Al Gore's new thinking on the climate crisis | Video on TED.com

Al Gore's new thinking on the climate crisis | Video on TED.com

Miwa Matreyek's glorious visions | Video on TED.com

Miwa Matreyek's glorious visions | Video on TED.com

Idea 1 Contd... Widgets for Business Apps

Finally i was able to get the idea in action and i am very happy to say that after lot of efforts and iterations and technical hitches we were able to come up with some meaningful and visually appealing widgets for MS CRM 4.0. However, these are still very limited in functionality but a good start.

So now we have one for "Top 10 Activities" which shows Subject of the Activity, Type, Due on and Priority. Also a link on the left side which will take you to the MS CRM record and open the form with all the details.

2nd one is for Support people " Top 10 Cases" with Title, Priority,Logged On, Case Number.

Also the widget has the setup which allows you to define the location of the MS CRM server and authentication.

We will be expanding these to be more flexible so that people can choose what they want to see in the widget based on MS CRM entity, predefined queries and what columns etc.. also we will be expanding it to graphical widgets with various types of charts. Also i was thinking why not make these widgets available on mobiles like iPhone or Windows based mobile devices.

You can download this widgets from our website and we have also given the Installer with User manual to guide the people.

http://www.grapecity.com/Services/BusinessSolution/CRMWidgets/widgetHome.aspx

Please send me your valuable thoughts, critical feedbacks and ideas to make this experience better.

I will try to be more regular now ;-)

- Sunny

Innovative Ideas....

I have been thinking for long to start my own blog and finally i did it today ;-)

Lets see how it helps me to share my innovative ideas with everyone and express myself through this medium. I have been impressed earlier by reading other people blogs. especially with the idea of free flow on thoughts in this way.

Innvovative Ideas....

Idea 1 : Widgets/Gadgets for Business Apps :

I have been toying with the idea on how does Widgets or Gadgets (Yahoo , Google and Vista) help users and been pretty impressed by their look and feel, specific usage, pulling information when you need it, not wasting time in searching info on web, easy to install, can be hidden when not needed etc..

Also i was wondering if there are any such widgets which can pull info from CRM or ERP apps and bring it to desktop.Not sure if there any exist but could not find one.(if you have something then please share ) Most of the widgets were focusing on info being pulled from external exposed websites and not from internal apps. Now a days lot of Apps are available on hosted environment and have secured access available. In such scenario how the widgets will perform need to be figured out.

To take this forward i thought :

How we will decide which kind of widgets are required from CRM users ?
I think it would depend upon the profile and needs of the end users. Like sales people will have different requirements from marketing and support people.

What are the parameters which will help decide on the information needed in widgets ?
Is it something which i need to track, which is changing with time, which is actionable information, which will help me take some timely and proactive decisions/ actions, etc...

I would welcome thoughts/ Ideas on this.. Please feel free to share. I am compiling a list of Widgets which will be good for End users of CRM.

I will keep sharing the more of such ideas as they pop up in my mind ;-)

- Sunny