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
Hi Jaspreet,
If you are checking out Drupal/Joomla do also look at DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com). its neat stuff and the community is quite active. one more plus is that the core team has matured into a corporation who are now providing SLA based support to enterprise customers (reliability is always a concern with open source community projects.. joomla for example got created when the core team of mambo broke apart due to internal differences).
Although DotNetNuke is open source and free it (obviously) needs win XP/2003 + sql server to run on. But if you want to run and manage just 1 site you’d be going for a hosted solution (lot of hosts provide dotnetnuke option for web hosting, godaddy etc…).
just my 2 cents..
Hi Jaspreet,
You can try DeskAway for project/task management (www.deskaway.com).
Best,
S
Well no, missed that.
I didn’t want to particularly point fingers at Tie … but all _costly_, five starred, whos’ who flooded conferences.
I happened to get an invite Tie Pune summit (long back) and was sad to find that none of the speakers were first generation entrepreneurs 🙁
and would like to go for Delhi Tie summit, (coz i am in delhi during those days) … but i am kind of tempted to spend that money on a customer visit.
-J
“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”
Were you present at the TiE ISB Connect? I think this one was a lot better than what you describe.
In any case, if you are interested in searching for a solution, I’d be interested in the same.
– Santosh
Jaspreet,
As most of the people here, I recommend Drupal as well. Have you looked at opensourcecms.com? They have listings/demo for a lot of open source CMS and other projects.
opensourcehelpdesklist.com is another site that lives up to its domain name. Techexcel.com is a paid alternate that you might want to look at.