I just got back from an intensive two-day brainstorm / working retreat with the team up near Mount Tremblant in Quebec.

It’s difficult trying to make the best use of such a short period with everyone in the same physical location - it’s only happened one other time - at the beginning of this project - and it’s unlikely to happen again.

The highlights of the meetings:

• A lot of progress was made on how we integrate the customer management, customer portal, and team collaboration modules.  We discussed where they overlap, and how we can ensure smooth transitions for all of the different roles of the people who will use the ... [more]

This is going to be a good week. The MG guys are all going to be in town for one last monster session before the final push in the development of the four products. This is where the designers and developers will start working together to deliver the most innovative CRM possible. I know that Scott A. and Mike will be interested in what the BV02 guys come up with on the ... [more]

For reporting, we started out using XML/SWF charts. I was familiar with the library and it seemed to be easy to integrate with rails (and it was). But the type of charts Scott wanted to see weren’t possible with XML/SWF charts.

After a few days of hacking, we scrapped that charting library for amCharts (http://www.amcharts.com/)

This library works great, but you need to get comfortable with configuration. Lots of configuration options, but really easy to get working with rails. Basically you just use repond_to and write the xml needed using builder and the javascript in html.

Here is a chart that is on the dashboard ... [more]

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Writing generally involves deadlines and limited access to the people who can provide the information and the direction. Much of being successful is being able to get everything you need in one shot, usually at the drop of a hat.

In this situation – which can happen pretty much anywhere – I try to lead a detailed conversation, to really get a sense of what we want to write about. This really beats getting a slew of information that people think you would need to get the job done.

In these types of discussions I will assume the role of someone who knows nothing about the subject (which is often not a stretch). The goal is to get the person/people to explain ... [more]

This morning Andrew and I had a breakthrough design session.

Despite weeks (months?) of him telling me he felt outside the development process and unable to insert himself in the project, and weeks of me responding EXACTLY the same way (”then change the process!”), I feel we broke past the communication barrier and established a new level of collaboration.

We’re starting to come up with some pretty fundamental and game-shifting ideas.

I’m not ... [more]

The first version of the client extranet is complete.  This version has the “backend” view of all the work items a company manages for a client, including support items (or “tickets”), project tasks, feature requests, or anything else you want to manage.

My favorite feature (right now): the “twitter-like” messaging feature that allows you to post messages to the client and colleagues.

This ... [more]

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Scott Lake’s post about being more than an email address (how to categorize people who sign up for the MG beta) got me thinking.

The Scotts’ discussion touched on an important aspect of communications. Target audience. The person you are speaking with. It affects the vocabulary, the delivery and the complexity of your message. It determines how you present ideas. We all do this to some degree during face-to-face conversations, but its it’s less of a focus in written conversations. Tragically.

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Scott Annan’s recent post on community driven software got me thinking about ways that companies can gain insights for product directions. For the most part, social networks are generating some great discussion when it comes to technology. Although I’m not sure much of it comes in the CRM space, I think that there are ... [more]