Engulfed in flames, an innocent OAP driver was literally...

   ON THE ROAD TO TERROR!

It was 8 am on a sunny spring afternoon when the Reverend Cameron P. W. “Bimbles” McColander, O.B.E.  set out for work. A very careful and experienced driver, he carefully negotiated the tricky left turn onto the bustling main road and reversed at a steady 5mph towards his local petrol station, situated on Cackwell Heath Road.

Having lived in Stoatford for 67 of his 53 years, he knew the surrounding area like the back of his hand. “I had no inkling that this day would be any different from any other,” he recalls. “I was due to arrive at my place of work about 8:30 am, where I am a plectrum tester for a large multinational. Being a careful and considerate driver, I indicated in good time and turned into my local garage to fill up.” Little did Rev. McColander know of his appointment with destiny that fateful day.

As he filled his carefully and considerately maintained Austin Princess with premium, he was unaware of a small split in the fuel hose, which, second-by-second, was leaking highly flammable petroleum spirit onto the arm of his jacket. “I didn’t feel anything at the time,” he recalls, running his hand through his thinning ginger hair, “I was concentrating on trying to stop the pump spraying the last few drops of petrol onto my feet as I took the nozzle out of the car’s filler.”

By now thoroughly soaked in petrol, Rev. McColander’s jacket was quite literally a time-bomb waiting to explode. Any tiny spark could immediately cause the entire sleeve to erupt into a flaming fireball.

After having carefully and considerately paid for his fuel, McColander started up his car and drove away, casually resting his petrol soaked right arm along the rim of his car’s open window. “It was a beautiful day,” he reminsces, idly scratching at his testicles, “the air was so fresh and clear, and thus I naturally decided to smoke a cigarette.”

The Rev.’s 8:15 am assignment with fate was now only seconds away. He lit his cigarette and took a deep, invigorating puff. A smoker for most of his life, the Rev. has achieved an almost superhuman lack of common sense, rivalled only by his lack of sense of smell and taste. As he tapped his cigarette out of the window, a fragment of burning ash fell onto his Arm of Doom.

“In moments my whole arm was engulfed in flames,” he states matter-of-factly, picking his nose, “I was on an urban clearway, and naturally being a safe, careful and considerate driver I continued at my alloted speed until I could find somewhere safe to stop.”

At that moment, quite by chance, a cruising police car happened to be passing in the opposite direction, attracted by the smell of frying. “We couldn’t believe our eyes,” reports Sergeant Pierre ‘Snapper’ Cloget, driver of the unmarked jamjar. “All we could see was a wall of flame quite literally gushing out of his car.”

By this time, the Rev. McColander had managed to find a small picnic spot near the beautiful Chiltern Hills, and had pulled over. Leaping out of his car, his arm still aflame, he was casting about for something to quench the fire.

Seconds later the police car driven by Sgt. Cloget and his partner Harry ‘Harry’ Harbinger (who asked to be mentioned in this story) pulled up next to the burning vicar. “I didn’t stop to think,” says Harbinger. A tough-looking 37 year-old ex-wrestler, Harbinger had some years previously exchanged his leotard and make-up of the professional wrestling circuit for the lacy underwear and handcuffs of the special investigative unit of the Police force. He continues, “I just jumped out of the car, grabbed the man, and threw him to the ground, where I was able to execute my speciality, the ‘Harbinger Hamstring and Double Nut Crunch’. In the process, the flames were fortunately smothered by the damp grass.”

“He was a very lucky man indeed,” observes Sgt Cloget, toying with his truncheon suggestively, “once the flames were out, we could see that the thickness of his jacket had prevented the flames from harming him in any way. The only downside is that once we were sure he was ok, duty prevailed upon us, and we had to arrest him.”

But on what charge?

I just ran a little experiment on my PC. I used AppTimer (hopeless gui, but a neat program!) to launch each of my browsers 5 times in a row.

Here are the results (times are in seconds)



Guess I'm sticking with FireFox for now. Although to be fair, who cares about such tiny differences? I start my browser in the morning, and close it when I shut down my PC.

But I thought it was interesting.

Centerbase CRM from Centerbase Inc.

Basic Info

App Name	Centerbase CRM
App URL	http://centerbase.com/
App Version Reviewed	Version 5.4.3.29 (Centerbase 2010 aka Centerbase 2011, depending on where you look)
Test System Specs	Server: Win2K3, Clients: multiple Windows PCs running Vista or W7
Supported OSes	Windows XP/Vista/2K3/2K8/7
Support Methods	Forum, email, phone
Upgrade Policy	Minor upgrades: free. Major upgrades: not sure
Trial Version Available?	Yes, fully functional, limited to 30 days
Pricing Scheme	$195 per user standalone / $39 per user per month hosted
Reviewer Donation Link	Donate to timns, the review Author
Screencast Video URL	http://www.centerbase.com/inside.aspx?module_name=tour
Relationship btwn. Reviewer and Product	I use a registered copy of this software for which I paid the full license fee

Intro:

I've been trying to get a CRM in place at my company for years. We're a small software business, specializing in logistics, and in the past we have not had a very coherent strategy for tracking leads, scheduling appointments, tracking customer requests or bug reports. Each of us used different approaches. To be fair, for the most part we got away with it. But as customer base grows, you suddenly reach that "tipping point" where there's just too much to track using an ad hoc approach. This year I finally sat down and really focused on trying to get something that would fix it.

After trialling quite a few low-end and mid-end systems, I settled on Centerbase. Please read this review for "why."

Who is this app designed for

I would say this application is designed for the lighter end of CRM. It would expect to run on the PC of a user who is part of a small-to-medium sized business that is trying to get or stay organized with its client base. It feels scalable to some extent, but I would anticipate that large companies with full-time CRM-oriented staff may need to look beyond Centerbase at the more heavyweight systems.

Installation

Installation was not too bad, although I stumbled a bit on the documentation since (in my opinion) it was not made clear that the server configuration must explicitly publish the server's address. However, in most cases it'll be a simple process since you may be using Centerbase's own servers. In that scenario, you simply install the client, and enter the account details provided to you by the Centerbase admins. On the upside, it gave me a chance to try out the support available, and I'm pleased to say my forum post on the subject was answered quickly.

Personally, I am paranoid about using 3rd party servers, and since we run several of our own, I earmarked a box and installed the server on our intranet. In this situation you install the server part first. All in all, it's a simple process. The server consists of a SQL/Server database on its backend, and a (probably) reasonably straighforward Web Service Extension which handles the clients' requests for data. Some minor configuration is required, which is achieved through a reasonable-looking little  program which appears during the installation.



In my case the setup only took about 20 minutes or so. In fact it would've been quicker than that if I had not misunderstood the ip address issue.

After that, the client installation was a breeze. Two minutes after downloading the client installer, I was set up and ready to go.

First Impressions



As you can see from the screenshots, it's all very blue! As with a lot of newer applications, there's the eponymous ribbon bar at the top, with the main menu accessible from the button. It's a pretty simple interface and I think all the better for a limited number of toolbars. There is nice customization available including selecting which buttons are shown on the ribbon, and which fields should be shown when viewing your data.

Expectations are that you already know a little about how to use a CRM, and the standard stuff is all readily available to you. I plunked around for a while and it did not take me long to set up a few of our more lively customers, my todo list, and my current support issues. Since then I've been running for several weeks now and the database is filling up nicely. I would expect the system to scale quite well, and there are a few options you can change to help prevent too much up/downloading of data when working remotely.

On the left is a tabbed datatree. Several tabs can be kept open and it's useful to have your contacts listed here. The central pane is also tabbed, and I tend to have tabs open for my todo list, calendar and help desk tickets (which are called 'Cases' in Centerbase) so I can quickly flip through the day's activities.

You can of course also track prospects, leads, contracts etc. and the system will even help you set up forecasts. I have not made use of these features but they are covered adequately in the user guide.

Strengths

Linking of items - I love the linking aspect. It's something I use a lot and it's probably the standout feature for me. In a nutshell, linking means you can connect any item in Centerbase with any other item simply by dragging one onto the other. This makes it very easy to collate and organise your data without needing any duplication. Let's take a simple example:

Someone from Company X downloads your software. You set them up as a Lead, and link them to the Product(s) in which they are interested. Ideally you may also have a contact. Create your contact, and link them to the company. Create a task to follow-up in two weeks. Link the task. (This is all achieved by simply dragging-n-dropping or using copy-n-paste)

In 2 weeks time, the task becomes due. You can have reminders appear as a pop-up window and/or email. From the task view you can instantly see that "Fred Shredd from Company X is trialling Product Z" along with all relevant details -  without having to duplicate any of your data or look anywhere else. Expand the links to see the details of each linked record. One-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many links are all supported.



This is really scratching the surface in terms of linking possibilities: when working with large numbers of customers, users and developers, the advantages start to add up quite quickly. No doubt some other CRMs share this feature, but of the small and mid-size systems that I looked at, it is unique.

Very easy report creation - Centerbase includes a complete drag-n-drop report designer meaning you can put together reports exactly how you need them to look, usually in just a few minutes. At the moment I'm using this to produce a daily todo list in a nice format, and various weekly summaries including progress reports, outstanding payments and a kind of management summary.

Customization - As well as the report designer, there's also a script engine so you can create your own queries to run on the database. The results are shown in the tree structure on the left of the standard interface. Very handy and it encourages you to look at your data in a lot of different ways, which I think helps to avoid tunnel vision.

   

In addition, you can even edit the program's standard forms, to add or remove fields as you see fit. This should not be overlooked - one of the main problems a lot of CRM users suffer from is overload. In my case I stripped out quite a few (to my mind) superfluous fields to keep the data lean and mean.

Good back-end - SQL/Server is a very solid and proven database engine. I think they made a good choice here. Setting up simple scripts for compaction, backup etc. is just a few minutes work, and as it's such a popular database, there are a lot of resources out there if you need any help.

Collections- as well as the pre-defined screens and data groupings, you can define your own. I've only just started with this idea, but I can see the appeal. In my case, I am grouping users together by which of our software products they have licensed. It's then very easy to focus on a subset of your client database when (say) preparing a mailshot.

Integration - there is a plug-in for Outlook which allows Centerbase to import selected emails and/or addresses. There are also import features so you can scrape large amounts of data from other applications. A special ACT! filter is provided, or it can handle simple CSV files in a fairly configurable way.

The needs improvement section

There are a few bugs. If the system loses connection to its database, it sometimes seems to have trouble re-establishing communication. A restart seems to clear it.

Screen size and location is not stored.

I have found one reproducible error when creating a company at the same time as a contact. We shall see what the support guys have to say about it!

Having said all that, I've only experienced one or two complete crashes since installing, and no data loss.

How does it compare to similar apps

A CRM system is a very subjective beast. I tried quite a few systems, and it's hard to be objective. In my case I was not willing to use any type of online service, and therefore narrowed the field quite quickly. For the rest, it seems that there's a very small subset of systems that go far enough beyond a PIM without charging headlong into overwhelming complexity. I have listed some of the other software that I trialled at the end of this review.

Help & Support

There's a relatively complete user guide available both online and as a downloadable document. It's a bit out of date, but worth going through to get a good idea of the system's capabilities. Unlike a lot of CRMs, you do get a sense that you're able to mould the system to fit your methods of working.

As is pretty common with software providers nowadays, Centerbase has a forum which is a useful place to go when the user guide doesn't cut it. It's not very active, but one of the Centerbase developers ("Andrew") seems to check in daily, and has replied satisfactorily to all of my posts.

Conclusions

So far, with a few small reservations, I'm happy with this software. Sure, there are free systems out there, but I think it's not a bad move to pay a chunk of change for a product like this. It makes me take it seriously, and to be fair, in terms of the price of some big CRM systems out there, it's a drop in the ocean. I can also expect quality support, and to feel that my voice is heard in relation to any bugs I find, or enhancements I may request.

So if you're in the market for a CRM, I think Centerbase deserves a little of your time for a proper evalution.

Also compared:  EnCircle, Desktop Sales Office, vTiger, Sugar, Radix, CustomerHunter, Time & Chaos