Enter Google Voice. I heard about this some months ago, but it never really struck me as useful. I’m highly suspicious of Google, despite their “Don’t be evil” tagline. There’s got to be some evil reason behind hording all of this data. Our emails? Texts? Websites? Now our voices and phone numbers? Oh that’s right, if you sync your contacts with Google Contacts they already have them. So for my personal line? Never! I have no desire to use Google Voice for this. Frankly, I don’t even trust the phone companies with my data, but this may be a necessary breech for now. But for business? Yes! Google Voice has great potential for the independent business person.

Google Voice comes in two tasty varieties: Use your own number or get a new one. If you use your own, your stuck. No additional number for you. If you choose the Red Pill, then you’ll get a new phone number that you can set to ring at any number of phones. It’ll get your voicemail when you don’t answer. It’ll even send your voicemail as text messages. That’s right. Rumor has it, voice to text. Don’t panic yet…

Features for using your own number

• Google voicemail: voicemail like email
• Voicemail transcription: read what your voicemail says
• Custom greetings: vary voicemail greetings by caller
• International calling: low cost calls to the world
• Notifications: read voicemail messages via email or SMS
• Share voicemails: forward, embed, or download voicemails

Features if you get a new Google number

• One number: a single phone number that rings all your phones
• Free SMS: send, receive & store text messages online
• Block calls: send unwanted callers straight to voicemail
• Record calls: record phone calls and store them online
• Conference calls: join several people into a single call
• Screen callers: hear who is calling before you pick up

Here are some videos to wet your appetite. If you have a Voice account, please send me an invite! I applied for an account last week. Now I’m just waiting… and waiting… hitting refresh on my email over and over. Nothing but emails from cute girls. Where are you Google Voice invitation?

After manually entering all of my contacts (and taking a few minutes to delete a few), I began playing around with the calendar. I loved its sleek and shiny Apple appeal. It’s really quite easy to use. But one thing was missing: the ability to sync with Google Calendar. (I’ve taken to GCal after using it at my day job–I was raised on Exchange, but the IT manager before me implemented Google Mail, and there really hasn’t been a reason to change. I haven’t looked back, to be honest.) But for eight months I lamented my purchase for this one fatal flaw, despite the fact that it mostly surpassed all of my other needs and expectations.

I’m happy to report now that with the new 3.0 iPhone OS, syncing with Google Calendar–even multiple calendars–is so very easy. You will not have to sync your contacts with Google, nor will you run the risk of deleting important information. You just set it up and it works. It takes about three minutes.

Visit this link and follow the instructions: http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/general/google-calendar-speaks-caldav-to-the-iphone

Thanks to Just Another iPhone Blog for this post.

When you start searching for CRM software, the tools you come upon are SugarCRM and vTiger. But which one to choose? Which one of these would be more suitable for your company’s needs? In this article we have tried to make a comparison between SugarCRM and vTiger. Hope you find it useful! If you like what you see, and you want to see more, please consider visiting one of our sponsors. Each click makes us a few cents.

SugarCRM

Sugar OS is an open source CRM application bringing a feature-rich set of business processes that enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales performance, improve customer satisfaction and provide executive insight into business performance. It is a preferable choice for customers of all sizes across a broad range of industries because of its collaboration and administration capabilities to adapt how their company operates. Find more information about Sugar Open Source features.

SugarCRM Advantages
Sugar Suite is an excellent choice due to its advanced features, and is convenient to organizations from all sizes and industries. The installation of SugarCRM, as well as the installation of additional modules and language packs is quite easy and trouble-free, and the admin area offers a great variety of options and tools. SugarCRM is built on the pure Open Source LAMPS platform: Linux or Windows, Apache or IIS, MySQL, PHP, and SugarCRM. Its mobile solutions translate to less downtime and greater productivity. Sugar Suite integrates e-mail and calendar information with Microsoft Outlook, ensuring that company communications are centralized and coordinated. Due to the Flexible Delivery Model, there are no constraints around deployment. Moreover, the customizable User Interface and Workflow guarantee adaptation to the user, not the other way around. With Sugar Suite Modular Open Applications you will have what you need to connect across your business. The Open Source Architecture provides 100% visible source code for inexpensive customization and support. The Neutral Operation System avoids “forklift” upgrades and propriety vendor lock-in.

SugarCRM Disadvantages
While providing more capabilities and reliability, Sugar Suite loads slower than vTiger CRM and is not so easy to use. Problems may also arise if a user doesn’t lock the Installation after finishing it. Contrary to vTiger CRM, some of its add-ons are not free for installing and should be ordered additionally. Another disadvantage of SugarCRM is the very resource-consuming upgrade process. A SugarCRM upgrade can rarely be completed successfully on a shared server because the upgrade times out.

More resources for SugarCRM

• SugarCRM Tutorial
• SugarCRM Installation
• Sugar CRM Hosting

vTiger CRM

vTiger CRM is an Open Source CRM software appropriate for small and medium organizations. With it you can manage your company wide CRM and Inventory Management activities effectively, including sales force and marketing automation, customer support and service, and procurement. There are many tools and add-ons that will assist you in enhancing your organization’s business productivity. Some of them are MS Outlook, MS Office and Thunderbird integration, Customer Portal, RSS and others. Find more information about vTiger features.

vTiger CRM Advantages
Being extremely easy to use is perhaps one of the most important advantages of vTiger CRM. Compared to Sugar Suite, vTiger CRM loads faster. vTiger’s user interface is more intuitive and easier to use. The necessary software, such as Apache, MySQL, and PHP are integrated, and executables are made available both for Windows and Linux operating systems. The vTiger CRM software provides Open Source add-ons for Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla/Thunderbird, Microsoft Word, and Customer Portal, which add more value to the end-users by providing many enterprise features. The Software is absolutely FREE and does not require any up-front investment. It allows pre-sales and post-sales activities be integrated in a single application and provides rich user-experience with product customization and excellent customer support.

vTiger CRM Disadvantages
vTiger’s installation is somewhat tricky, e.g. because vTiger cannot populate its database during installation, and may require additional file changes in order to be completed successfully. Another disadvantage of vTiger versions 4.x is that, similar to SugarCRM’s upgrade issues, the upgrade process of vTiger also times out causing the upgrade to fail. In the new 5.x releases this problem has been fixed.

More resources for vTiger

• vTiger Tutorial
• vTiger Installation
• vTiger Hosting

Special thanks to SiteGround.com. Source: http://www.siteground.com/sugarcrm_vtiger.htm

We traversed the search engines (what we do best) and contacted our vendor resources to see what was available. We checked out HP and some of the other more mainstream vendors. By mainstream I mean basically enterprise-level solutions under $50k. The problems we found with these solutions were that most of them didn’t support the largest size hard drives on the market yet. Specifically, most of them didn’t support the new Western Digital 2TB Enterprise class drives. They’re green, so they run a little bit slower than other drives; but WD drives are pretty reliable, or such is my experience. One highly annoying caveat from this search is that a lot of HP’s arrays take the smaller Ultra320 SCSI drives, which, at least to my knowledge, don’t come in sizes larger than 300GB. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I haven’t found Ultra320 SCSI’s bigger than that.

We’ve used the smaller 4-bay Drobos for many months for workstation backups, and we’ve been really satisfied. So when we found the DroboPros, we were anxious to look into them. Drobo has some really, really nice features. On our older Drobo’s, as well as the DroboPro, they use a technology that they call BeyondRAID. RAID 5 protects an array in case of single drive failure, RAID 6 protects the array in case of two disks failing simultaneously. Their BeyondRAID technology also offers some neat self-healing, drive reordering and automated (gasp) management of mixed drive sizes, upgrades, etc. Normally I’d shy away from these features and opt for managing the array myself, but I’ve seen it in action, and it actually works quite well.

Check this out. Right now the biggest hard drive you can get is 2TB. Many enterprise-level arrays won’t even support this. Most of them only support up to 1TB because, as is the nature of enterprise hardware, it can be a little slow to catch up. Almost all of the larger arrays we checked out–those that support 30 or more hard drives–don’t support anything bigger than 1TB. The other issue here is that with the traditional model of hard drive array, once you pick a drive size (sometimes even a drive make/model) you are stuck with it. Say you have a 30-bay array with 30 1TB drives and you’re ready to migrate up to the 2TB drives and double your space. If your array will support these larger drives, which is not likely, you’ll have to reconfigure the entire thing.

When you’re ready to upgrade the DroboPro (as well as a smaller Drobo) from an array of 1 or 2TB drives to the inevitable 4TB, 8TB or 16TB drives, you simply remove one of the drives and replace it with a larger one. It’s hotswappable. And, get this, the data on the missing drive is still accessible while the device formats and prepares the new larger drive. Furthermore, the drive sizes don’t have to match. You can have a Drobo array with mixed-size drives from 1TB to 16TB. This means that in the 8-bay DroboPro I can ultimately have an array of 128TB of space assuming I don’t want single or dual disk protection. Yes, you get that option, too.

Another thing to consider is your connection to the unit. It supports USB, FireWire800 and, my favorite, iSCSI. When we got our first two DroboPros, we filled them with 8 2TB hard drives each with RAID level 6 for that dual-drive protection. We hooked them up via FW800 and began simultaneous transfers from 2 1TB external Glyph drives to each of the drives. It was a straight copy of all the drive contents from each Glyph to one of the Drobos. This way we wouldn’t eat up too much of either connection’s resources.

At first we were pretty disappointed. It was taking at least 13 hours to transfer the drives simultaneously. So we took it down to one transfer, and our time dropped to 4-7 hours for 500GB. Still not that great. To make matters worse, the transfers seemed to tank ultimately. Almost none of them finished in one transfer. We had to come back and restart the transfer after a few hours because the Drobo would lose its connection–or something. Also our throughput was something like 2MB/second, which is terrible. I noticed that whoever attached the Drobos to the server had pinched the cables pretty good. That could have been the reason. Nevertheless, I called Drobo’s tech support–the real test.

I spoke primarily to Jeremy, who was not only extremely helpful, but he was really friendly and thorough, too. He identified that we were not on the latest firmware nor did we have the latest Drobo software–the application that runs in the background. Also he had me test some different cables on the devices to troubleshoot the connection weirdness. He  asked why weren’t using iSCSI. I didn’t install the device, so I was curious too.

It turns out that iSCSI is really easy to setup on these DroboPros. And it works great. Dig this. You simply plug a Cat5 ethernet cable into the DroboPro port and the other end into your server. If you don’t have dual network ports like we do built in on our Macs, just get a gigabit switch and network the Drobos like you would anything else. The Drobos are given DHCP IP addresses. More or less plug and play. By the end of the day, we had the units reconfigured for iSCSI. We were transferring up to 3 Glyphs at a time in about 3 hours with about 45MB/second transfer speed. Now that’s impressive. Oh, by the way though, your iSCSI needs to run on a gigabit network otherwise the speed isn’t going to be much better than FW800.

A couple weeks have passed, and we’re still quite pleased with the DroboPros. At this point, I highly recommend them. I’ll update this post if my opinion changes. But in this price range there doesn’t seem to be anything better. The DroboPros are around $1500 each. The WD 2TB enterprise hard drives are about $320 each. Our cost per TB is roughly $340 after RAID (which eats a few TB).