Posts

Why Are Standards In Technology Important?

As the world simultaneously tackles health crises, social crises and economic crises, this might seem an impossible question to answer. I would argue that a major priority is to stay informed about the facts and different points of view with respect to the facts.

However, even this is hard to do when standards of reporting and journalism often seem non-existent. That word “standards” is really important. Without standards, everything becomes messy. We need to hold our governments to high standards just like we need to ensure the quality of our food and water reach hygiene standards.

In this regard, technology is no different. It too needs to be standards-centric. We also need to know that the right experts have inspected the quality of the source code. This means independent experts, not just those chosen and paid by the authors to assure the quality, security and reliability of the execution. So technology being open source helps a lot too. Read more

What are the Most Important Sales Tracking Software Features?

The Low-Code Development market set to grow exponentially in the coming years. It might be tempting to think that any platform will enable you to build great sales tracking software, or more commonly known as a CRM. However, the arrival of Amazon Honeycode on the market proves, once again, that this is not the case.

Crust CRM Suite shows what can be done with a complete Low-Code Development platform. A customer relationship management system is complex to develop. For instance, even professional-grade, free CRM’s require expertise. To deliver advanced CRM tools requires a complete understanding of concepts such as:

  • Leads in CRM
  • Opportunities in CRM
  • Quotes in CRM
  • Case Management in CRM
  • Reporting in CRM
  • What is a BPMS in the context of CRM
  • And much more!

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Crust Releases version 2020.06 and Removes Paywall for All Products

Cork, Ireland, 30 June 2020

Crust Technology is excited to announce its latest major release, version 2020.06. Along with significant feature and functionality upgrades, Crust is also delighted to announce the removal of the paywall for all products in its portfolio. This means that the open-source Crust products are now free:

We’re thrilled with the latest features improvements and the expression of commercial confidence to remove the paywall on our product portfoliosays Niall McCarthy, CEO of Crust Technology.Crust is growing quickly and, with much innovation to come in 2020 and beyond, we’re proving we can adapt to fast-changing market realities effectively and aggressively”.

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Crust is Spreading its Wings

Since we launched in March 2019, Crust CRM Suite has established itself as the de facto open-source alternative to Salesforce. Self-funded, profitable in our first year of trading and equipped with an order book delivering over a year’s worth of cash runway, Crust Technology is already on target to grow between 200% and 300% in its second year. Corteza, the community project founded when Crust contributed its entire code base to the Commons Conservancy in June 2019, has gone from strength to strength, garnering many thousands of users in its first year. Its goal to become “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity” is gaining momentum.

These are big statements and we count ourselves lucky, given the economic mayhem and misfortune that has afflicted so many to date in 2020. Keeping our commercial focus and development on track and on budget has been a tough but welcome challenge to date and our next steps will set the bar higher again. Read more

Why is Customer Relationship Management important?

The 3 main reasons why Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is important are:

  1. Up to date information
    Customer information is always up to date, and easily accessible to all authorised staff.
  2. Automation
    Automation enables the streamlining of complex customer interaction processes, which saves time and reduces errors.
  3. Insights
    Finally, it provides businesses with reporting tools. Understand your customers better and detect where you can improve the sales team.

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What is BPMS?

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

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

What is an Open-Source Low-Code Platform?

It’s a cliché to say by now, but the world has entered stormy economic waters. Spending on information technology is due to decrease for the foreseeable future. Being less expensive than traditional development and often delivering better results, the growth of Low-Code Platforms is about to accelerate even further. Planet Crust offers the premium free and open-source Low-Code Platform Corteza for building records-based management web applications.

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

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?

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