If you’re a Bantam Live customer looking for an alternative cloud-based small business customer relationship management system with social networking integration, we’ve got news for you! xioup is pleased to announce the release of an import service that makes it possible to migrate almost all of your Bantam Live data into BatchBook.

Back Story: Bantam Live is Shutting Down (Temporarily)

Constant Contact announced the acquisition of Bantam Live in a press release dated February 16, 2011. The focus in most of the technology news outlets was the purchase price ($15 million) and the reason for Constant Contact’s interest in Bantam (Bantam’s “highly scalable technology”).

The message to Bantam customers in Constant Contact’s February 16 press release announcing the acquisition was reassuring:

While Constant Contact integrates the social CRM technology into its core engagement marketing services, Bantam Live will be free of charge to active Bantam Live customers.

So why the fuss? In contrast to the reassuring public guidance Constant Contact communicated to existing Bantam customers, news soon started to leak out that Constant Contact was actually planning to shut the service down on July 1, 2011, with vague plans to reopen it some time in 2012.

At the time this article was written, Constant Contact had not responded to our request for a statement.

Enter BatchBook

BatchBook is a full-featured, SaaS CRM aimed at small businesses. Like Bantam, they offer some innovative social media integration features. We’re big fans of BatchBook – we use it in our business and recommend it to our customers. We’re official BatchBook Experts, BatchMakers and have implemented a number of successful integrations with BatchBook’s API for customers around the world.

As you can probably tell, we like BatchBook, and we think it’s an excellent choice for small businesses who are searching for a cloud-based CRM solution. We also think it’s a great alternative for Bantam customers who need to find another service to manage their contacts’ information.

We aren’t the only company who feels that way, either. Bantam customers started making their ways, on their own, to BatchBook, and recognized that it was an excellent candidate to replace their current system. The only problem at the time: How do you get all of your data out of Bantam and in to BatchBook?

When all of this went down, the BatchBook team was deep in the middle of a super secret project that had most of their development resources tied up. Since then, they’ve announced the project: The New BatchBook, coming to browsers near you later this year. Great news for BatchBook users, but not much help for Bantam customers hoping to salvage their priceless data stored in Bantam.

xioup to the Rescue!

When Pamela O’Hara, BatchBook’s CEO and Co-Founder, contacted us in April and asked whether we’d be interested in writing an import tool to bring Bantam archives into BatchBook, we said “sure!” It took us a little longer than expected to get everything refined and completed. We’re sort of perfectionists here at xioup. We know how important the data in a company’s CRM system is, and we wanted to build an automated importer that brings in as much data as possible from Bantam archives.

We’re happy to report that our importer brings in all contacts (companies and people, including all address information, tags, special dates, social networking profiles and rss feeds). It also brings in 100% of Bantam deal and project information, notes, tweets and internal messages (including creation date, author and recipients). Bantam statuses are brought in, as well, albeit without creation dates, since they’re not included in Bantam’s export archives.

For your convenience, the importer adds a link to each imported contact, deal and project record, pointing to the original record in Bantam. This makes it easy for you to compare records in the two systems and make any manual adjustments in BatchBook that may be necessary.

We think the importer is pretty awesome, but it’s not quite perfect. Here’s a quick list of limitations:

• Bantam doesn’t include email bodies in their exported archives, so we import emails as BatchBook communications, bringing in the email subjects, and we place a link in each record that points to the corresponding email message in Bantam. This should make it relatively easy to copy email bodies over to BatchBook manually, where necessary.
• Bantam doesn’t export Task or File information in the XML archives. It’s unfortunate, but if the data’s not in the archive, we can’t import it into BatchBook. If Tasks and/or Files are especially important for you, let us know and we may be able to come up with a solution.
• Bantam archives don’t contain data that’s marked private, with one important exception. Private data belonging to the admin user who creates the archive may be included in the archive. There is no way for us to know which data is private. Everything we import into BatchBook will be public.
• Events are exported in Bantam’s archive, but BatchBook’s API doesn’t currently support event-creation. You’ll have to bring your events into BatchBook manually.
• The BatchBook API doesn’t currently support associating communications with deals, so you may have to do some manual work to recreate these connections.
• Bantam organizes some information in a slightly different manner than BatchBook, so there are a few other minor quirks (mostly related to Bantam notes and comments).

The low-down: We bring in as much data as we can from Bantam and we organize it as well as possible,within the confines of the two systems and the limited amount of time we had to perfect the process.

Where do I Sign Up?

We suggest that you contact support@batchbook.com first. They’ve written a couple of FAQs (1, 2) about the process, and have also offered to sponsor a limited number of imports.

If you don’t make it in time to get a sponsored import, we’re charging a very affordable price of $50 per archive. Each process takes around an hour, but varies based on the size of the archive.

No related posts.

Today we’ve got a five minute screencast demonstrating a 100% cloud-based mail-merge solution using contact and communication data from BatchBook (SaaS CRM) and Drawloop’s SaaS mail-merge solution, all tied together by xioup’s WebFormGlue API-Connector Platform.

Questions and Answers

Several people have emailed us with questions regarding this integration. Following are answers to some of those questions, in case you were wondering, too:

Q: Would it be possible to schedule a mail-merge job like this and have it run automatically when the time comes?
A: Absolutely! WebFormGlue allows the scheduling of automated processes. You can define an entire marketing cycle with emails, mail-merged documents, BatchBook Todos – any number and combination of automated and manual activities, then go play a game of golf. WebFormGlue lets you put your business on autopilot!

Q: Neat integration, but you’re just creating a single mail-merged document here. Would it be possible to generate a batch of documents addressed to different contacts with one click?
A: You bet! We thought a batch mail-merge might be difficult to demonstrate in a 5 minute screencast, but this is entirely possible. You can just as easily generate 1,000 mail-merged documents with a single click, if that’s the functionality you need.

Q: Do I have to use a bookmarklet to trigger a mail-merge, or can I set up an automatic mail-merge based on another kind of event?
A: You don’t have to use a bookmarklet – it’s possible to define your own trigger. Here’s a scenario:
Let’s say you offer White Papers to people who sign up for your email newsletter. You could use a Formstack web form to collect sign-ups, use Formstack’s existing MailChimp integration to get the new contact straight into your mailing list, use WebFormGlue’s Formstack to BatchBook integration to automatically insert a new Contact record (as well as Todos, Communications and/or Deals) into BatchBook, generate a personalized white paper and email it to the contact automatically, all in one step, with no manual intervention required!

Q: Could I have WebFormGlue email the mail-merged document to me rather than downloading it immediately to my PC?
A: Certainly! WebFormGlue is extremely flexible – you could have it email a link to the merged document to you, upload the document to your Amazon S3 account or to your own server or send it directly to a fulfillment service for outsourced printing and mailing. It could send you an SMS, a direct message at Twitter or place an automated phone call to let you know the document is ready. If you have a printer with a public IP address, it could send the document straight to that printer. If you prefer not to print, you could also have WebFormGlue send the document directly to your contact in a personalized, automated email message.

Q: What about mail-merge for email? Can I use WebFormGlue to generate personalized emails to one or more contacts?
A: Yes, with one caveat. We aren’t in the mass emailing business, but WebFormGlue can send emails through a service like MailChimp, or by using your company’s own email server.

Related posts:

1. WebFormGlue offers Formstack to BatchBook Integration
2. Supercharge Your BatchBook.com Web Forms

If you’re looking for a way to spice up your contact forms without having to pay for custom web development, you’ve come to the right place! xioup’s innovative new service, WebFormGlue, integrates Formstack (Online Form Builder) web forms with the BatchBook (Your Social CRM), and support for other SaaS applications is on the way.

Formstack Form Integrated with BatchBook

Before we get in to the details, please take a couple of minutes to fill out our survey to help us understand your web form and application integration needs:

-> Take the WebFormGlue Survey <-

Note: The survey form is a WebFormGlue integrated Formstack form. As soon as you submit the form, your survey answers and contact information will be saved in our BatchBook account.

Benefits of WebFormGlue

Formstack Form integrated with BatchBook on an IPhone

Alternatives to WebFormGlue

Until now, you’ve had four options for getting data into BatchBook: manual entry, data import, BatchBook’s own Web Forms and custom-built web forms.

Manual Entry: If you’ve got a contact form on your web site that only sends you emails, you’re living in the stone age. Get your contacts to do the work for you!

Data Import: BatchBook’s data import facilities are excellent when you’re first setting your account up and want to get all of your existing customers imported into the application, but it’s not the best way to get new contact data into the system as you collect it. The import process consists of several unnecessary, time-wasting steps that WebFormGlue does away with forever.

BatchBook Web Forms: BatchBook’s web forms get you closer to the ideal, but they’re simple, basic and and not very flexible. They do save submitted data straight into your BatchBook account, but you can’t set required fields or validation rules, and you have no control over your the forms’ styling, for starters.

Custom-Built Web Forms: You can do almost anything with a custom-built web form, but they require time and technical skill to implement. If you’re not able to make one of these on your own, you’ll have to hire someone (hint, hint) to build it for you. Unfortunately the price for a completely customized option may be too high for many small businesses.

What’s Next?

We’re not quite ready to release the service to the public. Right now we’re working on a nice user interface that will make it easy for non-technical users to configure their own WebFormGlue integrations between Formstack and BatchBook, and we’re also adding some powerful new features that make it possible to set up much more complex integrations and automations across multiple SaaS applications.

We’re planning to roll out the service for public sign-up in mid September ASAP

Moving Ahead

Our first integration is between Formstack and BatchBook, but it won’t be the last. We plan to add support for other form-builders and custom-built HTML forms, as well as other third party SaaS applications. Our goal is to create a service that allows you to use a single web form and map it to as many third party applications as you need to.

Further on, we’re looking at different ways we can allow users to easily and quickly set up integrations between different applications with APIs.

Stay tuned for more, and if you haven’t done it yet, don’t forget to:

-> Take the WebFormGlue Survey <-

While taking the survey, you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for email updates on WebFormGlue progress and request a screen shot of the BatchBook record that’s created by WebFormGlue when you submit the form.

Related posts:

1. How To: Get the Referrer from a Formstack Form
2. Mail-Merge In the Cloud with BatchBook, WebFormGlue and Drawloop
3. Supercharge Your BatchBook.com Web Forms

Formstack (aka FormSpring) is an innovative service that enables people with little or no technical skills to create powerful web forms.

Currently, Formstack forms don’t collect referrer/referer information. The referrer is the web page on which a visitor clicked the link that took him to the form page. This piece of information can be very useful if you’ve got links to a single form from several different sites or pages, because it tells you which pages are the most important sources of visitors to the form.

A formstack employee has stated on the official Formstack feature request forum that the company plans to add this functionality to its forms in the future, but if you can’t wait until then, I’ll show you here how you can start collecting this data immediately.

This short tutorial applies to forms hosted at Formstack, but the instructions in it can be modified for use on other forms, as well. The steps in this tutorial have been tested on multiple forms, and they also work with formstack’s hosted multi-page forms.

Step 1: Add a new Short Answer field to your form. I suggest that you set the label to “myreferrer.” We’ll hide this field later, after we’ve tested to make sure it’s working, but I’d leave it visible at first.

Step 2: Load up your form and view its source. Search for “myreferrer” in the source. You want to find the input or field that you’ve just added. You should see something like this in the source:

<td id="field1234567">
<label for="field1234567">myreferrer</label>
<input id="field1234567" name="field1234567" size="50" type="text" />
</td>


You need to grab the input ID for use in the next step. In the example code above, the input ID is field1234567.

Step 3: Add a new Description Area to your form. You have to make sure this description area comes after the myreferrer field that we created in Step 1, otherwise the javascript won’t work. In the description area, you should paste the following javascript (make sure to use the correct input ID that you got in Step 2):

<script type="text/javascript">
var theReferrer = document.referrer;
var theReferrerField = document.getElementById('field1234567');
if (theReferrer != '') {
theReferrerField.value = theReferrer;
}
</script>

Step 4: Test – open up a page in your browser that links to your form. Click on the link to visit the form. You should see the referrer URL displayed in the new myreferrer field that we created in Step 1. If you don’t see it, you’ll need to retrace your steps and make sure you didn’t make any errors. If you do see it, fill out and submit the form to make sure the referrer is being submitted with the form.

Assuming your tests were successful, you can go back to the Formstack form editor and set the myreferrer field that we added in Step 1 to “hidden”. Test again, to make sure everything still works.

Voilà! Your Formstack form is now capturing valuable referrer information. That was pretty easy, wasn’t it?

Just in case you’re wondering, you can use this same trick to insert just about any kind of javascript that you’d like into your hosted Formstack forms. Google Analytics code is one example, but the possibilities are pretty much endless.

Related posts:

1. WebFormGlue offers Formstack to BatchBook Integration

More and more companies are utilizing Facebook fan pages every day. And, as Facebook expands more companies are hiring professional web designers to administer their pages. Rather than giving out your private login information, you’ll want to manually add your designer as an administrator to your page. In this blog post we will look at manually adding an administrator to your Facebook Fan Page. Before you start you should make sure you have added your designer as a friend on Facebook.

Step one: Log in to Facebook

Step two: Type the name of your page into the search box in the upper portion of the page (the name should appear as you are typing). Click on your page’s name to be taken to your page’s wall.

Step 2: Search for your Business Name

Step three: Once on the wall of your fan page, you should see your profile photo plus 4 links directly below your profile picture. The first link says “Edit Page”. Click this link to be taken to your Facebook Page’s options page.

Step 3: Click "Edit Page" to get to Fan Page Options

Step four: Once you are on the Options Page you will see a number of wider boxes on the left side of the content area, a number of smaller boxes to the right of these, and lastly facebook ads on the far right outside of the content area. The smaller boxes in the content area should be named “News for Page Admins”, “Promote your Page”, “Admins”, “Help with Your Page”, and “Promote with Facebook Badge”. In the “Admins” box you should see your picture. On the same line as the word “Admins” is a link which says “Add”. Click this link.

Step 4: Find the Adminstrator box and click Add

Step five: At this point a box should pop up in the middle of the page which lists your friends. Select your web designer from your list of friends and click the button on the bottom of the box which says “Add Admins”. Congratulations! You’ve just taken the first step in upgrading your Facebook page.

Step 5: Select your administrator from your list of friends

No related posts.

If you’re pressed for time, here’s the short story: We recommend MerchantOS to small and medium-sized retailers without reservation. The system excels in every area that counts: price, ease of use, features, ease of deployment, technical support, integration with third party hardware and software, support for special cases. You name it, MerchantOS does it right!

MerchantOS Screenshot

Note: This is our unbaised review of the MerchantOS Retail POS system based on several months of use by one of our customers in a real-world retail setting. There are no affiliate links in this review, and we do not receive any commissions, discounts or other incentives from MerchantOS (or anyone else) for writing it.

Price

As with most SaaS offerings, MerchantOS is a web-based service that charges a monthly subscription fee. There are several attractively-priced packages, with basic service starting at $49.95 a month. The monthly subscription price increases based on the number of registers, employees and retail locations in your organization. If you’re turned off by the idea of paying a monthly subscription fee for software, or by the idea of relying on web-based software, keep reading to find out why it makes perfect sense in this situation.

If you’re comparing the cost of POS systems, there are several things you need to keep in mind. There are often hidden costs that you may not be aware of or that may not be mentioned in price quotes from classic POS vendors.

How much will you have to spend on hardware?
With MerchantOS, the minimum hardware you’ll need to get up and running is a single PC with a reliable Internet connection and a modern web browser. That’s it! Of course, you can add bar code scanners, label printers, receipt printers, cash drawers, customer-facing displays and integrated credit card terminals, but you can add these things on an as-needed basis, rather than having to make a big investment, buying the whole package up front. You can either buy additional hardware directly from MerchantOS, or you can shop around and buy it from another vendor, if you prefer.

How much will you have to pay for recurring software upgrades?
With classic POS software, you’ll pay for the original software, but don’t forget about the upgrades! These are sometimes expensive and can be a nightmare to install. Some vendors require that you keep your software updated in order to qualify for technical support. You may also need to pay for support during upgrade installation, and you will almost certainly have to take your cash registers offline while installing upgrades.

With MerchantOS, upgrades are priced into the subscription fee, and all upgrades are done on the MerchantOS servers, meaning that you don’t have to think about them at all – they occur seamlessly without requiring any work from you. This means less trouble and lower cost for you, but it also means that MerchantOS can release upgrades (adding new features and improving existing ones) more often than a classic POS vendor.

How much will you have to pay for technical support?
This is an important one. Some classic POS vendors charge $85 or more, per hour, for technical support. I’ve even read about vendors who require you to buy an annual support subscription before they’ll answer any questions for you. Some of them don’t mention this requirement until you call them with your first question. Imagine how you’d feel if you’d just spent several thousand dollars on a POS system, only to find out that you’ll need to spend several hundred (or thousand) dollars more in order to get technical support for it!

With MerchantOS, technical support is priced into the subscription fee.

No contract and no hidden fees
Your first month with MerchantOS is free. After that, you’re billed once a month and you can cancel your subscription at any time. There are no hidden charges buried in fine print. The price you’re quoted is the price you’ll pay, and nothing more. This gives you the freedom to evaluate the system to see how it meets your needs without making a large, up-front investment, something that is next to impossible with most POS systems on the market.

Ease of Use

Not much to say here. The system is extremely easy to learn and use. Most of our retail customer’s employees are ladies from the baby boomer generation, and none of them really qualify as “techies.” They were concerned that MerchantOS might be difficult to learn, but without exception, everyone on the team was comfortable using the system from the very start.

Features

In addition to standard cash register functionality, the system offers inventory control, purchase order creation, work order management (in case you offer services in addition to products), customer loyalty and tracking programs, gift card support, data export for QuickBooks integration, sales, layaways, departments, register discounts, configurable reports, employee management features and much more.

One important feature is the collection of electronic vendor catalogs. MerchantOS has a central collection of vendor catalogs that you can access from your account. This can speed up the process of adding new items to inventory – rather than manually entering all of an item’s information, you can import the information from the central catalog. If you’re working with a vendor who has an electronic product catalog that’s not yet included in the MerchantOS collection, simply send MerchantOS a copy of the electronic catalog. They’ll add it to the collection, and you’re good to go.

The web-based nature of the service also offers some special benefits. You can log in to the system from your home (or from anywhere with an Internet connection). This means you can monitor store performance, generate reports and perform other management activities from at home or on the road. You can also easily put together a mobile POS system for use at trade shows, conventions or to sell your products at any other location outside of your stores.

If you have more than one retail location, you can quickly check the stock of your other stores. This is great if you run out of an item at one store. You can quickly check to see what other store still has the item, and either put it on hold for a customer, request to have it shipped to your store, or request to have it sent to the customer. No more calling around to your other locations to see if any of them has an item in stock.

The last feature I’ll mention is the size and color product matrix. This tool allows you to easily import similar items that only differ in size or color/pattern. Let’s say you’re selling shoes, and you have one model that comes in 3 colors and 10 different sizes. The size and color product matrix will allow you to quickly add all of the colors and sizes to your inventory without having to manually enter each one.

Ease of Deployment

I mentioned it earlier in this article, but all you need in order to deploy MerchantOS is a PC with a modern browser and an Internet connection. Since I assume that you’re reading this article on a modern browser installed on an Internet-connected PC, you most likely already meet the minimum requirements for deploying MerchantOS!

I also mentioned the fact that your first month is free. You can set up an account and familiarize yourself with the system without spending a dime. As far as I know, MerchantOS is the only POS vendor that allows you to do that. Sign up for your free account, log in to the software, and you’re up and running.

If you currently keep track of inventory in another system (QuickBooks, another POS), MerchantOS charges a standard $100 fee to import that inventory into MerchantOS. They’ll help you export your inventory in a format that they can read, and they’ll import it into your MerchantOS account for you.

It doesn’t get much easier than that!

Technical Support

I mentioned earlier that technical support is priced in to the subscription fee. What I didn’t mention is that MerchantOS technical support is excellent. The representatives usually respond quickly to questions and are very helpful. In addition, you can turn to the online forums to discuss questions and problems with other MerchantOS users. I’ve heard stories about other POS vendors who fail to respond to pressing, important support questions. I don’t mean they take their time to respond, I really mean there are some vendors who, at times, do not respond at all to tech support questions.

You will not feel alone if you’re a MerchantOS customer.

Integration with Third Party Software and Hardware

MerchantOS makes it easy for you to export your stores’ data in a format that can be imported into common small business accounting packages (eg. QuickBooks). If you’re used to using QuickBooks or a similar accounting software, you should be able to continue using that familiar software alongside MerchantOS.

Barcode scanners and printers, label and receipt printers, cash drawers, customer-facing displays, integrated credit card terminals – MerchantOS integrates directly with all of the pieces of POS hardware you might need. You can buy the hardware directly from MerchantOS, or shop for it on your own. If you decide to buy your hardware from someone other than MerchantOS, it’s important to note that they only offer support for the models they sell. That means, if you want to have MerchantOS support for your hardware, as well as your software, you should either buy your hardware from them or buy the exact same models they sell from someone else.

For your registers, you can use Windows PCs, Macs or Linux PCs – whichever you prefer.

Support for Special Cases

Our retail customer has a couple of special cases. While MerchantOS didn’t have specific support for these cases when our customer signed up with them, they were able to help our customer organize their inventory and departments in a way that would address our customer’s special needs.

Supposing you have a special case that your POS software can’t meet here’s what you can expect to deal with.

Classic POS vendor: Because these vendors generally have rigid release schedules, they may only release new versions very rarely. Let’s say your vendor releases a new version once a year. Supposing you can get in touch with the right person at your vendor, and supposing you can convince that person that your special case is one they should support in their software, you may have to wait a year or more to actually see that support show up in your software.

MerchantOS: Because all MerchantOS upgrades occur on the MerchantOS servers, updates and new versions can be released at any time. It’s easy to get in contact with MerchantOS support, so you only have to convince them that your special case is one they should support. Just so you know, they won’t agree to support every special case – it’s simply unrealistic to expect any software system to be all things to all people. But if you can convince them to support your special case, there’s a chance that support for the case will show up quickly. This is a real advantage of relying on web-based software. The release schedule is much shorter, meaning that you generally don’t have to wait as long to see improved and added features as you would with a classic POS system.

Links

• MerchantOS Home
• MerchantOS Pricing and Signup
• MerchantOS Tour
• MerchantOS Live Online Demo

Background

I’ve been chomping at the bit to write this review! I first learned about MerchantOS late in 2009 while exploring some of the truly neat Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings featured at The Small Business Web. At the time, xioup didn’t have any retail customers shopping for a Point of Sale (POS) system, but I was so impressed with the MerchantOS concept and free online demo that I filed it away in my head for future reference. I was hoping we’d have a chance to evaluate the system in more detail for an actual client.

Fast forward a few months. Pat Milam is part owner of The Crossing New Braunfels, a “boutique featuring unique women’s clothing, shoes, belts, & other accessories, as well as wonderful gifts & home decor.” She’s also my mom Her team had relied  on a makeshift, informal POS system at the store for several years, and she was looking to replace it with a professional, dedicated one.

If you’ve had to shop for a POS system, you know it can be a jungle out there. It’s hard to find good, unbiased information and reviews on the many different systems available. It’s not always easy to calculate the full cost of different systems, either. Pat ran into these problems and came to us for help. Fortunately, I still had MerchantOS filed away in my mental rolodex.

So we did our due diligence. Pat and I had a conference call with Ivan, CEO of MerchantOS to clear up some specific questions. Pat called several retailers who are using the MerchantOS system and heard nothing but rave reviews. After carefully weighing the pricing and features offered by MerchantOS, she decided to give MerchantOS POS system a spin. Now that she’s been using the system for several months, I felt that we were familiar enough with it to write this review.

No related posts.

Client: NÖM AG
Team Members: Kurt Milam (working for OgilvyInteractive Worldwide)
Industry: Consumer Dairy Products
Service Areas: Content Management System (CMS) Implementation
Software: ART (in-house CMS), XML & XSLT, Macromedia Fireworks
Time Frame: 2003

NÖM AG - Home Page Screenshot

Background:

NÖM AG is a leading producer of consumer dairy products and one of the best-known homegrown brands in Austria. They do an excellent job of associating their brand with the concept of high quality in their classic marketing efforts, and they wanted to ensure that their web presence was just as effective. The concept prepared for the company by my then co-workers at OgilvyInteractive contained quite a few advanced features and design elements that pushed the boundaries of our CMS abilities.

The company also needed a solution that enabled non technical employees to easily customize all of the site’s content.

Does your company need a professional, premium CMS implementation? We’ve  got your needs covered. Contact us today to learn more!

NÖM AG - Content Page Screenshot

Solution:

Implement a CMS-based website with advanced features such as: on-the-fly image generation (with Macromedia Fireworks’ scripting engine), CMS-based form-builder, lots of rounded edges, highly configurable sidebar content boxes, random background images, scrolling news ticker and more.

I (Kurt Milam) served as software architect and technical lead for a team of web producers and technicians who worked to implement the novel, visually appealing design created by one of my favorite Austrian designers, Thomas Mostböck.

NÖM AG - Content Page Screenshot

Results:

• The customer has a website:
  • with a unique, professional design
  • that is highly customizable and can be easily updated by marketing personnel with little technical knowledge or experience
  • that matches the look and feel, as well as the high quality of their classic marketing and advertising campaigns

Coda: The NÖM website is holding up pretty well for its advanced age. The design is exactly the same as when I finished working on it, back in 2003. I notice that they’ve switched to a different CMS system, and some of the advanced features we built for them either didn’t survive the conversion or are simply no longer in use. Nonetheless, the site still looks great and works quite well.

Related posts:

1. Team Portfolio: Multilingual, Internationalized Premium CMS-based Website – Laufen Sanitary Ware
2. Shopping for a Small Business Website Content Management System (CMS): Part One, How to Avoid Vendor Lock-In

Client: Laufen Sanitary Ware
Team Members: Kurt Milam (working for OgilvyInteractive Worldwide)
Industry: Ceramics, Premium Bathroom Fixtures
Service Areas: Content Management System (CMS) Implementation, Online Product Database
Software: ART (in-house CMS), Oracle, XML & XSLT, Adobe Flash
Time Frame: 2003-2004

Laufen USA - Home Page Screenshot

Background:

Laufen needed a single, uniform web presence to support its European and North American sales operations. The website had  to provide country-specific and multilingual news, marketing materials and information on thousands of products. News and Marketing materials included press releases, printable handouts and an official product picture database (for use in advertising and promotional campaigns). Product information included product dimensions, colors and finishes, photographs, CAD files and printable product handouts.

Does your company need a professional, premium CMS implementation? We’ve  got your needs covered. Contact us today to learn more!

Laufen USA - Product Search Results Screenshot

Problems:

• The client needed:
  • a single web presence to support existing operations in thirteen countries (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, England, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland, the USA) and ten languages (Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Slovakian)
  • to address four target groups with one website (sales partners, architects and builders, homeowners, members of the press)
  • a website that could be easily managed by non technical employees, allowing them to add, remove or edit content as necessary, without relying heavily on an expensive technical support team
  • an elegant, modern website design that meshed well with the company’s reputation for providing premium, well-designed products

Solution:

Implement a multilingual, fully internationalized CMS-based website including full integration with the client’s product and marketing materials databases (Oracle).

During the initial implementation phase, I (Kurt Milam) served as software architect and technical lead for a team of web producers and technicians who worked to implement an elegant, timeless design created by Austrian design star Thomas Mostböck.

Upon completion of the initial website implementation, I took over customer contact and project-management responsibilities for continuing maintenance and upgrade activities at the customer’s request. I worked closely with marketing personnel based at Laufen’s headquarters in Switzerland, as well as with technical professionals based at Roca’s (Laufen’s parent company) headquarters in Spain.

Laufen USA - Product Detail Screenshot

Results:

• The customer has a website:
  • with an elegant, professional design
  • that can be easily updated by marketing personnel with little technical knowledge or experience
  • that communicates a wide array of easily searchable marketing and product information to a variety of consumers in ten languages across thirteen countries
  • that is fully integrated with the company’s product and marketing materials databases

Coda: If you take a look at the Laufen site today, you may notice some cracks and wrinkles that have crept up over time. Techniques and technology have changed tremendously in the intervening years since my involvement with the Laufen project came to an end, early in 2004. It appears that Laufen has not chosen to invest the resources necessary to keep the website up-to-date in a technical sense. On the one hand, it’s gratifying to know that the site is still functional almost six years after it was initially completed. On the other hand, it’s clear that the site is due for a refresher, at least at the technical level.

Related posts:

1. Team Portfolio: Premium CMS Website Development – NÖM AG
2. Shopping for a Small Business Website Content Management System (CMS): Part One, How to Avoid Vendor Lock-In

We came across this error recently in one of our mercurial hg repositories. This particular repository holds several subrepositories. The problem is pretty easy to fix, once you know what’s going on.

In our case, the problem was caused by a mismatch between our .hgsubstate file and one of the subrepositories it was pointing to. A mistake was made when the subrepositories were originally defined in the .hgsub file. Here’s what we had in .hgsub:
sites/1=sites/1
sites/2=sites/2
sites/2=sites/3 #problem line

And here’s what we should have had in .hgsub:
sites/1=sites/1
sites/2=sites/2
sites/3=sites/3


We committed this incorrect .hgsub and continued with our work. Several commits later, we noticed the error in .hgsub and fixed it there.

A few days after that, we got the “abort: unknown revision” error, and were unable to commit the main repository. Googling for an answer wasn’t very productive. Fortunately, a mercurial ninja over at stackoverflow.com was able to point us in the right direction.

All we needed to do was find the correct, complete changeset id for the tip revision of the subrepository that had been previously incorrectly linked, and paste it into the corresponding line in .hgsubstate. To get the complete changeset id for a repository, execute the following command in that repository: hg --debug tags. Take the tip changeset id and paste it into the parent repository’s .hgsubstate, replacing the incorrect changeset id.

Commit your changes and you should be good to go again.

No related posts.

Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) for your small business website can be an overwhelming task. There are hundreds if not thousands of systems to choose from. Read ahead to find out one important question that you need to ask before deciding on a CMS for your business, and to learn one reason that a hosted WordPress site is one of the best options for a small business website CMS.

Note: This is the first in a series of detailed articles on this subject. Our intention with this series is to help small business owners through the maze of choices they’re confronted with when shopping for a Website CMS. Follow us on Twitter, become a fan of our Facebook page or subscribe to our RSS feed now! We’ll inform you as soon as we publish the next installment.

How Widely-Used is the CMS? Or: How can I avoid Vendor Lock-In?

This may be the most important question you can ask when trying to determine which CMS to select for your small business website. A widely-used CMS has several important advantages over more obscure systems. One of the most important advantages is that it helps you avoid the costly trap of Vendor Lock-In.

What’s Vendor Lock-In? Let’s use a metaphor. Imagine you’re shopping for a new car instead of a Web CMS. You’ve done your research, taken your test drives, and the final contenders on your list are a Bugatti Veyron and a Honda Accord. The Honda’s OK – it’s safe, reliable, will get you where you’re going, and you can customize it to suit your needs. The Bugatti is superfast, sleek, luxurious and makes a statement.

Bugatti Veyron, Base price: $1,700,000 (don't forget to add maintenance and repair costs!)

In the end, you decide to buy the Bugatti, even though it costs almost 100 times as much as the Honda. At first, you’re happy with your new car. It turns heads and gets you noticed. It’s crazy fast, looks like a work of art on wheels, and it has a world-class warranty. You’re happy that you shelled out the extra money.

And then you get the call from your dealership telling you it’s time for your first scheduled maintenance. The person on the other end of the line politely reminds you that your warranty is only valid as long as you stick to the regular maintenance schedule, and have all repairs and maintenance performed by an authorized Bugatti workshop.

Now you’re locked in. There’s only one authorized Bugatti workshop in your town, and they charge more than ten times as much as the average garage for repair and maintenance work. On top of that, even if you chose to void your warranty and look for a cheaper garage, most garages in town have never worked on a Bugatti, and wouldn’t know where to start. You can’t afford to risk invalidating your warranty, so you really don’t have a choice. Your new Bugatti is going to cost substantially more than you had originally calculated.

But it doesn’t end there. Six months and four expensive trips to the Bugatti workshop for repairs later, and you’ve realized the uncomfortable truth that your warranty doesn’t cover every imaginable type of repair. A new headlight costs more than $1,000. A single tire costs $3,500. In an average month, you’re paying as much for repairs and maintenance on your Bugatti as it would have cost you to buy the Honda Accord, outright. But you’ve got too much time and effort invested in the Bugatti, and you can’t bring yourself to make the switch.

A few months later you pick up the newspaper and read the following headline: “Global Financial Crisis Hits Local Auto Dealers,” Subheadline: “Local Bugatti Dealership to Close.” Oh. Now what? The only Bugatti dealership (also the only authorized workshop) in town is shutting down. The next authorized workshop is in Big City, more than 200 miles away. I hope you like Big City, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time there. You’re going to have to book a hotel room every time you take the car in for maintenance. And the towing charges? Your friendly local tow-truck driver’s new uniform is a Brooks Brothers’ suit, courtesy of Y-O-U.

At least it can’t get any worse, right? Wrong. You’re sitting in your hotel room in Big City, watching CNN while your car’s in the shop for a $4,500 oil change. It’s a routine you’ve gotten used to over the last few months. You’re not sure how long you’ll be staying. You’re never sure. Sometimes the guys at the workshop are quick, and you’re back on the road in a couple of days. Sometimes it takes longer, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about it – you’re completely at their mercy. So, you’re watching CNN and you notice the ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen: “A Century of Automotive Tradition Comes to an End: Luxury Automaker Bugatti calls it Quits.”

Yep. Now you’ve reached rock bottom. Your warranty is worthless. Your car is practically worthless. On the plus side, you won’t have to drive to Big City for repairs and maintenance any more. Now you can have your repairs done at Fred’s Garage in your hometown, and Fred charges a lot less than you’ve been paying, right?

Well, right and wrong. Fred charges less for Fords and Hondas and Chevrolets, but he’s got a special rate for luxury autos, and an even more special rate for super exotics, like your Bugatti. Never mind that Fred’s never worked on a Bugatti before. Fred may look a little rough around the edges, but he knows how much a Bugatti costs, and he also knows what you’re used to paying for repairs in an authorized workshop. You’ll have to pay just as much to Fred as you paid at Bugatti, and since Fred doesn’t know the first thing about Bugattis, there’s a real danger that he’s going to ruin your car.

That’s Vendor Lock-In, in easily understandable layman’s terms. You want to avoid it at all costs. That Honda Accord, with its lower maintenance costs and stronger dealer network, looks extremely attractive in retrospect.

Honda Accord, Base Price: $22,010 (and a heckuva lot cheaper to maintain than a Bugatti Veyron)

Real Life Example

I can assure you the Bugatti-Honda metaphor is realistic. I’ve seen it happen, first-hand. I’ll givee you a real-world example from my past experience, then we’ll move on.

Global Ceramics Company Pays for a Bugatti, ends up with a Beat-Up AMC Gremlin

This one’s a tear-jerker. A few years ago, I worked as the software architect and chief programmer for the Austrian branch of a major international advertising agency. During that time, I served as technical lead on a big CMS implementation for a global ceramics company. My team worked several months to set up websites for 12 countries in 8 different languages. Each country site included a country-specific, searchable product database. Visitors could view and print out images, CAD drawings, brochures and a list of colors and finishes for every product available in each country market.

It was a nice project, and I was really proud of the awesome work we did. It was also an expensive project. After we finished the initial implementation, Global Ceramics Company (name changed to protect the unfortunate) signed a maintenance contract with us. The monthly fee for the maintenance contract was substantially more than a small business can expect to pay for an entire CMS-based Website.

The big problem for Golbal Ceramics Company: We used our in-house, exotic, proprietary CMS package to build the site. The CMS package was awesome (a Bugatti?), but only a handful of people knew how it worked. Global Ceramics Company couldn’t take their business elsewhere. They were locked in. Aside: I didn’t choose the CMS we used on this project – we simply used our standard, in-house, proprietary CMS on all of our projects back then.

As things go, our team drifted apart over time. Less than a year after we’d finished the initial implementation of Global Ceramics Company’s website, everyone who knew how to work with the proprietary CMS we’d used had moved on to greener pastures. There was literally no one left who could upgrade or maintain the site.

Global Ceramics Company had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their slick new website, and less than a year later, there was no one left who could maintain it.

I kept my eye on the website over time, interested to observe how it would hold up. Not surprisingly, without anyone left to maintain it, the website began to break down pretty quickly. No one could update it to make it work with newer browsers. No one was there to fix little problems that popped up over time.

Eventually, Global Ceramics Company had someone convert the site over to a more popular CMS. The conversion didn’t go too well – it was a complex website, after all. Now, almost 6 years later, Global Ceramics Company has a very expensive website that hasn’t been updated in ages and doesn’t work well in newer browsers.

Global Ceramics Company blew their entire, generous web budget on a new Bugatti, and had to settle in the end for a beat up, used AMC Gremlin with a worn-out transmission and a muffler that drags on the ground.

AMC Gremlin, Base Price: $3,415,000 ($3,414,600 total cost of your now-worthless Bugatti + $400 for the Gremlin)

I told you, it’s a tear-jerker, and the really sad part about it is that Global Ceramics Company weren’t the only ones left hanging when our team drifted apart. Several big brands (some of whose names you are bound to know) were also left with expensive websites that looked great at first, but quickly fell apart due to lack of maintenance.

I’m Convinced! What do I need to do Now?

Ok, you’ve stuck with me this long. Here’s what you need to do in order to avoid Vendor Lock-In when choosing a CMS for your small business website.

Executive Summary: For most small business websites, hosted WordPress is an excellent choice. It has a huge base of users and companies that support it, and it’s running millions of sites. For these reasons, WordPress offers your small business outstanding protection against Vendor Lock-In. (source: About WordPress Page)

Choose a CMS that’s widely used

If you’re talking with a web design firm about building a new website for your company, ask them what CMS they’re using, and whether it’s Open Source. Most of the popular (i.e. widely-used) CMS packages are Open Source, so that’s a good place to start. If the package isn’t Open Source, you should take a long, hard look at how many users it has, and how many companies support it. If the web design firm you’re talking to is the only one who supports the CMS package they’re trying to sell you, I strongly suggest that you look for another firm. Generally, the more companies that support a CMS package, the less likely you’re going to fall into the Vendor Lock-In trap.

To get an idea how widely-used and supported a particular CMS is, plug its name into Google and see how many results you get. It’s not a scientific test, but it should give you a reasonable idea of how popular the CMS is. For example:

• WordPress (297,000,000 results)
• Joomla (85,300,000 results)
• Drupal (28,200,000 results)
• PHP-Nuke (12,000,000 results)
• ExpressionEngine (6,280,000 results)
• Typo3 (3,780,000 results)
• DotNetNuke (1,400,000 results)

WordPress is the clear winner in this list. I’m pretty sure it’ll win this competition against every other candidate you might put it up against. As I mentioned, the results aren’t scientific. But based on the list, I’d be much more inclined to go with WordPress (assuming it met my company’s needs) than I would with DotNetNuke. There are some other reasons I’m not a big DotNetNuke fan, but I’ll save those for another article.

If google only has a handful of results for a prospective CMS, I’d be extremely wary about choosing it, even if it’s initially free. Back up to our auto metaphor – even if you’d gotten the Bugatti for free at the beginning, it would have cost you more money over the long-run than the more popular Honda.

Is that All?

Nope. That’s one important aspect out of several that you need to consider, covered in detail. You should now understand the dangers of Vendor Lock-In and have an idea how you can avoid it, but there’s a lot more to consider when shopping for a new CMS website. I’ll cover the other important topics in a few upcoming articles. Stay tuned for more, and feel free to ask any questions you have, in the meantime.

Don’t Forget: Follow us on Twitter, become a fan of our Facebook page or subscribe to our RSS feed now! We’ll inform you as soon as we publish the next installment.

Related posts:

1. Team Portfolio: Premium CMS Website Development – NÖM AG
2. Team Portfolio: Multilingual, Internationalized Premium CMS-based Website – Laufen Sanitary Ware