Connected Data

We added the ability to upload documents that are MS Office 2007 files (and more) in the Companies, Contacts, Personnel, Projects, and Knowledge Management modules.  New file extensions added are: dot, docx, dotx, pptx, potx, ppsx, xlsx, xltx, avi, pmd, pst, and rtf.

We also added a mass uploader to the Contact Manager: Opportunities module.  This feature allows you to quickly upload multiple documents to Opportunity records at one time (PC only). Simply click the “Add” button in the Documents area of an Opportunity record and the new mass upload window will open. We’ll be adding this feature to other modules and areas over time.

How can a hosted solution save you money? Easy, no servers. As an example, one of our competitors provides an on-premises solution for CRM and accounting. They recommend a three server setup. Since this is a mission critical application, I will use redundant servers as my example.

1. Database Server - HP dl380 G5 - two 750 watt power supplies

2. Application server - HP dl380 G5 - two 750 watt power supplies

3. Reporting Server - HP dl360 G5 - two 350 watt power supplies

4. Tape Backup System - Dell PowerVault Tape Backup 114T - 85 watts

All told this is 3785 watts of electricity to run the three servers. Of course you can get cheaper servers that draw less power, but I would not want to run my critical business apps on any thing less robust and redundant. I will not take into account the extra cost of air conditioning because of heat generated by servers. Next set of assumptions:

1. Average cost of power - 10.03 cents per kilowatt hr - Source Energy Information Administration If you look at the tables you will see that costs vary by state. Just look up your state and find the right number for you.

2. Calculate the annual cost of 3785 watts by the average price of electricity - Source Wolfram Alpha The  average cost is $3326/year for electricity to run three servers. In Massachusetts the cost increases to $6684 per year. WOW!

Next is the cost of the servers, shipping to your company and setup. To make this a quick back of the envelope I will say the HP dl380s are $5,000 each, the HP dl360 is $4000 and the tape backup is $150. The cost of shipping these server is around $80 per box so total shipping is $200. Server setup is is another set of numbers, but lets assume you have staff who can do it as part of their job, so there is no incremental cost. The OS for each is $1029 WIndows 2008 Server and MS Sql Server is $5,737.

So back of the envelope calculation is $23,174 for hardware costs.

In 5 years it will cost you $16,630 for electricity and $23,174 for hardware or a total of $39,804.

Go green, get rid of your servers, reduce your carbon footprint and go SaaS.

We added additional fee fields to the reporting engine: 1) Net Fee - Estimated 2) Subconsultant Fee - Estimated Fee and 3) Gross Fees - Contracted Fee and 4) Gross Fees - Estimated Fees.

Marketing is more important than ever for firms, and Cosential has recently released a number of enhancements to support faster and more accurate opportunity and lead tracking and reporting.  These enhancements can help you: track better data for each opportunity, quickly see useful information  and help ensure fast, reliable updates.  

A highlight of these improvements is the Hit Rate Summary report which generates a summarized hit rate report in seconds.  To generate this structured report: from the Opportunity reports module, click on “Generate Custom Hit Rate.”  This generates a summary of win/loss statistics, including pending submissions.  You determine the date range (by Close Date) and can sort by all Firm Org categories (Offices, Divisions, etc.) as well as Primary/Secondary Categories.

We just did a soft launch of our new website design.  Visit our new site at http://www.cosential.com Still a lot of things to do and improve, but we are using our content engine, lead tracking tool and HR candidate tracking tool. We will be marketing our web content engine over the next few months and we wanted our new look and feel to be done. A few cool things include our new lead tracking tool. This is available to all enterprise users of the Cosential Web Application. A simple form for visitors to enter their email address. The system will then check to see if they have visited and registered before or will then collect more information for our lead tracking tool. The number of times and number of pages visited will affect our lead scoring tool. The more time a visitors views our site, the higher the lead score and hotter the lead is.  We have also enabled emailing in leads, and collecting leads from other sources.  We have improved our web content engine with a new generation web content engine API, so most ANY web designer can set up almost any design to be powered by the Cosential marketing system. We have a number of customers doing this now.

We will be adding a number of features including more demonstration videos and more dynamic content. We are tying this Wordpress blog into our content engine as well. Our philosophy is to give our customers the best tools possible. The best way to do this is to use them ourselves everyday!

This past week our DNS hosting provider Register.com was experiencing problems due to a massive denial of service attack. DNS for the less geeky means domain name server. What DNS does is to translate www.cosential.com into an ip address 63.240.68.126.  When Register.com had problems, our customers could not get to Cosential’s website even though all of our systems were just fine. This problem happened intermittently throughout the last two days. 1 minute our website was accessable and the next minute it was not. DNS is a 30 year old technology and rarely has this been a problem. Register.com is one of the largest providers on the Internet.

We added a bunch of backup DNS servers on different providers. You can have up to 12 DNS servers on your domain so we moved to a few new places. Some large and some small to widen the target.  Anyone who has a website or email account should reexamine how and how their DNS is being served. I am suggesting to all of our customers that they move DNS for their email servers to at least two providers.  In this mission critical world, it is very important that the boring stuff stays that way.

Great article on news.com

“Jeff Smith, Smule’s outspoken CEO and co-founder, casting his audio app company’s loyalty with the iPhone is largely a matter of the platform’s capabilities. Smule’s iPhone Ocarina instrument requires five audio scripts to run concurrently, Smith said, plus GPS, the accelerometer, multitouch, and multithreading. These are hardware requirements he says only the iPhone can handle.”

Another data point as to why small developers will not spend the money to support multiple platforms.

Some of our customers are wedded to Blackberrys. OK so we can improve the experience by specially formatting our web app for the Blackberry. We went to look up documentation about setting up web pages for the Blackberry and guess what, they do not have a web page describing formatting! We had to download pdf files which were formatted for print, not screen. RIM just does not get it!

Our second app was approved and is now in the Apple App Store for the iPhone. We built it in about two weeks and took all of the lessons we learned in the first app and applied them. We also built a really cool web service to work with it. More about this in another post.

.

1. Keep it simple. Our first app took 6 months to build and is still in the approval que. After the release of the beta version of 3.0 it is clear why they did not approve it. It took 3 1/2 months to find out the hard way.

2. Make sure to have the right message happen if you loose network connectivity. “This functions requires Internet Connectivity.”  This was our rookie mistake and why the app was rejected the first time we submitted it.

3. Make a product page formatted for the iPhone.

4. Make a product Video in HD

COSENTIAL PROJECT PHOTO

The app is really a very simple app. It takes a photo, with the camera or the user can select a photo from the library. The user then associates it to a project by name or number in Cosential which is downloaded when the app is started. We also have fields for Comments and Keywords.  You Have to be a current user of Cosential, so if you are please buy it. We are charging a modest price  for the time being, mostly to prevent people who are not Cosential users from downloading it.  If you like it, please leave so positive feedback.

Follow this link to iTunes

Today John Sullivan has a good post about strategies for websites for AEC firms. He makes a number of really good points. The first is diminish the use of Flash. I could not agree more. We know a few things about this. We have over 10 years experience building websites for AEC firms. We just finished re-building a website for Perkins Eastman Architects. We built a dynamic animation of Images on the home page. We used javascript animaion and NOT Flash. As a result, the page loads much faster. We did use a tiny bit of flash for the text which overlays the photos, but there is no “loading screen” which takes 1 minute. The more modern browsers can do almost all the Flash efects using javascrit and HTML. You just have to have a programmers who knows how.

And now for a shameless plug - Perkins Eastman is powering their entire site using the Cosential Website Content engine. We have just finished a public API using a webservide to access this. All of this means that most any designer or website agency can hook up an AEC firm website to our content engine. The advantage is that The Cosential CM Engine is built precisely for project based firms. It requires no programming or customization. We will have a new product page for this shortly.