Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

Small businesses often suffer with customer service, whether they realize it or not. Clients quickly learn that the best way to get a response is by identifying one person who always help them individually or, worse for everyone else, having the president's direct number on speed dial. There are lots of tools out there that help resolve this. They handle customers in a variety of ways - it might be a CRM app or explicit help desk software. I remember fifteen years ago, a lot of companies had sprung up offering these services but they all cost money and when you're a small shop, it was often better to build it yourself. I switched recently to FreshDesk . 10 Reasons why: 1. Growth path - their pricing models allows unlimited agents in their "sprout" plan. Many systems offer trial periods or limited number of users. Freshdesk offers strong functionality and then added features as you pay. In short, their cheapest plan is "free" with GREAT functionality.

The Theory A stand-up is a 15 minute meeting, based on three questions: 1. What did you do? 2. What are you working on? 3. What's preventing you from getting it done? You have someone who keeps the meeting focused (the scrum master) and you don't let non-team members involved. This is the concept of chickens and pigs . Who are the pigs? Anyone who is directly working on the project - they have some skin in the game. Tasks involved are  chosen from the backlog. A key part of this process is that there is no dictation of tasks. Everyone magically chooses what they want to work on. Everyone sits (or stands), looking at some kind of white board (where electronic or physical) and they all jump up choosing what they want to work on. So now you can easily say "What did you do?" Tell us what you did the day before. Tell us what you're currently working on. Any problems? If there were any, you then discussed them outside of the meeting. The Reality Our sc

FoxInCloud sent this link a while back about their statistics regarding visits to their site: http://foxincloud.com/blog/2017/12/27/VFP-community-lessons-from-foxincloud-site.html What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older. Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments. But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward. FoxPro VFP