This blog has moved to http://www.reallysimplesystems.com/blog

This blog moved to http://www.reallysimplesystems.com/blog as from July 2011 – make sure up update your reader!

Really Simple Systems shortlisted for the Software Satisfaction Awards

Really Simple Systems has been shortlisted for the 2011 Software Satisfaction Awards in the best small business CRM and Customer Management Software category.

We won the award in 2008, came second in 2009, and won it back again in 2010. Will we keep our crown in 2011? We’ll know on 18th October at the award ceremony.

Thanks again to all our customers who voted for us.

Really Simple Systems wins at EuroCloud

Really Simple Systems has won EuroCloud‘s Best Customer Case Study award for its work with RSM Tenon (formerly Bentley Jennison).

“Cloud computing is more than just a passing trend or a buzz phrase – it is a new way of delivering business advantage,” said John Paterson, CEO of Really Simple Systems. “Using our cloud solutions, our customers have been able to avoid expensive and cumbersome hardware and software that would never have been able to keep up with their changing needs. They have the ability to scale the resources we use, as we need them, without having to factor in costly overheads, making them more agile and flexible as a result.”

EuroCloud is a European network gathering SaaS and cloud computing communities from 27 European countries, including vendors and industry experts.

8,000 users sign up for Really Simple Systems

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just hit 8,000 users who have signed up for Really Simple Systems Cloud CRM.

This is mainly driven by our Free Edition that we launched back in October last year – we’re getting about 1,000 users a month signing up for this entry level CRM system.

Free Edition is a two user Sales system for up to 100 Accounts, perfect for startups and small companies new to CRM.

Maybe you know somebody who would benefit from this great offer?

CRM Idol

We are delighted (flattered? amused?) that Really Simple Systems has been chosen to take part in Paul Greenberg’s CRM Idol competition, a CRM version of Pop Idol.

The winner will be announced in October. More when we know more!

MailSync improvements

We are making some major enhancements to our MailSync routine, the function that automatically adds emails to and from your Contacts into the CRM system.

Currently MailSync only matches emails to existing Contacts. The new version uses the logic in Web Transactions to optionally create Accounts, Contacts, Tasks, Activities and Cases for incoming emails that are matched.

So for example, you could set up one Web Transaction to automatically create an Account & Contact for an incoming email to info@yourdomain.com and assign a Task to somebody to follow up, and another Web Transaction to automatically create a Case for any new emails to support@yourdomain.com.

Incoming emails can also be rerouted from generic email addresses to individuals, based on who owns the Account or Case.

This new version is on beta test at present, if you’d like to join the beta programme or be notified when the fully released version is available, please contact our support desk or you account manager.

Cloud Survey 2011 – early results

We’re just pulling together the results from our annual Cloud attitudes survey (thanks to everybody who completed it!) and some of the results (more & more people use cloud CRM, more & more people are confident in Cloud solutions) are pretty predictable.

But what has taken us by surprise is how many small businesses are using social media tools both to look for and look after customers. We all know that larger companies are adopting social media for marketing, but the number of small businesses that are starting to adopt social is astonishing.

The full results should be published this week, just as soon as we have cleaned them up.

Free Edition sign-ups accelerate to 1,000 a month

Since launching our Free Edition back in October last year, sign ups for the service have really accelerated and are now running at a thousand users a month.

Free Edition is a complete cloud CRM sales system, limited to two users and 100 prospects/customers.

The combination of ease of use, great sales functionality and free is obviously a potent one!

Full details in the Free Edition press release.

New Features Roundup

It has been a while since we’ve updated people with some of the improvements we’ve been making to Really Simple Systems, so here’s the list:

The Data Upload routine has been completely rewritten and can now upload Activities, Tasks, and Opportunities. There are many more matching options for de-duping – you can match on id (useful for updating existing data) and combinations of name and post/zip code.

There’s a new Download Routine whereby you can download your data into csv files whenever you want to, without having to ask the support team for a backup.

There are more Custom Fields on each object (Account, Contact etc) and most of the previously hard coded fields such as Account.Type are now Custom Fields so that they can be modified.

You can choose which fields are Mandatory Fields, so that blank data is not accepted on the forms and grids.

Field Level Security. It is now possible to grant different access rights to individual fields on a page. For instance, you can make one field read only for everyone apart from Administrators.

For users with custom requirements, we can create Custom Objects (such as Fixed Assets, Referrals) and link them into your existing data, and also custom graphs on the homepage for you.

You can now request the system to Log all Deletes in the system log.

There are two new videos to help people get started, an Introduction to Really Simple Systems video and an Introduction to the Upload Routine video.

We’ve also been working on lots of less obvious improvements, such as:

Making sure that our Enterprise Edition customers are not affected by the rapid growth in usage of our Free Edition customers.

Automating and scaling the billing systems so more people can pay monthly by credit card, rather than annually in advance.

Generally handling the increased number of users, data and traffic so that our page response times remain as quick as ever by optimising the code and adding new servers, all without taking the system off-line.

Next on the list:-

The Listing Report writer will finally be getting a makeover, with hyperlinks and other goodies

The Customer Service & Support is being enhanced to treat incoming emails as transactions, creating cases and routing them to the appropriate person.

Check with the support team if you’d like to know more about any of the above features.

Really Simple Systems Free Edition CRM hits 1,000 Users

Delighted to announce that our Free Edition cloud CRM has now reached 1,000 users since launched it mid October.

One of the good things about launching our Free CRM offering is that it has really made us sharpen our act about ease of use. What was an easy system to use after a 30 minute web demo and the support team has loaded your data for you, is not such an easy system if you’re pitched cold into it. So we now have a couple of videos on Getting Started and How to Load your Data, and continue to work on making it easier for new users to pick up.

All this will benefit our existing users, not just the new ones.