible crazy long hours sales tasks which are totally not related to IT but good for company's profit.
If you're looking for small, low footprint and easy to code, look beyond the usual relational Access/mySQL/SQLite/SQL server express etc. There are actually better business products out there that just don't get the same air time. I'd recommend looking into an MVDBMS - there are a whole load out there, the most popular being UniVerse, OpenQM and OpenInsight. They all have a 3-D data model that more easily reflects real life (e.g. a sales order is a sales order, not a mix of parent-child relations) and built-in programming languages inside the database (not just TSQL procedures) that are based around business concepts. And before anyone starts flaming, yes I do use both relational and MVDBMS in my work. Horses for courses.
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If you're looking for small, low footprint and easy to code, look beyond the usual relational Access/mySQL/SQLite/SQL server express etc. There are actually better business products out there that just don't get the same air time. I'd recommend looking into an MVDBMS - there are a whole load out there, the most popular being UniVerse, OpenQM and OpenInsight. They all have a 3-D data model that more easily reflects real life (e.g. a sales order is a sales order, not a mix of parent-child relations) and built-in programming languages inside the database (not just TSQL procedures) that are based around business concepts. And before anyone starts flaming, yes I do use both relational and MVDBMS in my work. Horses for courses.
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My goal is to run my own CRM vendor company, so using MVDBMS is a good idea? I actually google it but cannot find a clear definition of it. I can just see it is more like an open source mult database program.
Just go and get a distributor contract with some of the established products. Maybe you can translate a little bit into your language. Googling products and asking on message boards will not get you anywhere. It is not something you can just produce in a sweatshop for 10c a day.
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Just go and get a distributor contract with some of the established products. Maybe you can translate a little bit into your language. Googling products and asking on message boards will not get you anywhere. It is not something you can just produce in a sweatshop for 10c a day.
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Thanks for talking about Mono and seem like it is very useful. How is that and can I use the Microsoft user friendly virtual studio with it or it has similar function? I need to create my own CRM instead of open source because my own one can be totally customized to anyway I want base on customer need. My simple plan now is just creating a very basic one and ready to customize then base on specific customer to customize it. In long run then I can use whatever I did for customers to make lives easier and have more customers. Another reason is open source is like aline thing in my city, so no one would believe that or even try to use it in normal people point of view. So having my own and sell it would make more business sense in this culture and what they get used to. USA is very high tech and people get used to open source, but not like an Asian city like mine.
crunchor wrote:
How is that and can I use the Microsoft user friendly virtual studio with it or it has similar function?
You could, but that's "not done". One develops on the platform that's being targeted. Otherwise you'll build something wonderful on your machine, only to get a lot of errors when you migrate to the Linux-environment. If you want to target Linux, it'd be best to program under Linux. That way you'll see any problem immediately. Mono implements most of the Framework, but it does not implement all functionality of Windows. Any WinAPI call would fail.
crunchor wrote:
Another reason is open source is like aline thing in my city, so no one would believe that or even try to use it in normal people point of view. So having my own and sell it would make more business sense in this culture and what they get used to.
You might want to point out that the internet is running on open-source software.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^] They hate us for our freedom![^]