I have thought about getting  a CRM system or a Project Management Software to help me with my getting more organized and efficient. Just yesterday I seriously started doing a lot of research and testing things out. I was looking for a LAMP based web application that handles project management and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Although I’m a proud owner of by business, I’m still pretty much regarded as a freelancer as opposed to an entrepreneur. I need something simple that gets the work done.

I narrowed it down to these 3:

1. SugarCRM
2. Dolibarr
3. PHProjekt

Now I’m really confused as to which one I should use.

These are some of the things that I need.

• Ability to have customer accounts related to projects
• Add and schedule different tasks inside a project
• Time tracking for each task and summary of time spent on each project
• ability to calculate ROI (not a must but good to have)
• Keep customer related info such as project history, internal notes as to what kind of sales strategy is working with this customer, project proposals, services they are currently using from me etc…
• Keep track of work that I outsource
• Controllable access to let contractors check and update their tasks, and have clients update and check project issues and progress

Any help in deciding what I should be using is very much welcomed. Please leave a comment or contact me from my contact page. Thanks

It is almost inevitable that we will have to evolve. We are pushing limits of our social and logical cognition. If you really think about it, the situation almost requires quick judgement and adaptation. Stability almost seems nowhere to be seen, and for thousands of years in our evolution, stability is the one thing that we have experienced and adapted to. Our environment(by this I mean our day-to-day activities, by which I mean interaction online and interaction with computers in general) is changing at such a rapid pace that our minds are getting pushed to this quick form of adaptation. Cultures all around the world seem to be blending too. So what we learned while growing up might not necessarily be very useful when interacting when we start encountering people from different races and cultures around the globe. But we are learning and evolving now more or less a single unit.

What does all this mean. Well if you go to the theory of evolution and natural selection, this is what I think is bound to happen. Success in this time and age depends on quick, rapid yet correct action. You can either make it or break it in a few actions, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and crazily sometimes even in a matter of days.

What is needed in this age is not a 1000 hours of research to make a decision, as some people do when chosing a product, a service, a house, or a job. What is required in this age of excessive information is intuition and instinct to make a correct judgement and to be able to do it quick AND TAKE ACTION, at the same time being aware of  the risk of burning out too quickly. We are seeing instant successes – it no longer takes decades to reach a level that most people dream about, it takes a few years and sometimes just a few months, or in some extreme cases just a day, or well… just a single video of less than 5 minutes on this thing called ‘YouTube’(I’m sure you’ve heard of it)

I don’t see all of this as luck. I see all of this as evolution. People who might seem like they don’t have the slightest clue about what they are doing are becoming instant success. It is my belief (and please don’t sue me for this) that these people are instinctively driven to behave in a certain way, or to act a certain way.These individuals who posses this instincts to act in a quick and correct way will become successful, and to some ‘intelligent’ hard working people this may seem very scarey, because you no longer need to get a degree, or a Phd to get ahead in life(actually who am I kidding, that never was the case anyway).

What am I saying here? I’m saying, natural selection will take place because conditions have changed and the rules that applied in the past for success (and ultimately survival) don’t apply now. With these changes in the conditions in our ‘environment’ natural selection will pick out the new winners, who are instinctively driven by and towards quick correct actions.

Paul Vixie – Internet Systems Consortium(ISC). He is the primary author of BINDv8, has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems since the 1980s. He has developed tools like, sends, rtty, cron etc…

John Demco – Webnames.ca. John is basically the God Father of “.ca”. He helped create the .CA domain in 1987 and was its initial registrar, and chairing the CA Domain Committee until 2000. He has also been responsible for chairing and managing a number of academic and research networks.

Chris O’Neil – Google Canada. Chris leads Google’s operations in Canada as Country Director for Google Canada. He is focused on building Google’s brand and driving innovation to help fuel growth for Canadian Business.

Byron Holland – President and CEO of CIRA.

Especially starting with Web 2.0 and the online social network craze,  it almost seems we are racing against time. Everything is super fast, super connected and super “oh my God, get me out of here”.

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Youtube, and what not. All these networks were meant to keep us connected and get us closer, but on one end it seems that we all are getting so close we’re overlapping onto each other and invading all kinds of spaces that we can think of. And on the other hand our ‘online’ world instead of making the world smaller is becoming so huge that we don’t know who’s who and what’s where anymore.

Google just launched Google Buzz – I thought it was going to be Google Wave that was going go to be the next big thing. Another online social networking feature but this time added to Gmail. This means more networks, more feeds, more updates, more people that I don’t know adding me and trying to be my friend so that they can send me mass pokes, and walls and updates about things that I don’t care about.

Again, as I said, don’t get me wrong I love technology and I love the Internet, but it’s just getting too much. EVERYONE is on Twitter or Facebook to say the least. People want to get ‘connected’ to everyone it seems. How can people have 500 friends? How can they tweet so much? I bet if you send a friend request to a 100 most random people on Facebook, 80 of them will add you the very same day; the other 20 might add you in the following days or if not, then they don’t use their facebook account anymore.

Even I started an online social networking site called kesario.com few months back. It’s not working as well as I thought it would. I wanted to come up with solutions, and the more I spend time studying the trends the more I’m realizing that something drastic is about to happen on the Internet.

What made me think was this. Yesterday I launched the site wordsthatmatter.net for Valentine’s Day. It was a crazy idea that I had and thought it would be very interesting. Anyway, to market this site, I decided to use all these social networks. There were so many people who just kept accepting my friend requests, and following me on twitter. I opened an account specially for that site so no one really knows me, yet everyone kept adding me as a friend and following my tweets.

People on facebook and twitter are already using it to do mass marketing, and now Google Buzz. There are SO MANY of these now. Yes I know, even my site kesario.com is one of them. Sooner or later we are going to reach a threshold and the weaker ones will get eliminated (yes I know, my site is also amongst the weaker ones).

I was thinking we need a new dimension to all this – a network to manage all these networks, and there are a few out there already, but today I realized that that is only patching up the problem we are about to face. This Web 2.0 and social media/network bubble has started to reach its threshold and I predict that sooner or later it will burst.

I will write another post to say what I mean by this Web 2.0 bubble bursting because this article is getting too long and it becomes difficult with the constraint of time we have in this super fast world that we live in.

This friends is the world of open source. The reason I love open source is, first of all – everything is free! It also keeps us variety and the power to chose not to be confined to large software enterprises that at times seems to be sucking out our wallets from our back pockets.

Open source software is the only field where FREE is actually fascinating, fantastic, fabulous and fun and not just free. Some of the open source and freeware software is actually 5 to 10 or even more times better than software that you actually pay for. Here are some of the software that I use and absolutely LOVE:

• Linux – Specifically Ubuntu desktop. I just love this OS. Some people might find it a bit surprising, but given a little more time to mature I may even be able to trade in my mac book pro for an ubuntu notebook! Let me add a little note here, Ubuntu is actually the Linux OS, the user interface is from the GNOME project. Whats really amazing about any linux distros is that you can easily change the interface to something feels right for you. There are other distros that I should mention here ‚Äì Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian etc.. But I like ubuntu, especially the desktop because it just works. I used fedora in 2006 and it was a pain in the rear.
• Eclipse ‚Äì according to me this is THE best IDE to use. There is a flavour for everything that you want to do. I use the PHP Development Tools (PDT) and it makes my work less work and more fun. I also use the free aptana plugin from time to time for web development.
• Mozilla Apps ‚Äì Mozilla offers such amazing apps its hard not to talk about them. Firefox is by far the best web browser out there, thunderbird is a fantastic email client ‚Äì few years back I tried to like this email client but I couldn‚Äôt and instead opted for MS Outlook. Now 2 months back (July 09) I stumbled onto thunderbird again and wow does it impress me. I got so impressed I switched from Outlook. I you are fond of the outlook calendar, look no further, thunderbird has an amazing plugin called ‚Äòlightning‚Äô and its got all your calendar needs. I‚Äôm not a big fan of plugins, but this friends is an Ah-mazing plugin ‚Äì it actually feels like a native feature of thunderbird.
• Apache ‚Äì Apache is by far the number one http web server out there, and I highly doubt that this will ever change!
• Mootools ‚Äì is a javascript framework that I use and that I think is really convenient. I don‚Äôt know if this is the best one out there because honestly I have not used any other. There are actually many out there. Yahoo even has one out there and has large library with tonnes for features.
• AVG Free ‚Äì although not open source, it is actually free and I think gets the job done. An excellent (and free) substitute for Norton ‚Äì oh how I hate norton.
• Zonealarm ‚Äì again this is not open source, but is actually free. It had a few problems with some of their intermedia releases, but now they are back on track.
• Gimp ‚Äì I love this. Its not as user friendly has photo shop(but then I don‚Äôt find photoshop that user friend to begin with. But being fair, I‚Äôm really a beginner at using advanced image editing software anyway), but its free and it does the job exceptionally well.
• OpenOffice ‚Äì this is THE best substitute for MS Office. This is an excellent package. After all it does everything that MS Office does and more; you can convert your word files into pdfs ‚Äì thats one feature that first caught my attention. I use MS office on windows since I already had it, but I use OpenOffice on my macbook, since I didn‚Äôt want to pay the extra. You don‚Äôt need to be worried about your friends, co-workers or your boss not being able to open your openoffice files because you can save those files in MS Office formats.
• Filezilla (ftp client)‚Äì an ftp client and server. Can‚Äôt say anything more about this. I think this one just rocks. If you are using anything other than this for your ftp needs, you should slap yourself haha.

There may be more that I’m using that I’m missing out there. I’ll update the list later. If you have any questions, you can contact me or leave a comment.

Finally I’ve made the move to start my blog. There’s a lot of things I want to talk about here, but I must say progress will be quite slow at the beginning. That’s because I’m in the middle of a few things at the moment.

To highlight a few things in my life a the moment – I’ll be graduating in June 2007 with a Honours Specialized degree in Computer Science , so that’s exciting. Just looking for jobs at the moment, you know the usual thing people do after graduation. I am really looking forward to start working. The fact is I am more excited by the thought of working than the fact that I’m finally done with university!

I’ll be adding RSS feeds etc to my blog soon. There are many tools already available, but I’m thinking of writing my own little program that’ll do it for me. I’ll probably even post it on my website for people to download…I’ll see how it goes.

While searching for some tools on the Internet, I came across this, it’s pretty amazing, not only is it thought provoking, but the way the video is made and how it progresses makes it even better.

Enjoy … or well… ponder upon it

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