Nominated for an Award

 PLEASE VOTE!!!!
The inaugural Nat West Devon Venus Awards were launched earlier this year with an event at the Sapphire Living Space in Topsham. The awards are designed to recognise women in the workplace and employers that support women. The awards started in Dorset by Tara Howard in 2010, and have since grown to include Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Southampton and of course Devon.

I was extremely lucky to have been nominated in the Heart Business Mother of the Year category and from an initial 222 nominations made it to the filming section and from there to the semi-finals.

The semi-finals are a public vote, and those with the most votes make the final 3 (announced at a special event on 10th July) and go on to the award ceremony that will be held at Exeter University on 5th September.

This is where I am now asking for your help! The vote closes this evening at midnight and I am looking for as many votes as possible. Why vote for me? I'm a mum of three that runs a business with my husband, I am also a farmers wife and help in the local community. I am a Trustee of the local sports centre/recreational association where I also help out on a voluntary basis. I also manage their Facebook and Twitter accounts on a voluntary basis.

VOTE HERE!

PS: You don't have to live in Devon to vote!

Taking Cheques - do you?

Most of our invoices are now paid electronically via BACS, standing order or direct debit,  but having not had any for a while, in the last week we have received 2 cheques for payments.

Obviously I don't have a problem receiving cheques, the bill is still being paid after all, but it made me realise the extra effort that needs to be made to bank them.

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ConvallisCMS and ASP.Net MVC 4

In previous posts I've talked about how we slowly evolve our software by taking advantage of advances in the platform that we write our code in (the .Net Framework). Last time I discussed the Entity Framework and why I decided to move us over to it's most recent release. This time I thought I'd write a little about ASP.Net MVC.

This is a technology that I doubt hardly anyone who isn't a software developer (and probably a web developer at that) will have heard of. I'm sure many of you will know that ASP.Net is the name Microsoft gave the web development platform which is part of the .Net Framework, and the MVC framework is a subset of that.

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Author: Richard Isaac

Entity Framework 5

Last time, I wrote that I'd decided it was time to update our software and make use of technologies that have been more recently released than those we'd been working with over the past few years. One of those technologies is the Entity Framework.

When we first started work on ConvallisCRM the Entity Framework was still in development and hadn't been released, but what had been released was a tool called Linq to SQL. Both of these technologies are examples of what are known as object relational mapping tools, or ORM for short.

In our daily lives we make use of various objects on a daily basis, from the telephone to communicate with others, to our beds in which we sleep. In a similar fashion many programming languages allow us to define and create 'objects' that represent a function or data within an application. An ORM is a tool that performs a query on a database and maps those results into a data object within the application that can then be further manipulated, oft times that simply means that it is displayed.

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Author: Richard Isaac

Our Move to Office 365

At the beginning of the year we took the decision to move our email and document storage solutions to Microsoft Office 365.

Office 365 is a cloud based service that bundles a number of what have until a few years ago been separate server installed products (in fact you can still purchase and install the products locally if needed). These products are Microsoft Exchange (email), Microsoft SharePoint (documents & collaboration) and newcomer on the block Microsoft Lync (formerly Communications Server). The highest priced feature levels also include a license to install Microsoft Office Professional Plus, which the user can install on up to 5 machines (e.g. at the office and at home).

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Using Social CRM for Marketing

I've just been reading an article on some recent research regarding how marketeers use Social CRM and was very interested to read the results.

Social CRM is a 'buzz' word in the world of marketing and is a topic that is featured in many an article or discussion online, but how is it used? The results of the research showed that most businesses (41.2%) that took part do not have any formal Social CRM program in place, but 25.1% have an informal Social CRM program in place.

But what is Social CRM? To me it is using digital media such as social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter etc) the web and other digital media to engage with and promote my business to others.

The research has shown that 60.9% of the participants use Social CRM for prospecting and lead generation, whereas 58.6% use it to build a community.  Personally, looking at the results, my use of social CRM leads one way or another in most of the roles shown, but am I doing it right? To be honest I find it difficult to show a ROI on Social CRM overall, so I am hoping to be able to rectify that in the future.

Please visit the DestinationCRM website to see the full research results.

Ever Onwards with our Technology

Over the past few years we've steadily worked on our CRM and CMS software and have added new features and capabilities to it. However, while we were busy doing that the technologies that the software is built on was itself undergoing changes, some of which we made use of while others we chose to ignore. Fortunately those changes/enhancements usually maintain backwards compatibility with code that's already been written and so it rarely if ever breaks existing code. 

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