4XLD websites

I’m a bit pissed because in the end it wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it was.

Somehow there were these I-frames on a few of the internal pages to this odmarco site that was distributing malware.

Not sure how I got it… I thought it was the old wordpress installs, that’s what Dreamhost was telling me … but in the end, they were mainly old index files from camtasia files and one php index file that was not WP related.

Anyway … hopefully the malware alerts will stop soon, not sure how long google takes to review these things, but hopefully not to long.

We’re having some server issues around 2AM

hanging midway through the load.

The hosted version of XLsuite now has a template management system that allows you to create a series of templates that will install with each new site.

This is great because it saves huge time setting up new domains and because it makes it easy for designers to set up templates catering to the type of industry that a designer serves.

In other words, if you make a lot of real estate websites, you can set up a selection of sites that when a new client signs up (or you do it for a client) you can have a site up and running in minutes.

Try it yourself – sign up for an XLsuite domain now
Point your browser to any subdomain of your choise

http://yourname.xlsuite.com

We’ve also got a few new screencasts on the wiki, check it out:

Wow this is a neglected corner of our world, the classic cobbler’s children have no shoes situation.

Should I update? If an update is never heard in the web does it really exist?

Here goes, ’cause lots has changed…

We’ve stopped development on smrty for now, not because it’s finished but because we had other things to do.

We’ve done a lot more work on our main project – weputuplights.com mostly because it was the season.

We’ve also decided to open source all of the code for that site and create new open source ERP / CRM solution for the ruby on rails community. It’s called XLsuite and you can download the code now.

We’d welcome any help that the coder community could give us with this project, while it’s not the first group ware / business process project to hit the web, we hope that it brings together the best features of most of them in a new and more relevant way…. plus… it’s RoR based

That’s the update from the CEO and brings us close just in time for the holidays.

Good cheer to all, I look forward to the growth of the new year.
Riel

Man… one thing leads to another, and another….

With some good project’s on the go for outside clients ( rickstonehouse.ca  – for one ) we’ve been lagging behind on the finishing up of smrty.com

Worth checking out as we’ve got a “look” up and happening and you can now sign up for a free account to try it out, but some of the billing issues are still to be worked out.

We’ll keep you posted as things develop and thank you for all your support.

OK… we all get off on the wrong foot sometimes.

While www.iclock.in is a cool domain….  (it’s now for sale if you’re interested)

we’ve decided to go with www.smrty.com

We feel like we’re a bunch of smarties for having come up with this solution and it just keeps getting better evey day.

We now have the domain set up and are using the sysetm internally without any incidents, if you’re interested in a beta account please CONTACT ME and I’ll be happy to give you access.

In working for our clients, we’ve developed a rather handy tool to track issues and time on various aspects of our clients files.  The system also handles billing for us by extracting the time each member spent on the project and applying their rate to that time.

We have refined it over a periode of time and decided that it was worth giving it another polish and making it presentable to the public.

We are currently preparing to release and application with the following features:

• Issue Management. Create new issues for each piece of work you do, detailing what you’re working on as you go along. Follow up with comments, share documents and discuss the issue.

• Time Management. Clock your time as you go, easily switch between different issues and clients, never miss another minute of billable time.

• Billing integration. Move your time sheet into a bill, modify what you need to and send the client your invoice securely. A summary invoice will be prepared and the client can view a detailed breakdown of time simply by logging in..

• Secure Delivery. Securely deliver and track when your client receives your invoice. Email is not a secure way to send an invoice, our system delivers a link with a login challenge so only your client sees your invoice and you know when they opened it.

• Mobile Integration. Use your mobile phone to switch between clients, starting and stoping your timer remotely.

• Client side integration. Open your issue list up to your clients so THEY can view and add issues and comment too, involve your clients in the process, they will love the transparency and it will help you to deliver a better customer experience.

• RSS Streaming. Want your clients or other team members to stay on top of developments? Let them subscribe to your issue manager using RSS, they’ll never miss another comment.

• Tag Based Search. Using TAGS helps you sort and track issues better and more naturally.

We are excited about this new offering as we feel that it meets our WEB2.0 standard of being a functional site that addresses an actual need, we will let you know as soon as it is ready for public consumption.

Emial is a hastle… it builds up and it’s hard to find all the related files when you’re talking to a client.

Our CMS module has a very nice email system that allows you to search for groups in the database (say everyone in the Dallas area) and send a message to them at a specific time.

There reply though, went into outlook, not the system.

Furthermore, if they wanted an email to remain on record, it required them to use the web based emailer that we provided in the system… not the end of the world, but non the less, not their first choice.
So… with that in mind may I present our latest module for the XLcms system.

XL-POP: Email Documenting and Archiving.

Integrated with your companies email, the XLcms system files all correspondence between your clients and employees so there is no more searching through various outlook or other email clients trying to find the history of a client’s communications. All of the emails are automatically entered at the mail server level regardless of what email software your company or employees use.

We do this by having your send through the sites SMTP server (rather than your current ISP’s mail) all in and outbound mail to specified addresses have the email automatically copied to the database and filled under the appropriate clients file.

If a file doesnt’ exist, the database creates a new profile and flags it for completion (fill out more details) on the dashboard of your site.
No need to change email habbits, outlook, thunderbird, opera… whatever… just “set it and forget it” as good old RONCO used to say

The all important client list is just that…. All important.

Here are the benefits that we see to storing that data in an online environment.

• - No more Synching data from one client to another.  With all the data in the same place, no one has to synch anything.
• - Backup Protection, any data center worth their salt will have back up facilities that beat anything you can do from your home or office.
• -  Integration into other work processes.  Having the core client data accessible to other systems encourages integration with other work flows such as Support, Billing and Marketing needs, providing a more inteligent and client centered focus.
• - Left hand knows what the right hand is doing.  Better systems integration allows more people in the supply chain to be aware of clients “status”.  This means more attention to detail and awareness of client needs/wants between departments and devisions.
• - Client Control.  The best part of moving Client data online, is the ability for those clients to maintain that data.  Maintaining Client lists can be someone’s full time job in a mid size organisation.  Empowering the Client to update their own information results in lower costs to maintain client info and more accurate information.

Those are only a few of the reasons that we have moved to modulatize our CRM engine to better integrate it into our clients database solutions.  More on that later

Riel Roussopoulos
Data Evangelist