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Implement a Centralized Biz Mgmt Suite

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

The days of using a plain and simple CRM package are over. Today,

organizations need much more than a basic CRM to serve their needs. For

instance, one of the requirements of a CRM solution is a database of customer

contacts. The trouble is that usually, these come in the form of



business cards from so many different people. This makes it very difficult to
track them. So in addition to a basic customer contacts database, what's

needed is a good, centralized contact management solution. Your sales team is

completely crippled without it. Further still, they also need a sales force

automation (SFA) kind of a solution.

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In this article, we'll talk about one such solution, called CentraView,

which provides all three functions. The solution also includes a groupware

module, to do calendaring and file sharing within the workspace. It also has a

human resource module for submitting things like expense forms, time sheets,

etc. You can even synchronize this application with MS Outlook, Outlook Express,

Palm, Pocket PC and Blackberry through the Companion Link conduit. Here, we show

you how to incorporate this solution in your IT infrastructure.

Direct

Hit!
Applies

to:
IT managers
USP:

A complete business management system, which has 15 different modules that do Contact Management, SFA and CRM
Links:

www.centraview.com 
Google

keywords:
CRM, CBM solutions 

Prerequisites



The solution can be implemented on both Windows and Linux. We used Windows 2003
Server. You also need the Sun Java 2 SDK 1.4.2, MySQL 4.1 and MySQL database

connector. You can download CentraView from 'sf.net/projects/centraview'.

Download all these according to your platform and install them on a server class

machine. Note that the machine should have at least 512 MB RAM.

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Installation



Download centraview-2.1.4-jboss4.zip from the website to your server. The zipped
file has both a jboss application server and CentraView. After the files have

been extracted, go to the 'centraview' folder and you will find 'fs.zip'.

Unzip this to a separate folder. Then copy the downloaded MySQL database

connector for Java to 'mysql-connector-j.jar' file to path-to-jboss>\server\default\lib\.

Our path was '\centraview-2.1.4-jboss4\jboss-4.0.2'. Before starting the

application server, you have to set the Java home environment variable and Java

path. In Windows you can set it by right clicking My Computer>Properties and

Advanced tab. Here, go to the Environment variables and set new system variable

JAVA_HOME = C:\Program Files\Java\jdk (Java Home path).

The 15 CentraView modules

Contacts, e-mailing, activity scheduling, synchronizing data with mobile services, HR, accounting, notes, file sharing, SFA, marketing, help desk support, reporting module for custom reports, project mgmt, reporting and template mgmt for automated mail response

Configuring the database



Next step is to configure the MySQL database so that the application can store
its data in it. To do so, open a Command Prompt and issue the command 'mysqladmin

-u root -p create cvdb'. Next, you need to import the data to it. For that

CentraView gives you data structure in SQL file. Just go to the CentraView

installation folder and you will see a file named cvdb.sql. Use the command

given below to create a data structure.

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mysql -u root -p cvdb < cvdb.sql



mysql -u root -p cvdb

It will bring a MySQL prompt console. Here, type the following command:

UPDATE cvfolderlocation SET Detail = 'c:\fs';



Exit

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Complete details of business contacts are shown in a window applet. You can add and print new contacts here 

Here, c:\fs is the path of the CentraView file system. If you've used a

different path, then use that. Next, go to the CentraView install folder and

open mysql-ds.xml file in a text editor and replace the and

entry with your MySQL database username and password. This file

is used to connect the CentraView application with MySQL. Copy this file to the

'deploy' directory of the jboss application server, which is

c:\centraview-2.1.4-jboss4\jboss-4.0.2\server\default\deploy. Then you need to

give privileges to the database user you are using in mysql-ds.xml file. For

this, issue the commands given below:

mysql -u root -p mysql



GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cvdb.* TO 'root'@''


IDENTIFIED BY ' ';

Starting CentraView application with JBoss



Finally you need to start the JBoss Application Server, which we have configured
for CentraView. To start it, go to the c:\centraview-2.1.4-jboss4\jboss-4.0.2\

folder and execute 'run.bat'. This will start the Application Server and

initiate CentraView as a Web service. You can access the application at

http://:8080/centraview. A Web page will ask you

for your user name and password. Use admin for both.

Using CentraView



While the core functions in CentraView are three, there are actually 15
different modules that get installed. Many would be subsets of these three

modules. Here, we will take up one function, Contact Management, and leave the

other two for a later issue. The Contact Management module lets you keep all

your business contacts in a centralized location, so that your users can access

them from anywhere on the network. The contacts are kept in three sections

(Entitles, Individuals and Groups). You can access these by clicking on the

Contacts tab. On the left side, you will see the three sections, while the right

side shows details of these sections. Here, you can search for contacts based on

any field such as designation, name,last name, city, country, etc. You can add

contacts to this in two ways. Either manually, one contact at a time, or by

importing them from other sources. To import contacts, first click on the 'Marketing'

link and the List Manager listing, then click the New button. It will open a

Java based import wizard. Here select whether to add this information to an

existing list or to create a new list. Enter a list name, description, owner,

then enter a field separator for the list, or select the tab character as your

default separator. Then enter a line separator for the list, or select a line

return as your default separator. Select whether you would like a header row to

precede the list. Select the Browse button to select the text file containing

your contacts list to import and click on the Next button. On the subsequent

screen, you will get the list of fields that you will import, match up the

imported fields on the left with the CentraView fields and click Next. This will

start the process of transferring the contact data in to the CentraView

database. Once the contact data is transferred in the marketing list, you can

then move or duplicate this data to CentraView's Contacts area. If your

contact data is in some other format then you have to first convert it to a text

file. For example, we had an Excel file containing contacts. We first saved it

as a .txt file, and then imported it in CentraView. CentraView also lets you

modify the modules according to your needs. This makes it very flexible. For eg,

if you need additional fields or need to modify the existing fields in the data

entry form in the Contact management module, then, you can customize this module

by clicking the 'Administration' button. This administrative module lets you

configure the software for your specific requirements.

This was just a fraction of what all is possible with CentraView. Next time,

we'll go deeper into it and tell you its other advanced



capabilities.

Sanjay Majumder

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