What is BPMS?

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According to Wikipedia, “Business Process Management is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize and automate business processes.”

BPMS (Business Process Management Software or System) is a software platform for enabling BPM activities. Managing business processes is at the heart of your work, building a:

  • CRM Suite
  • applicative software
  • applications of IoT
  • tools for a digital transformation strategy

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How to set up an automated business

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As the economic squeeze continues, many businesses will be asking how automation can help them and their staff become more productive, focus their efforts on relationship building and service existing customers more effectively. Read more

Is an Open-Source Low-Code Platform Really Right for You?

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Some users and even software vendors seem to think that open-source and low-code platforms compete with one another. I’ll be honest, the title of this article even came from one such vendor. And, it is a crazy line of thought, in the same way as the Mattermost vs Slack argument in the field of open-source chat. It’s futile without putting the respective feature sets front and center. Whether an open-source low-code platform is the best choice for your organisation or not is dependent on the feature set and quality of the product – not that the software code is available in the public domain or not.

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Why do you need a CRM?

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I’ve worked as both a Manager & a Sales Consultant in several different sectors including CRM Suites. My advice to any organisation considering getting a CRM is to start with the following question: What do my team need the CRM to do for them & how will it help them achieve their goals?

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How to implement CRM in a company

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A CRM implementation must be a comprehensive, cross-department process involving:

  1. Buy-in from all major stakeholders
  2. Customer-focused approach to needs analysis
  3. Great definition of user stories
  4. Strong project management
  5. Appropriate choice of technology

Though the above list is a useful guide as to what order of priority you should follow, addressing this list in reverse order here helps clarify some of the rationale as to why.

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It’s time to turn the page on open source forks of SugarCRM

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It is a testament to SugarCRM that it spawned so many open source forks, before deciding to take itself down an exclusively closed-source, proprietary route. There seem to be dozens of them out there, each claiming to be unique while all working from the same core community edition engine, abandoned by Sugar CRM all those years ago. Read more

What is a Digital Transformation Strategy?

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I was recently asked this question and at the same time asked to explain what free CRMs have to do with the subject of digital transformation. Naturally, we here believe that Planet Crust’s CRM is the best free CRM on the market, providing the market-leading open source Salesforce alternative. However, more importantly, we provide a low code platform that rivals “Lightning”, the Salesforce rapid application development offering in every facet. CRM is just the tip of the iceberg – with the Corteza low code platform we can build just about any type of records-centric web applications. Read more

Open Source Product Innovation and Marketing Collaboration

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According to Wikipedia, “Innovation in its modern meaning is a new idea, creative thoughts, new imaginations in the form of device or method. Innovation is also often viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs or existing market needs. Such innovation takes place through the provision of more effective products, processes, services, technologies or business models that are made available to markets, governments and society.”

Personally, I like the use of the term “more effective” above. It says something important which is often missing in open source products. It’s not good enough to only write beautifully-engineered technology, because that’s often not what counts as more effective in the eyes of those who buy. We need to think through the whole context outside of engineering – the processes, the services, the business models etc – and we need to ensure that the big picture looks and feels more effective overall. Read more

In celebrating “Digital Sovereignty”, we will be judged by the quality of the software we produce, not our fine words.

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Crust Technology recently had the pleasure of taking part in the Univention Summit in Bremen, Germany. The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is a leading platform for cost-efficient operation and easy administration of server applications and entire IT infrastructures. It is both self-hosted and open source and is used by many recognisable, brand-name organisations. UCS is an excellent OS base upon which to build your Digital Sovereignty, being practical, feature complete and supportive of multi-vendor environments.

Digital Sovereignty is a complex term, implying unimpeded access to the software code (i.e. 100% open source), default support and promotion of federated architectures, control of data location and consistent cross-jurisdictional regulation. While vendors such Univention point the way at the infrastructural level, software manufacturers at the application layer must pick up the baton with equal enthusiasm and determination.

In practical terms, what might this mean for software application vendors?

  1. Be 100% open
    This means no tricks or games. Every line of code must be available to the using or hosting organisation. But it goes even further than that – application architectures must be clear, well-documented and not a source of data lock-in themselves.
  1. Easy E-Migration
    The cost of migrating away from a solution, self-hosted or otherwise, must be as low as possible. In other words, the software must be built with recognition of the principle that the using organisation has a fundamental and exclusive right to “own” all of their data and that, should they wish, this data can be moved away from the platform easily.
  2. Embrace Standards
    From security to communication to API’s, software must be standards-based and must, in so far as possible, facilitate federation with other software and services. Clouds should be capable of collaborating with eachother, irrespective of the language in which they are coded.
  3. User Experience (UX) must be excellent
    Good UX leads to strong adoption. Failing at this first hurdle is unforgiveable. It has now been proven umpteenth times that solutions with poor UX simply do not get adopted by a population of a meaningful size.

Credibility is key. Businesses and governments pushing for Digital Sovereignty must learn from history. It’s littered with defunct open source providers, who failed to deliver compelling alternatives to components of giant data-harvesting clouds and proprietary software manufacturers. To fail again would be to be laughed off the stage, while the use of data from our corporate champions, mittelstand (mid-sized economic actors) and small businesses drifts further and further from our control. The stakes are that high.

Do you want to take the first step to Digital Sovereignty? Give Univention’s UCS a try and set up Crust using their Univention App Center.

About Crust

Crust Technology Ltd, headquartered in Ireland, is the driving force behind the open-source Unified Work platform Crust, providing a flexible, self-hosted platform for your organisation to work and communicate internally while engaging with its customers, suppliers, partners and other third parties externally. Its integrated approach to identity, messaging and business logic delivers a simple-to-use yet extensible means for managing users and the applications they require every day, whether in the cloud, behind the firewall or a hybrid of the two. For more information, visit www.planetcrust.com or follow @Crusttech on Twitter.

Companies are replacing Salesforce with Crust and Corteza – with use cases scaling to hundreds of thousands of users. Here’s why:

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Crust Technology strives for feature-by-feature equivalence with Salesforce. While some parts of our feature set are different (and, we believe, superiour!), the ability to migrate from even complex Salesforce implementations, and immediately realise performance, control and cost benefits, makes the Crust and Corteza platforms the more attractive choice.

Modern Code and Modern Architecture

The backend of Crust and Corteza is written in Golang, a multi-threaded processing language. Designed with performance in mind from the outset, it’s extensively used by Google to power its data centres and applications. Salesforce themselves are even recent converts to Golang.

The frontend of Crust is delivered in Vue.js, a lightweight JavaScript engine which also focuses on performance, reusable components and optimized re-rendering. The frontend should always create an outstanding experience for the users.

The majority of open-source CRM’s are written in PHP, an older, single-threaded processing, web programming language. Reaching up to the hundreds of thousands of users demanded by modern-day customer scale applications should not necessitate complex optimisation efforts on an older codebase – performance should be there by design, as it is in Crust and Corteza.

While Crust’s architecture allows it to be shipped as a “monolith” bundle for smaller sites, it can be split into microservices for larger sites, allowing components with heavier workloads to be fed and watered individually according to their processing needs.

Crust Low-Code Platform

The Crust Low-Code Platform is Crust’s answer to Salesforce Lightning, the cloud vendor’s low-code platform. It allows businesses to customise Crust CRM quickly and safely, augment its functionality or create entirely new applications (e.g. Crust Service Solution is also built with our Low-Code platform).

Intuitive, yet comprehensive in its approach, Compose delivers a “building block” method for designing and implementing your key business applications. With Corredor you can add automation scripts, increasing the efficiency of your application.

With powerful API’s Compose also enables businesses to extend safely beyond the borders of their Crust implementation and integrate with third-party systems – either within the boundaries of their firewall or outside.

User Experience (UX)

UX is crucial, but it is not always about creating unique UX. While some of our features necessitate innovation, much of our approach at Crust is driven by what businesses expect to see from their enterprise applications, especially if they’re seeking viable alternatives to solutions proposed by the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics365.

Control

With Salesforce you are stuck to their cloud. You don’t know exactly where your sensitive business data is stored, or who has access see it. In Crust and Corteza however, you have full control over all your data. You decide where you want to store it: in the cloud of your choice, behind a firewall or as a hybrid of the two.

Cost

Not everything revolves around cost, but Salesforce prices do hurt. The full Salesforce suite can cost up to an eye-watering USD 300 per user per month and even that does not include the costs of other applications in the appexchange.

Crust and Corteza products are and always will be 100% open source and the cost of support is a fraction of that of Salesforce. Our commitment to quality is sky high and we will always chase feature equivalency with or superiority to Salesforce.

We’re Growing

Crust Technology has ambitious growth plans. We’re already the premium open-source CRM vendor for enterprise-scale deployments, but we’re aiming for outright market leadership. We’re excited about this journey. If you are too, please contact us at recruitment@crust.tech.