The world of software as a service and online hosted business applications is huge. I’ve worked in this industry for a while and I know how powerful and amazing hosted web apps can be. Thanks to GMail most people will never have to know about the inconvenience of Outlook. The whole Google suite of docs and calendaring is pretty amazing for organization of personal and business affairs. Lately I’ve started looking for solutions to help my brand new business doing freelance web design in Colorado Springs. As a former agency employee I am familiar with the necessity of good project management and time logging. I am a lot more motivated of course when I’m my own employer.

We used a complete end-to end solution at that company called Info@Hand. It had everything in one work flow, sales, CRM, estimates, internal project management, invoices, bug tracking, and support help desk. It was a great idea, but it was incredibly unpleasant to use. It was built on an open source CRM package and then had tons of bloat added to it. The underpowered servers we ran it on just couldn’t handle it, and the amount of javascript in their front end code didn’t help any. So, logging time and doing anything at all took forever and the app just wasn’t intuitive or pretty.

Now that I’m on my own and doing my own project management I am thinking about the best way to operate my small sole proprietorship while maintaining a level of professional organization. I want to give my clients a nice workspace to log into and follow the work I’m doing and see their account status. I want to keep my own internal tasking and data management clean and effortless. I want to learn to manage a real sales process, which is something I know almost nothing about. And most of all I want to deliver great design without losing my mind with all the management stuff.

So I’ve broken down my requirements by the role in my process they will fill.

1. CRM (customer relationship management (sales))
2. Estimating
3. Project Management (collaboration and bug tracking)
4. Invoicing
5. Accounting

So I knew of a few applications that did some of this stuff but I wanted to get the most value for my (limited) dollars. I looked at hosting my own open-source software, but have pretty much abandoned that idea due to the poor quality of the software available that I installed and tested. So that leaves hosted solutions, which have a variety of price points and numerous hurdles for integration and cross app communication. What would be nice is if the data could enter at the sales process and follow my work through all the way to the final accounting records. Unfortunately there are very few products that really deliver on that idea all the way through.

There are a lot of programs that do one thing or two things in that list, but then I would have to hand the data off to another application at some point. Sometimes the data transfer is already setup through their API’s, but sometimes it will have to happen through importing CSV files, or just manual copy and paste. The other problem is the huge variety of programs out there! There must be hundreds of applications in each of these categories. I can’t do free 30 day trials of every one of them.

I started with a really popular program, FreshBooks and liked it, but balked at the $20/month price tag for getting more than 3 clients. I’m not totally unwilling to pay that much, but I just wanted to see what other options were out there. FreshBooks doesn’t offer CRM or project management, but it does integrate with some apps that do that. So, I started looking at all the other options and began to assemble a spreadsheet of various freelance business workflow software. As you can see I very quickly ran into many many options, and they became fairly expensive when combined. I really shouldn’t be paying anywhere near $60/month right now for this stuff.

So I’m trying a few things out right now. I like products that integrate with my Google apps email accounts. I like products that offer a nice looking interface and seem intuitive. I really like cheap and free products. A few front-runners right now are all of the Zoho applications (CRM, Invoices, PM), a very pretty project collaboration tool called MavenLink, and of course FreshBooks still. There’s some others that have caught my eye and may find a place in my workflow, such as an accounting app called Outright, a document signing service called RightSignature, and a potential all-in-one product BlueCamroo. Leave a comment if you know of something great, but I don’t know if I can handle many more suggestions or options to consider, I need to quit thinking about management and get down to actually doing some work.

Step 1. Let your 2 year contract with AT&T expire. Woohoo! Now that iPhone 3G is yours free and clear. Now, make sure you resist the tempation to re-up the contract in order to buy a fancy schmancy iPhone 4.

Step 2. Get laid-off and cancel your iPhone data service to save $30/month. (I know this is a tough step to follow, but trust me on this, it’s going to be worth it). Use your old crappy phone for a while.

Step 3. Get sick of not having enough minutes with the AT&T 700 minutes for $70/month 2 line plan. Decide to drop “those bums” and start shopping for a different plan. Make a spreadsheet.

Step 4. Realize that your current phones are GSM and that means you can switch to T-Mobile if you can manage to unlock them. Do research. Figure out that unlocking an iPhone is usually trivial. Find out that unlocking a Motorola L2 SLVR is not trivial, but is still definitely possible.

Step 5. Sign up for the 1500 minutes for $60/month plan at T-Mobile, ask for just the SIM cards and transfer your old numbers (remember to bring in your AT&T account number). Unlock your phone and your wife’s phone. Bonus points for backing up her phone book and not bricking her phone, I recommend using P2KTools. Pop in the new SIM. Disable cellular data on your iPhone (you cheapskate) you will just use wifi hotspots from now on. Within 24 hours both phones will be up and running on the old number with the shiny new minutes ready to be used up.

That’s it!

I’ve been spending some time lately putting together and tweaking a live video system for my church, Rock Family Church in Colorado Springs. They wanted the ability to do I-Mag live on the projector for the audience as well as record and stream the video for the web. This was really something that is right up my alley. I priced out a bunch of components and put together a decent standard definition package with a lot of flexibility and expandability. Since we rent our Sunday morning venue from a large event center it needed to be flexible and portable. We have storage and offices in the same building as the event center, so I decided a rolling rack for all the production equipment would be ideal. We lock up the cabinet and roll it out to the back of the venue each Sunday morning and plug into the semi-permanently wired video and audio cable runs we set up to each camera position. I’ll talk about the cameras another time.

We decided to go with the LVS-800 switcher by Edirol/Roland. This was the switcher that seems to be in the right price range and has a lot of flexibility including 2 computer RGB inputs, and 4 s-video inputs, all shared with the systems 8 total composite video inputs. It seems to be a well designed switcher. Not a lot of frills, no genlock, no still image frame buffer, no linear keying, only a few basic wipes and PinP funtions. But the built in DSK(downstream key), could be useful at some point, and the large number of inputs seems like a smart move. Of course, possibly the biggest downfall to this unit is that it’s not HD, but we were going for budget.

Something to consider now though is that Panasonic has released a 5 input HD switcher for $4000, the AW-HS50. If I were to roll out another simple video production system I think I would consider this switcher and some lower level HD camcorders that support HD-SDI. Potentially you could spend the exact same amount of money as the setup I’m describing with full HD support as long as your projector can handle it. One thing I cannot recommend enough is to spend some time on the churchmedia.net forums before you make any real shopping lists.

So, back to the LVS-800 switcher. We noticed it has a few frames of delay in the big video that goes to the projector. If you don’t want this delay you need to use the A/B outputs on the back. That delay is coming from the effect processor that adds in the DSK overlay. So, if you’re using this switcher for I-Mag you might not be able to use the keyer to put lyrics over your video. But if you were putting lyrics on side screens in the main venue you could run the keyed lyrics over video to another venue that might only have a single screen, which is pretty convenient.

The other thing I’m looking into about this switcher is it’s support of a tally system. Tally lights let the camera operators and the talent know which camera is active at any moment. The LVS-800 has a DSub 15pin connector on the back for connecting to the tally system. But, the tally systems I’m seeing online are more than a thousand dollars just for the controller. I’m thinking I can build my own with some LED’s some resistors and some long Cat5e cable which we have lying around. I can’t find anything too specific online for this switcher, but it seems like a simple enough circuit to build, even with optoisolators, it doesn’t seem too crazy hard. I’ll post again how it goes if we get around to building it.

Yes, that is a chocolate cake with pink cream cheese frosting, and we have no excuse for why we made it.

Yes I can fry anything.

As seen from my hammock.