Francis’ Weblog

I’ve been working on a Magento to Salesforce plugin and i’m interested in seeing if anyone wants to use it or has any features that they want me to put into it?

Ii’ve setup a uservoice to collate ideas.

This week saw SalesForce launch version 9 of their popular online CRM product. The two things that interested me the most were the workflow visualiser and the free version of the SalesForce platform:

Workflow Visualiser & Process driven CRMs

In the CRM world there are three main types of CRM vendors; interactive, process driven and record centric CRMs:

At the moment the market leader for process driven CRMs is Ciboodle (who I used to work for) and with the Workflow visualiser it really reminds me of Ciboodle and a more process-driven CRM. Ok, you’ve always been able to do workflow in salesforce but they are now allowing you to see visually what your workflow actions are doing and how they flow into each other and with complex workflow actions this is really good news. The only limitation being you can only see your workflow and have to go back to salesforce to continue to edit the workflow. Read more…

This month Tony Karrer’s blog asks the questions:

Where is your time spent?

How much time do you spend and how did you find time for all the relatively newer things like reading blogs, twitter, social networks, etc.?

What are you doing less of today than you were 3-5 years ago?

Do you have less of a life with all of these new things?

Where is your time spent?
With the amount of information available at the touch of a button I think the best way to answer this to say how I manage my time on an average day and how it now fits into it.

It takes me an hour door to door to get to work and I spend this time, on the way to work catching up with the latest and greatest information. This usually involves either listing to podcasts and/or catching up on my Google reader feeds on my phone. I’ve found google reader a great asset as I can mark interesting stories for my friends to read and they do the same, I also may send a tweat. When I get off the train it takes about 10 minutes before I’m at work so I use this time to check the days calendar and any outstanding emails from the previous day. I’m usually quite strict about emails and only read them 3 times a day, I find they can be quite distracting if your constantly getting pop-ups about new emails. That actually reminds me of an old boss, one day he came into work and tipped his entire in-tray into the bin and announced if it was urgent someone would tell him eventually.

Read more…

Seems like only yesterday I was walking around Toronto University but yesterday saw Professor Barry Wallman from Toronto University and Alexandra Marin release their paper Social Network Analysis: An Introduction (PDF). Its a great introduction into networking concepts, its probably one of the most insightful and relevant I’ve found to date. Social networks are maturing and I feel its important to understand how social networks can really be harnessed to influence and shape the way we learn. Informal learning accounts for 87% of a persons learning and this is accelerating as more people use online wiki’s, blogs, pod-casts and social networks to learn, people and are managing their own learning and linking with other like minded people on networking sites.

Professor Barry Wellman is a professor based at the University of Toronto (and a very nice campus it is too!) where he directs the NetLab and studies networks: community, communication, computer, and social. His research examines social support, virtual community, the virtual workplace, community, kinship, friendship, and social network theory and methods. His pioneering work with networks pre-dates the hype and hysteria that is currently online social networking.

Looks like BBC News has been knocked offline again due to performace changes… this is what I’m seeing at the moment..

It’s happened before:

October 11th 2007:

The BBC News web-site has been suffering outages today while its hosting location fluctuated between BBC Internet Services and the Akamai web application acceleration and performance management service.

For many users this afternoon, the front page of the BBC News site has been slow to respond, often displaying error messages such as “No suitable nodes are available to serve your request” and “an error occurred while processing this directive”. Other users found that requests to news.bbc.co.uk caused the server to continually redirect their request back to news.bbc.co.uk, causing an infinite redirection loop which would have added to the load on the servers.

Today’s performance problems coincide with apparent moves to and from the Akamai content distribution network. Prior to today, the news.bbc.co.uk site had been self-hosted by BBC Internet Services in Docklands, London.

For some periods today, the BBC News website had resolved to IP addresses belonging to Akamai, while other times it had either been pointed back to BBC Internet Services at Docklands, or did not resolve at all, thus leaving the site completely inaccessible.

Akamai transparently mirrors content stored on web servers and users then access the content from these instead of the origin server. By automatically picking a mirror server that is near to the user, performance is generally increased while decreasing the load on the origin server.

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, has published a blog article about the site problems.