Announcing the latest releases of our Free Open Source Software, the Web Business Suite 10.05 and eBusiness Suite Rental (for hire) Portal 10.05

July 9th, 2010

Randr Inc would like to announce the latest releases of our Free Open Source Software, the Web Business Suite 10.05 and eBusiness Suite Rental (for hire) Portal 10.05.

The Web Business Suite (WBS), is a full function, cross channel, multi-company web ordering portal with an Anonymous User Web Site, Wholesale or on Account Ordering, Salesman and Sales Rep Ordering, CSR and Will Call Ordering, and Affiliate Ordering. It is a mash-up of 5 web applications: Order Portal, Information Portal for Order Portal, Sales Portal, Information Portal for Sales Portal, and Data Migration Portal which gives you round trip sales and marketing functions as well as transaction system integration. Additonally, when WBS is integrated with a transaction system it can provide Customer Self Service.

The eBusiness Suite (EBS) Rental Portal is a Rental (for Hire) web transaction system that handles rental orders, sales orders, work orders and warranty/repair orders. It has scheduling, inventory, and accounting. The EBS Rental Portal is a mash up 5 web applications: the Order Entry Portal, Information Portal for Order Entry Portal, Financial Portal (AP, AR, GL, and PO), Information Portal for Financial Portal, and Data Migration Portal which give you workflow management and information reporting.

With these latest releases Randr addresses some of the concerns of our Open Source Community. We focused these releases to enable users to install the portals as packages in an effective manner. We went looking for suggestions on how to accomplish this objective. Most of the decisions in this respect were influenced by our trip to the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), our trip up to the Google I/O conference, and our participation in the local Linux User Group and other user groups.

We have been using Ubuntu Linux as our preferred Linux distribution for the servers to run our Portal Suites on for years. With the release of Ubuntu 10.04 this year and its adoption into Amazon’s EC2 Cloud and as a major player in the server arena, Randr has moved the development environment of our Portals to Launchpad, Ubuntu’s collaboration and repository for software projects. The source code, bugs, and new feature requests (Blueprints) are now all being tracked through Launchpad. Randr also became a Ubuntu Software Partner. We will continue to make our software available for download on SourceForge as individual Portals. If you would like to get more involved in the Launchpad development process (feed back to make the software more useful to your business is more than enough) please join the Randr Team on Launchpad and sign up for our development mailing list. For those of you not familiar with Launchpad, anyone who signs up to be part of the community can add design requests and bugs without having to go through us. All the requests are prioritized for the next release by the Randr Team. You can review all the bugs and blue prints without having to sign up as a member.

As part of the move to Launchpad, the WBS and EBS Rental Portal now have Personal Package Archives (PPA). This means that on an Ubuntu system you can install the WBS, EBS Rental Portal, and all the required middle-ware (Tomcat, Apache, PostgreSQL, and the Java JDK) with a few simple commands. So far we are seeing up to 75% of the time reduced to get up and running on the software. We have the updated install instructions using the PPA on our support forum.

Most of the code changes in these releases are centered around stabilizing the portals, so they will run “out of the box”. This includes the integration between the portals in each suite as well as integration between both the WBS and the EBS Rental Portal. For a detail list of all the updates in these releases please visit www.randrinc.com and scroll down to the release notes on the left menu.

Starting with these releases Randr will switch to a more regular release cycle of twice a year conforming to the Ubuntu release cycle. The first release around May and the second around November. The release numbering has now been change to [Year].[Month], for example these releases are numbered 10.05 for May 2010, again conforming to the Ubuntu release numbering.

Randr has also been deploying the WBS and EBS Rental Portal on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud. No changes are needed to the software. We will make our Cloud Sand Box available to the community in the next couple of weeks. There are a few “gotchas” on the server side, but this looks like it will be the deployment option of choice.

Our focus for the next releases of the WBS and EBS Rental Portal will be the usefulness of the software to businesses. Our goal is to rid the software of a “1000 paper cuts”. We will also be integrating in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Google’s Visualization (we’ve added some Visualization already in this release in the Sales Portal Information Portal), and refactoring for mobile devices using Google’s mobile development tools. We welcome any feed back from you to help make the software better for your business or technical insights to improve the software.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at any time.

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Posted in Community Building, Open Source, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Christmas came early…The ‘Droid phones arrived on Saturday

April 29th, 2010

We will be going up to the Google I/O conference in May and one of the key topics we and many others were interested in was mobile computing. So, in anticipation, Google sent the attendees an Android phone to develop and test with prior to the conference.

Besides the superior marketing effort and the obscenely good packaging…one free month with Verizon came with the phones so you were up and running immediately, the power of the phones which are really mobile devices and the application suites were stunning. Better than a very nice job.

We were able to test all of our applications including custom installations within hours. All our applications worked albeit some were clumsy and will need some clean up, but because we only write true Web Applications our conversion to mobile devices was done for us….all we will have to do is move ahead.

Our Midrange Customers and ourselves have played with mobile applications over the last 5 years or so…but other than a few inquiries in Sales Force Automation and Customer Self Service they really have not taken off…quite different from the hipster crowd with iPhones or the corporate refugee Blackberry crowd. There was one mobile device here or there more on an individual basis than as a pervasive technology. Collaboration is seldom used because companies reduced staff so much over the last few years that there is less and less to coordinate.

The Android phone will change all of this for Small and Medium Businesses. The hand held mobile device and Pads have come of age. They are just too good.

The hard take away we have learned for Small and Medium businesses is that even though we may not be an internet based business or use a particular technology when new standards of performance or functionality break through and change the landscape, they set new standards and expectations we must adjust to…..The Android phone is such an occurrence, they will change the landscape, set new standards and expectations for everyone including Small and Medium businesses and their owners.

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Great Example of Manufacturer Direct Organic and Web 2.0 Marketing

April 28th, 2010

What started as an observation on a life style and a discussion, prompted a Google Search, and a reference book (Sunset’s Western Garden Book) input followed by a couple of search results to a preferred vendor to additional input from the vendor, back to a Google Search, to a video, back to the product developer, back to manufacturer, back to our preferred vendor with us making a commitment to wait for their products and buy a lot more than we already were….

One of our members, though not a health nut, tries to eat a healthy diet, and always has a blueberry smoothie in the late morning. We were kind of joking around that we ought to plant a blueberry patch for him. But, we thought blueberries didn’t grow in Southern California. A quick check of the Sunset Garden Book corrected us by noting there were numerous blueberries from the South which would do well in Southern California. So, we checked our favorite supplier, Bay Laurel Nursery, to see if they had any in stock. A quick check of their site showed that they carried all of the varieties we were looking for….but they were out for the season. We continued a few more clicks on their site looking at other low chill varieties for next year and stumbled upon a fun looking page that had all kinds of fruit crosses we would be interested in….Plumcots, Apriums, etc. and then there was an unknown reference to: Zaiger Hybrids.

We had no idea what this meant but a reference from Bay Laurel was good enough to warrant the time to check it out. We did a Google search and this led us to a page which had a number of entries from Dave Wilson Growers with a YouTube video that was a visit to the Zaiger Farm. It was an unassuming video that spoke directly to their intended audience very effectively. What we didn’t know was that Zaiger developed many of the hybrids we were interested in….and the Dave Wilson growers was the major producer of the Zaiger products and many others. We then went to the Dave Wilson site to see if we could buy direct only to find out they were purely wholesale and listed Bay Laurel as one of their outlets. So, we went out to our Urban Orchard (backyard) and checked the trees we have been so happy with from Bay Laurel and they all had Dave Wilson tags on them. We had never noticed them, so the circle was now closed (or, so we thought).

Riverside Public Utilities has had a program for years where they will subsidize trees for planting in the yards around homes. This makes a lot of sense because especially the West facing walls just cook in the late summer and early fall and a canopy really reduces the heat and therefore the AC usage. You can only get your trees from local Riverside nurseries and thinking we would only get generic trees we weren’t overly interested even though we are in the market for at least another 20 fruit trees. However, when we checked at some of the local nurseries and their websites, there in plain view were notices that they had Dave Wilson stock, so another channel became available to us.

The take away for small businesses is that Web 2.0 is earned and is not assumed or viral for most small businesses but it can be contagious in small niche markets out on the Long Tail. Bay Laurel’s reputation sent us to Zaiger which based on their quality and innovation of their products sent us to Dave Wilson whose products were the best we had ever used which sent us back to Bay Laurel confirming the great reputation they already had with us. Bay Laurel will get our business for many years to come.

The throw in of the local nurseries was just a piggy back on the other businesses. If we buy from them (which we have not done for years), they will never know why they got the business. It will be because of Web 2.0 referrals for some of their products out on the Internet. A classic case of cross channel fulfillment.

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Posted in Web 2.0 | 6 Comments »

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