We have been working hard to have a first set of applications ready for you to enjoy. It has been an interesting journey with many challenges and lots of fun!
The journey starts many years ago when AlineaSol (a company I was part of) started building extensions for SugarCRM, community edition. Many development years were put into applications like “Reports” and the feedback was really good. However, other parts of the business grew faster and the company stopped offering these applications to the enterprise market and focussed solely on specific industries.
In the last 2 years or so (not longer being part of AlineaSol), I have been working with an international team to take some of these applications further. We performed a proper integration with SuiteCRM, resolved open issues, performed additional hardening and we even took the time for functionality extensions and new modules. Now, we are on our own path.
While coding, learning, and sometimes despairing 😉 , we had lots of time to think about where we were going (why plan ahead, right ? ). Well, actually, we had a vision, but you normally start seeing things more clearly when you are on the ground, getting your hands dirty, so to say.
Our vision was relatively simple: Many things in life are just becoming more and more complex. Nowadays, when you create your own company, before you know it you have a global team and tens of people working together … (well…let´s just take this as a working example…). You start thinking about processes, how to work together within you team, how to keep communication flowing, what giant in the industry you want to get married to well knowing that you will be in their hands (in the good times and the bad times). And at some point you will notice that you will be spending more and more time thinking about these topics and possibly less about doing real, hands-on, business, the stuff that you used to enjoy.
And this brings us to our vision: Companies will have to outsource much more to stay efficient. Running IT ? Is maitaining computer really part of your core business ? How about maintaining the applications you are using ? How about having someone to help you setting up processes or identifying improvements in your operations ? How about the customization of the tools you are using ? Having dedicated people doing this very specialized work is costly. Fully outsourcing this to the big giants can be expensive and getting their attention, possibly tough.
This is why we joined an initiative developed by Sofis Capital, based on “Think global, act local”. The intention of this initiative is to have a group of companies working together to:
- Develop professional, easy to use and cost-effective applications that can be used globally.
- Have local support, to really engage with local companies.
ValeDale is the development “pillar” of the strategy. We create applications, maintain them, evolve them and help our customer with specific development that may require to integrate this back into our products (act local, think global). Another pillar of this initiative is to have local companies that can offer hosted services, local support, project management, consultancy etc. The first member of the team being ECM2, a Dutch based company specialized in SuiteCRM and Alfresco solutions.
This global initiative also made us think about how and what we develop to best support the groups philosophy . How we can best offer flexibility to our partners while keeping things manageable? So, while doing all the fun hands-on, we established two rules. We want to focus on 1. Reusable components and we want to push into the direction of 2. “low-code” tools.
Of course the concept of “reusable components” is nothing new, but we think we are taking this into a new dimension. For example, vNotes makes use of 2 major building blocks: “vReports” and “Forms&Views”-runtime environment. It also makes use of ValeDale Common facilities to add elements to existing SuiteCRM Views. Putting this all together: vNotes did not require PHP development. It was created using the reusable components provided by the other packages. vProjects also makes use of the already mentioned elements, but a complete GANTT application was integrated (no “low-code” here !!).
So, about “low-code”… vReports goes well beyond a reporting system. It allows you to define actions on individual elements (e.g. delete an entry, change the status of an entry with a click, …). But the real “low-code” tool is “Forms&Views”. We are working on a version to fully open up these new facilities to you, but we are already shipping a run-time environment with vNotes and vProjects. This helps us to drastically reduce customization and development costs. We will be posting more on “Forms&Views” at a later stage.
Although we plan for more interesting extensions and functionalities in the near future, let´s focus now on the applications that we release now.
For all of them you will need the SuiteCRM platform.
- vReports: you will be surprised how much vReports can do. It provides table and graphical output. You can create card-like output. You can create reports that include other reports. You can access external databases. There are two graphical libraries integrated. You can schedule reports, schedule the creation of Target lists, you can send the output of a report to a ftp site. Many of these facilities you will not use… untill you need them ! 🙂
- vProjects: if you want to manage projects, keep the status online so that people are aware of where the project is and what is expected of people, you will be happy to use this application. It also provide a GANTT editor and for the old-school people: you can even export the GANTT to MS-Project (try to keep it a secret though…).
- vNotes: vNotes is a simple but useful application that allows you to add comments to any module in SuiteCRM. It supports also “internal comments” (top secret stuff and so on…).
- WorkFlowManager: this is a very strong tool, but take into consideration that it is really meant for technical knowledgeable people. In most cases, I would recommend that you outsource the creation of Workflows (please see our partner list, or contact us directly) instead of you creating them yourselves. Some knowledge about how SuiteCRM works will quickly be needed for the more complex flows.
That´s all folks ! We will be adding posts soon !