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Posts from the ‘General’ Category

Jan 24

Fun with Unicode

InaPlex has put considerable effort into ensuring that Inaport has full support for Unicode; Inaport is used in most European and many Asian countries, and good character set support is essential for our customers.

We were therefore quite surprised when a customer complained that it was not handling Chinese characters; worse, they had a screen shot demonstrating it:       

Chinese characters not displayed
Chinese characters not displayed

 

The source file is a tab delimited text file with a mixture of European and Chinese characters, all in Unicode. As you can see from the screen shot, there is a problem of some sort with the “City” column.     This lead to head scratching and debugging activity, until finally the penny dropped.      Read more

Jan 16

Cross database queries – or, how to rescue a bad database

Even InaPlex gets it wrong occassionally.

It was late, we were tired, instructions from the client were not clarified properly… and the database was not backed up before a SQL update was issued that created some real problems. The SQL update modified the primary userid of most of the account records in the CRM system.

Of course, the problems were not discovered until the next morning – second last day of the financial year for the client, and the sales people could not see all their accounts in the CRM system because they no longer had appropriate permissions.

The project manager at the client was very polite, but was clearly under substantial pressure to get it fixed.

But the database was live, had been modified, and the most recent backup was a few days old. Rolling back to the backup was out of the question, continuing with the current system was impossible for the sales people.

All in all, not a good situation.

Read more

Sep 5

Regular Expression resources

Anybody who has attended an Inaport demonstration or training course will know that I am a big fan of regular expressions. For those that have not, here are the highlights:

Read more

Aug 26

1 Comment

Inaport versus Scribe Workbench

Normally we would not mention a competitive product, but with the release of Inaport for Dynamics CRM a common question is “why use Inaport instead of Scribe Workbench”.

This is a fair question, because Scribe is probably the incumbent player for import/migration/integration projects with Dynamics CRM.

(I might parenthetically point out that a few years ago Scribe Workbench was the incumbent for Sage SalesLogix; now InaPlex is a Sage Endorsed Development Partner, and Inaport is the only endorsed integration product for SalesLogix.)

One obvious answer to the question is pricing. Inaport starts at $450 for an entry level 30 day license through to $3,495 for the unrestricted Professional Edition; there are no seat count restrictions, and no limit on the number of systems it can be installed on. This makes it very competitive against Scribe Workbench, which is $3,995 (server) + $1,295 (adapter) + $995 (user pack) = $6,285.

However, the British have a saying “penny wise, pound foolish”; the American equivalent is “you get what you pay for”. It would be short sighted to save a few thousand dollars on the software, to later discover that either it cannot get the job done or it adds significant time and complexity to the project. Integration projects are already tough enough without also battling your tools.

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Apr 13

Computing and storage in the cloud

IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article here comparing various “cloud” computing resources, with an emphasis on open source alternatives.

The main names in this space are Amazon, with their “Elastic Compute Cloud“; Google, with their “App Engine“; and Microsoft, with the very recently launched “Azure” platform. Of the three, Amazon looks to me to provide the best balance between completeness of functionality and ease of use. Azure provides access to the full Microsoft technology stack, but doesn’t seem to provide easy monetization mechanisms; Google looks very low friction to get going, but is currently restricted to Python (soon to include Java, but with restricted library support)  and a Google entity based data store.

The IBM article mentions a number of other services, and provides brief overviews and comparisons.

I would be interested to know if CRM users are starting to consider cloud based resources for temporary or permanent storage of extracts from their CRM databases. It might be interesting to add an Amazon or Google driver to Inaport and see if any creative uses emerge…

Regards

David

Apr 10

InaPlex at Sage Insights – Nashville, May 10-14 2009

InaPlex will be exhibiting at Sage Insights in Nashville, May 10-14 2009.

We will be in Booth 527, and look forward to renewing old acquaintances and forming new friendships.

Perhaps most importantly, we will be hosting the CRM “Meet and Greet” session on Monday evening – Govenors’ Ballroom B. Please come along and join us to start the conference in style!

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