Complementary Solutions Blog Site

We are starting a company blog for you to enjoy in the hope that you may be interested in our research and achievements.

Index of articles

080207 Windows Vista

060207 Microsoft CRM - Installation and customisation

040207 Home Automation ( includes speech recognition )

020207 Automation Push

010207 Why blog 

080207 Windows Vista (includes speech recognition)

Overview :  Vista has saved my old Tiny PC from certain death and it works wonderfully. Some issues with driver support for which we will blame the vendors and apart from that, very impressed. The machine has not had a glitch since I installed except once which I think was a power surge.

As a Microsoft partner, we received the Vista Business Upgrade and Office 2007 a while ago. Vista upgrade has been sitting on my desk tempting me for ages. I knew full well that when I upgraded I would lose drivers, connections and probably get bugs and hasssle but that didn't stop me - the fact that my primary machine is the only option I have for Vista stopped me in my tracks though, i can't take the risk of losing my workhorse.

and then a happy thing happened. Many moons ago I bought a Tiny powerhouse machine for home and of course it hasn't worked properly since then. The operating system kept falling over and generally it was a terrible machine. I am on a support contract so each time I just ship it off and it comes back repaired, last time with a new motherboard and other bits replaced. classic at 5.99 a month. how anyone makes money supporting those machines I don't know. no wonder they went bust. Totalcaresupport do a great job, but the machines are just overpriced tin. until today, when I rebuilt the machine and wham, the answer was there - its a P4 with 1GB of RAM so while the iron was hot, I ejected the rebuild CD and inserted the upgrade. I am happy to report that Vista has now been running happily for two weeks and I have had one crash which I suspect was a power surge. So I am very happy. One more week and my primary PC is becoming a home machine :-)

The new interface is very mac-like. there is a superb video on YouTube of that is a take on the similarities and it is brilliant. It so obviously a crib on Apple features. Poor old Microsoft. In the background the critical work gives us superb searching functionality, rock solid robustness and some great new features ( by the way this aero stuff is rubbish. its nice to scan your open apps in 3d but its a once off and you'll never use it again. apart from that all the new visual stuff really is a glorified theme. ) which is where their 10 billion has obviously gone, but if I was Steve Jobs I would have words over the look and feel aggrieved. take it as a compliment Steve :-)

The troubles are only two - and they are that the netgear sc101 NAS device and my Minolta 2300DL network printer don't have vista drivers. and that's it - and I can't really blame Microsoft. Most major vendors seem pretty much on top of things, so I will blame Netgear.

Apart from that, I am still getting used to the Office ribbon but I like it and I don't see much difference in office, although again I am sure that it is the deeper stuff that is stronger, clever and more interoperable. I must remember to save my word docs in the old format, or I will be seen as a vista snob and who wants that eh.

Vista has a ranking score for the "experience " on which my machine scores 3.6 out of 10, so I guess there are more good things to come when I install on my dual-core machine.

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060207 Microsoft CRM - Installation & customisation

Overview :  Installing CRM is not that tough, the config is easy. I am sure it will get harder in more complex environments but the major issues seem to be data migration and the outlook connector. AutoTester handles the data migration very well indeed but I cannot get the outlook connector to work on anything. Which is fine as the web interface is great.

My first foray into pure software sales was as a salesman for a fantastic company selling a mid-business size CRM system and fantastic stuff it was, but difficult to sell. Especially since at the time our company was an SAP specific consultancy. Still, it was fun before we got more specific and had to drop it. So it was a great thing to return to CRM with Microsoft's new offering. The last time I looked seriously at it was when I used Business Contact Manager. and that, my friends, was diabolical. It didn't integrate to outlook and it didn't really work for me at all. Unlike a lot of people in the business i actually think Microsoft is pretty darn impressive. but on this one they failed miserably in my opinion. but Dynamics CRM 3.0 is a different kettle of fish entirely. This is a seriously amazing application. Of course it is built to work for the larger enterprise and is a fairly complex beast so I spent a good few hours reading the documentation before I even started. But it went like a dream.

The installation requires that you have a fully built server 2003 with Exchange. For this you'll need a fair whack of cash for the hardware, another for the software and an experienced technical resource who can build and maintain the thing for you. I am lucky enough to have a Dell SC380 ( which is about 300 pounds ), a Microsoft partner subscription and a David who manages my server superbly.

Although CRM requires 2GB and a dual processor, it runs perfectly on my server. which has 1 GB RAM and a single core processor. I am sure that it will creak seriously with loads of users, but it works well for a demonstration from a remote location. The whole thing installed in a day or so and configuration took a while but you can opt to use the system out of the box if you want to.

I am very impressed indeed. I have just finished configuring the first demonstration on my new server and it is working brilliantly. Remote connection to the server is like a really potent application and really I don't know if I will even bother to install the outlook plug-in.  The config was easy for someone with a bit of software experience. I have downloaded a superb plugin on trial from a company called c360 whose console puts everything in one place. This is great, but actually Microsoft's design is solid and the customer has opted not to take this plug-in. impressive software though, and great service in the eval process. if you ever want to see everything on your CRM contact in one screen, go for this, its affordable and superb.

Microsoft recommend 30 days for a vanilla installation and 60 days for a full system migration to CRM. I am being very glib here, because I realise that server clustering and separate servers and large scale data migration is going to make it much more complex, but here's the story : I tried to install CRM Mobile and because I broke the golden rule ( never touch the server if you have a David who knows what he is doing )  I broke it, and destroyed my entire CRM installation. and of course no, it wasn't backed up. so we stripped the server down, reinstalled and recreated the config in 5 hours flat, used AutoTester to migrate some accounts and contacts in at speed and the demo was up and working again. the customer did notice that it was unavailable for a while and the a few of their changes had disappeared, but eggs and an omelette you know... ah well, its an interesting thing. I put down the bible ( which in this case is a CRM handbook from Amazon ) and called the customer, patted myself on the back and went back to writing this blog. on a parting note, I have since tried to install the outlook installation of CRM on my XP machine and my vista machine and I am still using the web interface, so I guess you can see how that went. I now have managed to use CRM many times and never used it linked to outlook. Maybe I just lead a charmed life.

The outlook connector for Vista and Outlook 2007 is a beta, so I guess there I owe them an apology, but the CRM for XP doesn't do nought.

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040207 Home Automation ( & speech recognition )

Overview :  Home automation is difficult and expensive to do properly unless you are building yourself a new house, but the cheap option worked well and although Craig can't turn his lights off, he can certainly video and skype conference hands free, listen to all his PC music and watch his videos and Youtube and is having fun with other things.

Once you have looked at office automation its only a matter of time before you find one of our geeks in the office looking into home automation as a natural extension. When you're working with Craig you can assume he's looked into it - and he has.

Craig here - yup, I have a basement with a PC which links up to the television and other things above in the lounge. Home automation is actually and expensive and difficult thing to do properly unless you build it in to the new build of a property. I gave up before I spent a lot of money on the X10 products ( this is the home automation standard ) and got a few small wins. My PC appears perfectly on the television which is a 26 inch LCD purchased from ebuyer.com made by a company called Vistron. I don't think they sell them anymore, it was a dirt cheap deal. The TV is fine, my only issue is that the Picture in Picture function is only available on the PC screen, not with normal television, which is odd. but it works well. There is a standard PC video input on the back and it works a treat. I added an infra-red keyboard I had in the cupboard and that has an integrated mouse.

One thing - buy yourself a boundary microphone. I bought one for about a fiver from ebuyer and one from maplin for 25, and the cheaper one was better for my purposes. Install Skype and a camera and enjoy hands free video conferencing from your own sofa. Amazing. The grandparents in South Africa can now see their grandson. actually controlling the lights and such is a long way away, but all my PC videos, mucis and YouTube movies are a treat.

Next steps are to install a remote controlled infra-red sender so that I can actually control the tv, etc from a distance. now that would be seriously groovy and I think I know how to do it. More on that later too.

Next step was speech recognition. I have Windows XP on the home machine with a superb application called Audiomatic. This also cost me a fiver, so I think we can see what my price point is. This allows me to use voice commands to do all sorts of things on my PC. Just for fun, I linked Audiomatic to AutoTester which means that I can use one voice commands to drive absolutely anything. It gets more fun, as I installed VAC which throws your sound to another channel and piped this to my microphone channel and linked this to skype. So now my computer phones me, with nice music of my choice in the background and plays me a message when something happens. Now that is cool.

As an aside, I recently got a fantastic present from my wife for my birthday - its a waterproof case and a pair of waterproof headphones from aquapac. I put this into a coolclasp holster so that I could go swimming with it ( worked a treat ) and combined with this call automation and an old phone with a pay as you go and skypeout, I wasted 3 pounds last night having my computer phone me WHILE I WAS UNDERWATER swimming 50 lengths in my gym pool, and it played my half an hour of my favourite music interspersed with update messages on how my data load was going. I was embarrassed enough wearing a walkman in the swimming pool that I didn't dare to explain what I was actually doing.

More on voice recogntion in Vista above, if I remember.

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020207 Automation Push

Overview :  Complementary has been a test scripting company and supplier of AutoTester for years. Automation of processes using scripting tools is not new, but doing so in a package is new and has proven very useful but we can't stop machines crashing or software applications falling over.

Complementary Solutions has been a test scripting company and supplier of AutoTester for years but until recently we had supplied AutoTester for the second half of the name. We often helped customers script processes to automate the boring stuff, and of course we have often used AutoTester to migrate data the easy way, but until now we had not focussed on delivering a package primarily aimed at automation. More fools us, as this is a really popular idea and has been for ages. After our work with Amethyst Logistics, we are now convinced that the package of templates, data sheets and processes we use can automate a data load in about three days. The only problem is the robustness. With automation, you need to be able to manage for errors. This can be done using some quite complex error handling, but such things take time. The best approach tends to be to manage for all application errors but not to handle for a) applications crashing and b) machines crashing.

This of course implies that our automation processes are fine if they are watched or confirmed periodically. Bearing in mind that each process running ties up one laptop/PC, this is actually quite practical. We have found that the best option is to run vnc with no inputs, so that it is obvious to the observer when a machine has stopped. Version 3 viewer is the best as it can be magnified or reduced and placed in a corner of the desktop. See a picture here of machines ready for a load.

Once we set this up, it was perfect. If a process stopped on one machine because of an unanticipated error, the user would notice quite quickly and would fix the problem, noting the error. We could then replicate the error and manage the process repairing the script for the next run. Almost every time the error was a local issue and we just slowed the scripts down. This project saved 10000 minutes of user time. Yippee.

We have looked at writing a console script that polls from another machine to see if the system is writing to a file and the warns the user that a machine is not responding, but it would tie up another machine and it wasn't worth the effort and cost to the customer. We did find some tidy little folder monitoring tools that watched folders and told us when they were updated, but in fact we wanted a negative one that told us when it hadn't been updated for about 3 minutes. This was difficult to find and the systems that did it well were not worth the cost. We are trying to save money here, so we stuck with noticing when a machine was dormant.

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010207 Why Blog ?

Overview :  Blogging is a wonderful way to communicate with people. It is regular, interactive and interesting. It is also a great way for the company to record projects/ideas as they come along and are processed. We do something different each week. We welcome comments and will post them if you email us on info"at"caspost.co.uk and they add value

We have been considering blogging for a few months now, but we have been so occupied with other things that it has been impossible to actually get to it. We spent quite a lot of time looking at different blogging software options before we realised what a waste of time that was. We are quite proficient with frontpage and the new version, expressions Web, and so now we will just update this page on a regular basis. It means that we can't accept and publish comments and no doubt we will lose out on being able to do RSS and XML feeds and such, but if they salient issue is to get things out there so that interested parties can see them, this is the way forward as far as we are concerned.

We looked at a number of blogs, focussing on the comments, and concluded that blog comments seem to be from neanderthals with brains the size of a pea. Valid comments and constructive stuff is for forums in our opinion and we're not there yet, although we would love to be in the near future. ( When we get kicked into gear with Sharepoint we can talk about this some more )

Another reason for being a bit hesitant to start a blog is the worry that you may not have that much to say. Oh well, only time will tell :-)

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