Helping your business to do more business
Thanks to clever marketing campaigns by various vendors over the past few years Customer Relationship Management, or CRM to use its abbreviated form, has become intimately associated with a certain category of software. I would argue that that has happened to such an extent that many people think of it as software rather than what should be its true meaning.
HTML 5 has been getting a lot of coverage over the past few months in both the IT press and blogs, with most of the browser manufacturers now committing to support parts of it, no doubt in some cases just to score a few headlines. But what does it all mean for us as businesses at a practical level today?
At Convallis we've been working with .Net 4 for some time and while WCF Data Services has been around (under a different name) since .Net 3.5 Sp1 we hadn't dabbled. However, while implementing a new feature for online ConvallisCRM which required a Silverlight component I decided to experiment with Data Services to provide the Web Services needed by the Silverlight component to exchange data with.
Any web site is worthless if it fails to attract visitors, most importantly this requires a pleasing design and interesting content that holds the visitors attention beyond the initial 'click off' time. There are many ways to attract new visitors but one of the most important, and certainly one that can't be ignored are visits as a result of a search, and that requires that the site does well in its search engine rankings.
Part of the art/science of programming is taking a big problem and breaking it down into smaller problems. The idea being that on their own the smaller problems are far easier to solve, and in doing so you then find that the big problem has also been resolved. It's a technique I use regularly, breaking a project down into its base functionality and then working on and testing those functions until the whole project has been written.