And the third time I’m importing the same database over and over again. On step 3 of 5 I found some inconsistencies. It looks like we have a lot of contact details with missing data.

The biggest problems is that people don’t want to fill the information. They don’t care about internal structure (well, it’s not their structure, after all, it’s just mine).

So even if you set up some fields as “mandatory” in the forms, people will come with huge XLS-sheets of data to import. Where, of course, there will be no structure and a lot of data missing. You have to implement nazi-style policies in order to keep the information available for analysis

Well, the good thing is that after the migration the data will be clean after all.

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Today I’ve started another migration of company data from one CRM to another. Last time I did it from Goldmine 6.0 to MS CRM 3.0. This time the task is much easier: from CRM 4.0 to CRM 4.0.

List of Things to migrate:

• customisations and special fields
• account data with all account details, notes and contacts (this one is still running while I’m writing this post)
• accounts hierarchy
• all additional and non-account related contacts
• order history

It’s almost always easier to break all the old data to small pieces and combine them into the new structure. At the same moment you can delete garbage and old data and even analyze, which parts of the CRM structure were more useful than another.

After already 3rd generation of the same business model I can see that some of the features of CRM are used by sales people and which aren’t. The most important for them by far are contact details and notes. Sales love notes, it allows them to store information without thinking about business intelligence models. Of course, sometimes they ask questions like “which resellers perform better in 2009, than in 2008″. For such questions you should have all order history stored in a neat structured way. Even if nobody is enjoying it every day.

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The first question after buying a TV was: what exactly am I supposed to watch? I’ve never actually watched any broadcast TV-channels in by life. Of course, I love TV-shows and movies, I just don’t like the channels itself. Too many commercials, not enough choice. I prefer to get the content via the Internet.

This makes the problem  a bit easier : how to transfer different audio/video content from a hard disk of a desktop to a TV?

There is, of course, technology, especially created for that – HTPC – Home Theater Personal Computer. It’s a Wintel-based computer, sitting next to the TV and using the TV as a big monitor. Only HTPC guaranties, that all the movies with different codecs and subtitles could be watched without glitches or delays. But it jas a disadvantage  - you need a separate device.

However, the TV itself and, for example, a game console like Sony PlayStation have a possibility to play audio-video content via DLNA protocol directly from a PC. At least you get this solution for free. You must be able to install the DLNA-server and connect it to your TV. The Media Player on Windows 7 actually could do it, but I was not able to install it properly. Free solutions from Internet were not very stable: they crashed and gave strange error messages.

The solution with PlayStation looks much better. First of all, the software, which can stream video to the game station – PS3 Media Server looks much more stable.  At least I was able to watch an episode of Fringe yesterday. Second , it’s possible to send the 5.1 sound not to the TV-speakers, but to an external 5.1 amplifier. The disadvantage is – you have to use a game controller to watch movies (or buy a special remote control for it).

All the solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. Probably I’ll have to try them all before choosing the best one.

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Today I’ve spend half of the day meeting with a web development company. They use a very nice way to convert from MRD (Marketing Requirements Document, which is basically list of features, which sales and marketing want to have implemented in the product) to TRD (Technical Requirements Document, which is a description of functions, procedures and interfaces of the product, written especially for programmers).

The project manager basically creates a wiki-database with functional description of all the technical features. At the beginning this wikipedia contains only the list, which could be printed and signed by the client. Later, all functions, data structures and interfaces find place in the same database, hyperlinked to each other.

They spend more time on building this wiki, than on actuall coding at the end. Simply Brilliant!

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The situation with domain name registration should follow the same rules, as with the web SSL-certificates. Why should they charge a lot of money for the job, which is actually is just a query to a database. Like, for example,  storing and changing a DNS name. Especially when there is a competition. Prices must inevitably drop.

1. Just yesterday I’ve tried to move a number of domains to our new account byNXS.  They’ve asked €12.50 per domain.
2. Then I found that by Trans-IP you got the same for €4.95 per name.
3. At the end, when I made a free account by Trans-IP, I even got those for €0 (nil, or zero).

That’s the right direction. I think domain registration will simply became free addition to hosting services or something like that.

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The prices of SSL-certificates is going to change. The server certificates will be cheaper, much cheaper. Currently you can spend from $10 (ten) up to $2500  for a certificate. Very interesting question, why such big difference?

Some time ago I worked for a company, which positioned itself on a paranoid academic level of security. The way we viewed certificates came straight from Bruce Schneier “Applied Cryptography”. If you want to secured public-key cryphographical exchange with your bank, you must have a 3rd party, the Certificate Authority, which knows both you and the bank.

This Authority must be very authoritative, obviously. It’s located something above all the banks and the users and provides insurance of the security.  One of the reasons why the websites pay so much for certificates.

Who is this authority nowdays? Actually, it’s Microsoft Internet Explorer (together with his brothers – Firefox, Chrome and others)! When you connect to a bank or to a e-shop, check your SSL-certificate and enjoy reassuring icon of a lock, you trust the CA-certificates, which are currently hard-coded in your Internet Explorer (for the IE actually they’re in the Windows itself, but it’s not important at that moment).

If you want your web-server to be available for secured connections to the whole world, you have to buy a certificate from one of guys in the list. Doesn’t matter actually, who. I’m not saying it’s insecure, it’s basically OK. Bruce Schneier may not like it, but the system works.

Now the funny thing.  The production of actuall certificate cost nothing, it’s just genaration of  numbers and files.  And you see how many Trusted Root Certification Authorities are in the list. There famous “invisible hand” must start to work. The prices should go down, dramatically.

Well, last month I’ve received notices from two different CAs about renewal of my certificates (Thawte and GlobalSign). Both gave discounted offers for ~150 and 200 euro’s. Minimum. If I’d wanted a nice green URL by my e-shop, I’d have to pay more that 1000!  However, on another website http://www.namecheap.com/ I was able to buy the same service for $10.95.  Yes, they started it! One of the “Authorities” (GlobalSign in this case )  has dropped the price. Dramatically.

Now we should just wait, the whole market must follow.

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There are hundreds of books about planning. People want to be mobile and effective. Work more, earn more, die rich! I find it very positive, the opposite would be “Work less, stay sick, die miserably”.

There are also a lot of programs on PC, which help you to get your planning right. I’m not talking at this moment about professional project management tools, but about simple personal planning. Personally I think almost all those programs are useless in itself. You have to know, how to use them. They’re like a 3 meter-long lance. You suppose to learn kung-fu for 20 years, only after that you can defend yourself with a lance.

You have to understand the theory of planning and execution. Actually, the planning itself (on a personal level), could be done very easily on a sheet of paper. You don’t need any computer to help you with that. The real challenge lies in the execution of your plan. How to make sure, that you’ll be following your plan day after day several months for example. It’s much harder, then in looks.

Of course, everything was already discovered before us and books are written on this subject as well. The best one, which describes the correct theory of “execution” is Getting Things Done. The book is written in American motivation style, which I don’t like that much, but it also has some interesting ideas. After understanding why and how you should execute your personal plan, you can (and actually should) use a computer program for that. Please note, in the description of the software there is a clear indication, that it uses GTD (Getting Thins Done) theory.

• My Life Organized - my personal favorite, I use it already 1.5 years. A lot of features. Disadvantages: there is no especial queue for “Waiting for” tasks and no mobile version
• Tudumo – version with a bit less features, but with more modern design. Also, no mobile version at the moment
• Thnigs - very, very nice software, unfortunately only for Apple products – Mac and iPhone

Those all are  ”execution” programs. There are also pure “planning” programs. I’ve tried a lot of them, but I don’t have feeling they’re helping me with anything. Yes, after you make a nice diagram with your current projects or knowledge, you feel much smarter. You can also send it to your boss and get a raise. But it doesn’t help to plan. I prefer to do planning on a paper and then create projects/tasks in My Life Organized. Anyway, if you like to try them, here is a couple of examples:

• The Brain – graphical mind mapping software. I don’t know, may be my brain doesn’t work like this.
• MindManager – something in the middle between personal and corporate planning.
• Freemind - free version of MindManager

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Marketers are telling stories, said Seth Godin. Actually he said, they’re all liars, but in a good way.

They make story in their mind and telling it to the world. The story may or may not be true, it doesn’t really matters.

But sometimes they get carried away in their stories and forget the borders.

I wonder what exactly did they mean? With whom this nice looking guy is going t0 share the customer data? And how much they’ll pay him for it.

It’s from http://www.exact.com/us/en/products/exact-synergy/ (they have a rotation of slogans, so it’s not always there)

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More of my friends are starting with the newest Social Network gizmo – Foursquare.

I like social networking (one of the reason, I’m writing it). Other people don’t like it and their major concern is often – privacy issues. People don’t like to share intimate information (for some reasons).

Yet another people went even further – they believe social network are dangerous. They’re secret databases for  the police, CIA, KGB, you name it. There is something in this point of view, of course. If you have a list of your friends, hobbies, places you like, places you visit, it would be easier to find you when you hide from the law.

IF you hide from the law.

Foursquare is definitely could provide help in this direction. This service allows to to “check-in” in different locations, like Starbucks restaurants, hotels, shops, etc. It has all modern social network features, like awards, statistics, badges, achievements (looks like World of Warcraft a bit).

However when I logged in and looked the the neighbour location, I found a lot of “My home” locations. So, what you need to do is:

• write an application for scanning the home locations nearby
• let it download the preferences from the linked facebook account, like “Fan of Hi-Fi, Jewelry, old books, etc”
• drive in rich neighbourhoods and create a map of potential burglary targets
• find out via a twitter account, when people are normally going to work/traveling
• (skipped)
• PROFIT!

I think this application is really too much for me, I’m switching to the category of paranoid Facebook-haters!

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3-4 years ago for a small website project (around 50 pages in 3 languages plus news) I’ve chosen Joomla! (the exclamation mark is not displaying my overwhelming emotions towards the product, it’s actually part of the name)

I didn’t do the design template myself, this is a bit too technical for me (or may be I’m just afraid to touch anything with word “design”), but the rest was  very easy.

Joomla served right for many years and help to earn millions of euro, although there was some minor disadvantages:

• any change of design is quite difficult. For example to add a third level menu if you have only two. You need to tweak the template file very accurately
• I don’t like the SEO-plugin at all. It’s very hard just to create simple short fixed URLs. Especially together with the translation plugin
• Speaking about translation, the JoomFish was also not very brilliant. I’d actually prefer to have 3 sites (one per language, not one with 3 translations). Otherwise if you have 50 pages in your mother language and just 40 in the other ones, you can not publish them correctly.

So I’ve desided to have a look on what’s on the market for the modern CMSes in 2010. First of all I found the site http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ , which was horrible.  Despite on scientific approach to the CMS description, it didn’t help me at all. After choosing some of the requirements, I’ve got a list of 50 products and initial Joomla was not even in it.

After some googling it looks like the following product  are suitable for the needs: Joomla itstelf (still), Bitrix, Drupal and Typo3.

Next step I’ll try to find some freelance designers and ask them which CMS do they prefer from this list.

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