On the fifth day…

Nothing much has transpired today because I got distracted setting up VirtualBox in my other desktop computer that is running Ubutu (Hardy Heron). Everything went OK except that the disk space I allocated for the guest OS is too small which meant that I had to install XP again. The good thing was that I have not installed any additional software. I’ve installed VMWare in the same machine and to me it seemed a bit slower than VirtualBox. I guess the real test comes when I have everything installed. The other thing that I will do is to physically relocate my data folders and files into another hard disk and leave in the primary hard disk just the operating system and programs.

Now back to the 30-day challenge…

My blog entries are starting to get comments and at the moment they are all constructive. Thank you. I’m tossing around an idea on how to structure the Product table. At the moment my idea is to have a product and product item table. The product item table represents the different permutations of the product e.g. standard, professional, enterprise, educational, etc. Aside from representing the different permutations, the product item can also represent permutations in prices which a single type i.e. the professional version can have different pricing schemes. The alternative is to have a single product table and have all these different type and price combinations represented by different records. What do you think?

On the fourth day…

I got stuck on the Issues detail window. I was not satisfied with the initial layout that I did so I moved the different elements around a couple of times and the funny thing is that I ended up with the initial layout that I had. The other thing that I spent quite a bit of time on was trying to include the processing of actions relating to an issue. I also wanted the actions to be available from the main window but did not want to have to maintain two (2) versions. Here is a screenshot of how the issue detail window finally looks (I think this is now pretty stable).

I wanted to get the issues option to a stage where I can use it to capture issues relating to this challenge (dogfooding). The other thing I did was to create a spearate section in the main window for help desk related functions. Here is a screenshot of how it looks like:

I think before spending too much time on a given portion of the application I shall try to get the remaining functions up and running. I know it is still a bit early but if you are interested in giving it a whirl before the 30 days are up just send me an email at pflores at pcfworks dot com.

As the name implies misvCRM is the name of the application I am currently developing and hope to finish in 30 days. As I have mentioned in my first blog post, it is a desktop application that aims to integrate in a single place the different tasks that a misv performs in managing his/her product(s).

At the moment the following functions are now in place:

• Client
• Issues (aka bug/defect tracking and recording)
• Issues Actions
• System Codes
• Product

The other functions that still need adding are:

• Sales
• Product Items
• Client Contact (aka communications)
• Marketing (mailouts, etc.)

I aim to get Sales, Product Items, and Client Contact in place before the coming weekend. I can see that most of the remaining work will be in integrating the different functions i.e. being able to add actions from within the issues detail window or adding system code items after adding the system code etc.

I have added a new screenshot in the screenshots page. Please have a look at them and if you have any comment please let me know.

Yesterday, 1 June 2008 is the official start of my personal thirty-day challenge. I have to admit I have already done some work on this project with the screenshots as evidence. Obviously there is still much work to be done but I feel positive about being able to achieve my goal. This optimism is based on the rate at which I managed to get client, help desk (issues), and system codes management up and running. It is by no means complete (oh no not by a long shot) but it has enough functionality that records can be created, edited, and deleted i.e. your normal CRUD functions.I still have the product and sales portions to develop which might take me one to two days.

After these, I plan to start working on the enquiry portion of the different sections. This I feel is the more difficult aspect of the exercise simply because of the different ways of how the information can be requested i.e. should it be individual or aggregate, in list form or graphical form, etc. I also need to include the most basic of business rules and the related validation e.g. which pieces of data are mandatory and which are optional; which data items depend on one or more data items etc.

Here is a screenshot of the main window. As you can see it is very similar to another application that I have developed called VeriTime Time Tracker. I used this layout because it gave the users easy access to all the possible functions of the application.

I think this is all for now. When I have all the sections in place I will probably write a little description of each and how they relate to each other. Wish me luck.

Here is the first cut of the entity relationship diagram of misvCRM (which by the way is the name of the application). It is possibly almost complete but I am sure as time goes on I will discover that there are better ways of designing things. For now, this serves as a primary blueprint.

To draw this diagram I used Visual Paradigm for UML for Community Edition. It is a freeware product that allows you to draw different kinds of diagrams such as UML, requirement diagram, CRC card diagram, flowchart, ORM diagram, etc