Luis’s Corner of (non) Wisdom

I have been searching the last few weeks for a “simple” ERP (in quotes because no ERP is simple) that I could use to start a new business line in Intelectix aimed at small businesses.

Although at first I was considering some inexpensive commercial ERPs, I took the decision to only look into open source ERPs, the reason being that if the total cost included licenses and consulting, if I could lower it (to only consulting) more small businesses would be able to afford it.

So I started looking into open source options. Although there are several, I found two that I felt were relatively mature with a big enough installed base. I want something that is stable and has been proven somewhere else. If I am going to sell it, it’s Intelectix name that’s in play. So the choice needs to be done carefully.

My main two options are Openbravo and OpenERP. At first I liked Openbravo, but it doesn’t seem as customizable. OpenERP seems more complex, but at the same time its modularity allows using only parts of it (say, the CRM module), and apparently there are many more modules for it on the web.

Today I called a friend of mine who recently implemented SAP in his company (a big company). I told him that I would like to have a beer with him so he could share some of the experiences with implementing an ERP. When I told him what I was planning to do, he told me he had a couple of companies that could benefit for a low-cost ERP solution.

I still have to do some more studying to see if OpenERP is really it, but so far it seems like so. Has anyone had any experiences with it? Could anyone suggest any other open source ERP that I might be overlooking?

One of my colleagues at Intelectix, Gerardo, left us last week to pursue one of his goals in life, living in another country. He will be moving to Toronto, Canada in the coming days.

Gerardo worked with us for the last two-and-one-half years, and he always had a great attitude towards the company and his colleagues. He has quite a lot of experience with web development, specifically ASP.NET, AJAX and HTML, as well as some graphic design abilities.

Gerardo, I would like to thank you very much for these last two years, and in the name of all of Intelectix, wish you the best of luck in this new chapter of your life

As a custom software development company, we have mainly focused in medium and medium-large enterprises, because small businesses, in Mexico at least, don’t have the budget to have a software solution developed specifically for them.

In the past I have had requests by some friends who own small businesses to develop an application that would manage most parts of their business (sales, accounting, finances, production and inventory, etc.) and wanting to pay under $5,000 USD for it. I would tell them that the best solution for them would be to find some shrink-wrapped solution.

Recently one of my big client asked for something similar for a small subsidiary of them. Basically, what they are asking for is an ERP. This client is in the process of implementing SAP, but since this is a separate, independent business, it won’t get SAP.

So, instead of developing something that covered all of that, I started looking for an ERP that I could implement for them. For some time already, I have had the idea of finding a nice, little, inexpensive ERP that could be suitable for small businesses, so that Intelectix could sell and implement it in companies in Mexico. This opportunity only made me work on it.

In the last week or so I have spent a lot of time searching the web for a suitable ERP. What I would like most are these features:

• Aimed at small business. I do not need something very complex, but I would like all the basic functionality (CRM, sales, invoicing, accounting, inventory, production, warehouses, asset management, etc).
• Desktop application for Windows (instead of web based), because it’s easier to use and faster response
• Relatively inexpensive. A small business cannot afford to pay $20K USD just for five user licenses, plus implementation and training costs
• Extensible through plugins, and preferably .NET-based, so we can use our development expertise to enhance and tailor it to our specific clients’ needs

One of my first findings was Interprise Suite, but after a little digging in the web, I found some comments by customers of them saying that the product promised a lot but it was not yet ready for prime time, and also that the company behind lacked reliability.

I also found along those lines Darwin Productions’s Evolution ERP, which also seemed nice but once I installed the demo, was a bit slow and the screens very convulted. I still need to give it a better try, but it doesn’t seem straightforward to use.

I haven’t reviewed open source alternatives yet, but a quick look at OpenERP.com seems promising.

One thing that is very important is that the software is rock solid. I will be selling it to my clients and if it does not work well, it is my company that will get all the complaints.

So, can anyone suggest a nice ERP for small businesses?

My friend Oscar Fraustro will be playing tomorrow what probably is to this day the most important round of golf of his career, the Sectional Qualifier for the U. S. Open. A few weeks ago he got his place by finishing tied for third at the Local Qualifier.

He will be playing in a field full of PGA Tour Professionals, some of them past U. S. Open champions. Among 120 players, 16 will make it to the U. S. Open which takes place in two weeks in a course named Bethpage Black, which is close to New York City. The last time the U. S. Open was played there, in 2002, Tiger Woods won (as he too did last year).

I want to wish Oscar the best of luck tomorrow, and I look forward to seeing him play in the U. S. Open. I know he has what it takes; I just hope things go right tomorrow.

You can follow along by reading his blog at www.oscarfraustro.com, where he most probably will write about his experience tomorrow.

As I wrote in my last post, the trade show at the NADITA conference was quite an experience. I had never set up a booth at a trade show, so every step along the way was a new learning experience.

Remember I said that I was invited to the conference two weeks before it took place, but only a week before it started I was told that as a vendor I had to set up a booth. That meant I only had a week to design the booth, as well as design and print marketing material such as brochures, banners, and promotional pens.

But it all really started when I got there. From past experience, basically from shows where I had been an organizer during college, I thought that with each booth I would get at least a table. I had my projector and my laptop, and also had printed a couple of big banners to have them standing on each side.

On Monday evening, in the networking cocktail I met one of the organizers, and when I introduced myself, he asked me if I had talked to Sam (the guy in charge of setting the vendor fair for NADITA) already, to which I said no. He urged me to email him that night and call him early in the morning because my booth only came with the three walls. So I emailed Sam that night and in the morning I had an email with a 40-page guide on preparing for a show.

Basically, if I needed anything I couldn’t provide myself, I had to rent it at ridiculously high prices. To start I needed a table on which to put the projector, brochures, business cards, and so on. There went around $175 (the table was I think $140 plus a 22% service charge). After the show I ended with a bad backache for standing around 4 hours, just because I did not want to pay another $150 for a chair.

If I needed anything related to electricity, audio, video or computing equipment, I had to rent it with Encore, which I understand is the hotel’s company that sets up conference rooms for trade shows.

At first I knew I needed electricity. So I filled up the order form like this: around $150 for one 110v outlet, $120 for one hour of labor (the minimum) and tax. It ended up in just under $300 for having electricity in my booth.

On Wednesday morning I came early  to the conference room to see my booth and start setting it up. It looked something like this:

One thing I knew immediately I needed was a projection screen. I called an Encore salesman and he immediately set that up for me ($60 plus service charge).

I also thought about asking for a 21-inch computer monitor to demo my products. It cost about $175 (come on, you can buy one for less than that!) and I was not sure it was worth it. After asking a couple of people who told me that it was not necessary, I went with my gut and asked for it.

At the end, the booth looked like this:

Given the lack of experience, short notice and limited resources, I think I did a good job. It definitely was not most flashy booth in the room, but still looked decent.

Other things I could have rented for my booth were a projector for $350 (luckily I took mine from here) or a 128 kbps internet connection for $400 (256 kbps for $600). The prices were so insanely high that they made laugh.

Overall it was a great experience. I learned a lot and made a few interesting contacts. We will see if something serious comes out from them.

I apologize for not posting anything for the last two weeks but I was very busy (I mean, really busy). I was invited to participate as a vendor in the 2009 NADITA Conference last week in Las Vegas, and I had only a week to prepare for setting up a booth.

NADITA is the association for the IT departments of Caterpillar dealers. MAQSA, the CAT dealer for the north of Mexico, is a client of Intelectix, and we have developed a few solutions for them that could be helpful to other dealers. MAQSA’s CIO invited me to the conference with about two weeks in advance, but just one week before the departure date he informed me as a vendor I was required to set up a booth.

So the week before the conference I had to:

• Design and print banners
• Design and print brochures
• Make more business cards
• Make some pens for giving away
• Create an English version of my website and update it with CAT dealer products
• Create a PowerPoint presentation to show on my booth to visitors
• Buy plane tickets, pay for the stand, make hotel reservations, and other trip arrangements
• Sign up for the golf tournament

And all of last week I was in Vegas. This year the conference was about implementing an ERP solution in the dealerships. CAT dealers currently use a very old, terminal-style ERP provided by Caterpillar, who will stop supporting it in a couple of years. The presentations I could attend were interesting, but they were only a few. Sometimes vendors were not allowed in the presentation because it was only for CAT dealers, and other times I was doing preparations for my booth.

This was the first time I set up a booth in a trade show, so I learned quite a bit. I am planning on writing a whole post about this weekend.

The best part of the conference was the golf tournament. It was played during the last day in scramble format with teams of four. My teammates were David Young, Tad Wharram, and Alejandro Caro. We shot 58 (-13) and won by 7 strokes, which in a scramble tournament is a monumental difference. The prize: a nice Dell Mini 9 netbook for each of us. I already wanted to buy one of them, but getting it for free was better

The winning team: Tad, Alejandro, myself and David

I must admit that I am writing this post because it is my English homework. My dad and I recently took up English lessons (after at least 10 years) with the idea of perfecting our pronunciation and fine tuning other details of the language. The assignment for this week was to write a little half-a-page essay on what we think are the benefits of blogging. Since I just retook blogging and am so into social media strategy recently, I decided to make my essay public by posting it here.

As I see it blogging, if used correctly, can bring the following benefits:

First of all, it gives a more personal, transparent view of you. Readers can be sure that there is a person behind a web page, and when looking for some information, they feel they can engage in conversation with an actual person, and not with just a faceless web page. Even if your blog has a specific topic, sometimes you will sprinkle a personal tidbit here and there. Your readers will know more about you as a person.

Another advantage of having a blog is that people in these days when they are about to hire a person or a business, they look up references on the web. For most of us, our name comes out a few times. It could be a friend’s reference to us, an article in our business website, or a newspaper article about a social event. What if when someone searches for you, the first thing they get is a link to material written by you? Wouldn’t that be an advantage?

From a business point of view, you can exploit blogging by giving some information and tips for free. With the internet, people usually try to find an answer and solve the problem themselves before committing to spend money. If you give something for free people will start looking at you as the expert, and when they still can’t solve their problem, they’ll come to you, checkbook in hand.

Your business can also use a blog to announce future events or new products, or to (very importantly) acknowledge mistakes and say what you are doing to fix them. Again, your potential customers see that there are people behind the company with who they can relate.

One nice thing about the internet is that everyone is created equal. No matter your country of residence, your college degree or your age, you are solely judged on the content you publish. And if you become important in the online world, it will bring benefits to you in the physical world.

After reading The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and his follow up book World Wide Rave, I have decided (once more) to start blogging again.

Although I have been blogging scarcely since at least 2004, this time I have decided to jump in with both feet into social media sites with basically two goals in mind. The first, and I would be lying if I said otherwise, is to promote my business. But the second is more altruistic. Through my career, although it has not been very long yet, I have learned a few things in the area of business and software development. Many of these I have read on the web in different web communities (CodeProject comes to mind) or other sites in the blogosphere. I think it is time for me to give something back to the community.

Less than a year ago I started with a friend another company, TDC, which basically does IT outsourcing to home offices and small businesses. A few days ago I started another blog for that company (in Spanish – I apologize to my English readers) which basically will give away tips and tricks for making your computer usage more productive and secure. I plan on publishing an article there at least every week, or more often if I can induce my partner into this blogging thing.

I also created an account on Twitter, which I plan to update several times a week. If you have an account there, you can follow my updates: @luisalonsoramos.

And last, but not least, I am in the process of revamping both my companies’ web sites. They are pretty dated by now, but we will have new versions in the coming weeks.

Oscar Fraustro, a very close friend of mine who is a professional golfer, just qualified for his first PGA Tour Tournament this weekend. He will be playing the Puerto Rico Open, and his tee time tomorrow is at 12:55 pm.

You can check how he is doing on the live leaderboard at pgatour.com.

Oscar, congratulations on this achievement, and my sincere best wishes for you! Come back with a trophy!

It’s been a long time, I know, but I have been quite busy. When I get an idea about writing something here, I always say I will do that tonight. And tonight comes and tonight goes and I don’t write anything. So this time I had this little problem, found a obscure fix, and decided to write about it now, or else I would not do it. So here it is.

I have an desktop application that uses the AppUpdater component to install updates on all client machines. Somewhere, a long time ago, I found that I needed to enable WebDAV on the IIS server hsoting the updates.

A few months ago I moved the application to another server, with 64-bit Windows installed, and apparently everything was working fine. Until tow days ago.

I installed a web service (ASP.NET) application, and it wouldn’t work until I changed IIS to work on 32-bit mode unde 64-bit Windows. I already had learned this with another server migration, so I got it to work in a few minutes.

Today I released a new version of the client application, and I got an error message from the AppUpdater component saying it couldn’t update the application because a network error had occurred, and the web server had returned 501 - Not Implemented.

I remembered the WebDAV thing and immediately checked for it, and it was Enabled.

To make a long story short, after some time googling for this problem, I found a thread in a discussion forum that seemed to talk about this problem and offer a solution. The steps basically are:

1. Have IIS runing in 32-bit mode under 64-bit Windows
2. Go to IIS Management Console, to the Web Service Extensions section
3. Add a new web service extension, naming it WebDAV2 (or whatever you want) and adding this file as required:

   C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64\inetsrv\httpext.dll

4. Enable that new WebDAV2 extension

And, I don’t know why, it worked!