Hi, i am facing some generic problems and i think many of us out here should be facing the same …. so i thought i might put up a post regarding the same and attract some wise answers.
My customers are enterprises, so my viewpoint and questions revolve around them. Feel free to give generic answers …
1. Website management – Whats’ the easiest way to manage and scale a website with more of less static pages. I found wordpress to be an overkill and wiki an over simplification. In wordpress you have to remove/turn-off all the extra features which are blog centric and wiki’s flat URL hierarchy kills a lot of fun.
2. Online suppor system and Knowledge base (KB)– I found no good (esp. Open Source/Free in code or cost) solutions for managing customer centric issues or knowledge articles. Any suggestions. I can foresee in very near future that, KB and support and licenses if not centralized can become a mess. I just found JIRA and Confluence good, but seems like even they are not very much customer centric and costly. BTW, I use trac for internal development and project management.
Also how do you handle customer calls. Its easy now giving customers just one mobile number, but don’t see it scaling.
3. Open Source: Any indian companies here, with good experience of utilizing the Open Source development model, not just PR ?
As i understand, to utilize the benefits of open source, you should have a community which also gives back in source or opinion. Rest is just PR.
4. Enterpreneur Meetings : Do you guys meet up some place where VCs are not there ?
I am not particularly happy the way these conferences by nasscon/Tie are organized. They charge a big sum + travel and usually there are just 1/2 speakers ready to share and interact. VCs and Speakers are praising what they have done “right” in past and attendees are just busy pleasing them. Now it may be just me feeling this way …
IMO, Good food involves much more than knowledge of “good recipes”. I guess you should know the possible mistakes/gochas as well. I have done atleast 1001 mistakes, and would like to share them and learn from others.
So, if all those who have done in the past and all those attempting the same can get together dumping there company tags behind, outside a five star hotel … I think it would be great !!
Opinions ??
- India’s Hottest Startups - September 7, 2008
- The case of SonimTech – And lessons we can learn - August 23, 2008
- The Druvaa Story – III - July 14, 2008
Agree completely!
Vtiger is a good option which i would rate above Sugar and other open systems.
Like everyone else ill recommend Drupal once more :).Sugar CRM for the other stuff.
I must agree with Jaspreet on the TIE events which are held in total glamour and attract only those who can afford it. I think startups would certainly find something else to invest their 7k in other than going to a TIE event which may or may not yield the returns they want….
There are lots of Barcamp’s and Mobile Monday’s meets all over India. Do check out their wiki pages for more info on their schedules. If you wanna just meet up @delhi then just drop me a line.. 🙂
For website management, i would suggest using Drupal. Takes a bit of learning but within a few hours you can master it and it can be scaled to any amount u want to. Do give it a try. Better than Joomla also in many ways… http://www.drupal.org
1. Drupal – If you are not scared of hacking a bit of php then there is nothing drupal can’t do.
2. TigerCRM/SugarCRM
3. Again TigerCRM/SugarCRM might be interesting models to look at.
4. Totally agree on Tie being very expensive. The recent Tie bash in delhi is like 7K per head – spending that much for lunch should be reason enough for a VC(Angel) to not invest in your startup.
Hey Jaspreet,
Typical enterprise product problems when you need good mapping for
KB. Good APIs or open source support equally viable.
Suramya