openCRX - new features in openCRX v2.1

openCRX allows you to capture relationships between accounts (contacts, legal entities, groups, etc.) at exactly the level of detail you require to get your job done. From tracking simple relationships of the sort "X knows Y" to documenting very detailed relationship information of the sort "A has been knowing B since 1-Jan-2008, the quality of the relationship is excellent, and the fact that they know each other is only known by A, B, and X", openCRX has been up to the task since v2.0. With openCRX v2.1 we are going one step further. In addition to analyzing direct relationships between accounts (i.e. 1 hop), openCRX v2.1 enables you to analyze multi-hop relationships with various sophisticated tools. openCRX delivers answers to questions like:

Show me the shortest path (i.e. minimum number of hops) from account A to account B.
Show me the shortest path from account A to account B with a minimum relationship quality of good.
Was there a relationship between account B and account C back in 1997 over no more than 4 hops?
Is there a relationship between Company X (including its employees) and Company Y (including its employees) over no more than 5 hops?
...

Thanks to the JavaScript Information Visualization Toolkit (JIT) of Nicolas Garcia Belmonte - distributed with a BSD-license - it is also possible to visualize accounts and their relationships. Even better, you can interactively navigate the graph and explore the social network of any account:

Sample Screen Shot #1:

Sample Screen Short #2:

The number of hops is not limited by openCRX, i.e. if your DBMS/DB-Server is powerful enough, you can easily analyze networks covering 8 hops and more. That should be sufficient for any real-world application.

The UML model for all of the above features is quite straigh-forward:

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AJAX Inplace Editing

The process of editing objects is a lot smoother with the new AJAX inplace editing control. No more context switches, no more page reloads, and no more (browser window) pop-ups. The show inspector is simply replaced in-place by the edit inspector whenever you choose to edit an object:

When you're done with editing you click the [Save] button and the edit inspector is replaced with the show inspector containing the new values.

Even better: it is also possible to edit objects directly from within a grid. The following screen shot shows an account grid with the contact "Koller, André" ready to be edited:

Once you click on the menu entry "Edit" an inplace edit inspector is inserted right below the respective grid line:

Once you're done with editing you click the button [Save] and the inplace edit inspector is replaced with the show inspector containing the new values for you to verify.

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Segment Setup Wizard

This new wizard puts segment administrators in a position to setup/configure newly created segments with a single click. The wizard creates all a whole range of advanced helper objects for Activity Management (e.g. Activity Types, Activity Creators, Activity Trackers), Groupware Functionality (Shared Business Calendar), Workflow Management (e.g. Topics, Workflows), and Reporting (e.g. various filters, reporting spreadsheets, etc.):

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Mail Merge Wizard

This new wizard takes an RTF template (which you can create/edit with any RTF-capable word processor like OpenOffice Writer, MS Word, etc.) and merges an account's postal address with this template to produce a new document. If the wizard is called on a group it produces a merged document for each of the group's member and finally neatly zips up all the merged documents for an easy download. On a decent server you can produce merged documents at a rate of several hundred documents per second.

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Spreadsheet-based Report Generation

In addition to the advanced reporting features based on JSP-Wizards, we introduce a powerful new reporting feature based on spreadsheets. Spreadsheet-based reporting is suitable for end-users and we provide various ready-to-use standard reports that are filterable/sortable in Excel:

list of members (of an account)
list of filtered accounts (filter is user-definable)
list of activities by activity group (Tracker, Milestone, Category)
list of filtered activities (filter is user-definable)
list of filtered contracts like leads, opportunities, quotes, sales orders, and invoices (filter is user-definable)

Creating new ad-hoc reports is very easy:

Create an Export-Profile (basically a filter describing which objects you want to export).
Execute an export based on this new profile to get a spreadsheet containing the raw export.
Beautify the spreadsheet as required.

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Groupware VCF Servlet

Starting with openCRX v2.1 all accounts contain a new (derived) attribute vCard:

openCRX manages this attribute in a fully automated fashion so that an account's vCard is up-to-date at any point in time. Furthermore - similar to openCRX's iCal servlet - the newly developed vCard servlet makes vCards available to vCard-enabled clients.

We will also provide code enabling MS Outlook to connect to openCRX to download/upload Contacts.

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Support for HSQLDB, the Lightweight 100% Java SQL Database Engine

Starting with openCRX v2.1 we will fully support HSQLDB. Due to some limitations (e.g. no server side cursors, result sets must always fit in memory) we do not recommend HSQLDB for production use. Nevertheless, as HSQLDB is very easy to install and configure, it is a good choice for testing, development, and demo purposes. And performance is easily on par with MySQL. Our new installers will include a fully functioning HSQLDB instance.

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http://www.crixp.com/ http://www.openmdx.org/