No problem programming or making some of our own tools. We've already considered making our own intermediary API server to be the glue between the systems. I'm just curious to see what you'd all do out there in this situation or if anyone has gone through these growing pains (and what they did to fix them).
Thanks for the info though! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Peterson" <[email protected]> To: "AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, July 5, 2018 12:13:51 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] One Program To Rule Them All.. ? We use Netsuite. Not sure if I'd recommend it if I were starting again. My general issue with it is that we have frequently built the network to Netsuite instead of the other way around, and don't have real database access to it so things that make sense from an ontological perspective can't easily be done and you end up having a bunch of hacked 1-1-1-1 relationships instead of many to many relationships. It is our CRM/Billing/Accounting/Ticketing/Payroll/Sales/Inventory platform. Doesn't really do Project Management short of the typical Estimate->Sales Order->Fulfilment process. We have a programer on staff who does a lot of integration for us like syncing Netsuite with our Radius Databases etc. For communications we use slack and documentation we use lucid charts. Lucid chart diagrams get linked to entities in Netsuite. Slack is somewhat tied into our other systems, i.e alerts and some custom functions can be managed through slack. No matter what you use, your going to have to program. I'd likely start with Sugar CRM and then build around that If I were starting from scratch. We generally look for a tool to do X or Y or Z and then try to manage all of them but end up with a toolbox full of random tools that don't make sense in the same toolbox. Starting with a toolbox system then integrating it with the tools and the tools with it makes more sense but takes a lot of planning up front. On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 11:18 AM, Steve < [ mailto:[email protected] | [email protected] ] > wrote: We have a dilemma of having multiple billing programs, multiple businesses all by run by one office. Because of the nature of what we are doing we have no choice to use 1 product for all of them. Separate companies and geographic locations etc. Multiple Powercode instances for different countries, non wireless services require separate system. The issue is one tech support for all of them. So when the public contacts us we need to ID what sort of customer it is, where, and log into the appropriate back end, put tickets and issues into that specific system. Then we need to monitor multiple channels, Email, Voice, Text, Slack, Social Media, Chat etc. Input the issues / tickets into each billing system. Then we need to tie these tickets somehow to other tools and reference material such as Wiki's, KB's, IPAM's, Charts, Diagrams, attachments, decision trees. Then we need software to manage all of these issues that are attached to ongoing projects. Project management software or kanban boards like Trello. Then we all need to collaborate in the same system internally and globally. Some employees are mobile obviously some are fixed. Some people use slack, we use Zimbra chat and slack. Then maybe you could even have your Sales team use this to enter in new leads, customers to push that information into the right billing software package. So yes there are a few solutions that do lump SOME of these things together. Zendesk is one example can unify your channels into one pretty flat and basic ticketing system. You can integrate it with Trello cards (minimally) and other software like Jira etc. It is by far the biggest cloud based software but it simply just helps you plug into other products they support. I've been looking at some of these cloud based programs that help unify comms and other functions. The rest you'll need to build out yourself, and or use / attach to existing programs. So what you get is needing to pay 5 different products a monthly fee that we could host ourselves internally. Then it still doesn't have all the functions you want in 1 nice collaboration / ticketing suite. I'd like to ask you folks.. what you use if anything to unify some of your platforms? As you grow much larger you encounter these growing pains. I'm looking for something we can really grow into no matter which billing software we use. It must be 2 way however, preferably on prem. This allows us to pull customer info into the system without risk of hack or interception. SO the goal is: 1 ticketing software -- multiple businesses 1 collaboration / email platform / chat 1 project management software 1 sales process -- multiple billing platforms 1 repository of information pulled from multiple sources All of them linked together. -- AF mailing list [ mailto:[email protected] | [email protected] ] [ http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com | http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com ] - -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
