We recently had to import some masterfile information from Pastel into vTiger for a client. Since a lot of SA companies use Pastel I thought I would write "how to" to help others to use vTiger and get a state of the art, open source, CRM system up and running.

This "how to" assumes a clean vTiger database i.e. a fresh vTiger install. It would not be hard to get the scripts to workwith a database that already has data. The scripts would need to be adjusted for the next crmentity sequence number.

Here is a simple backup script that we use to backup MySQL servers where there are a large number of databases. Each database is dumped out to separate file making restoration for individual databases much easier. Usually scripts dump all databases out into one large file. This is problematic if there are many databases and some of them are large. Simple copy the script into /etc/cron.daily to have it executed each day.

For our work machines I tend to use Ubuntu and, of course Xandros , but at home I like to use something where I can try out the more cutting edge stuff, so I use Gentoo .

A while ago I decided it was time to abandon the old familiar Ant build tool and try Maven. Everyone claims that Maven is much better than Ant so I thought lets give it a go. Unfortunately I found the documentation available on the net confusing and hard to follow.

Struts Validations Framework How to

The struts validation framework is quiet straight forward to use but there are lots of little gotchas that slow down the learning process. It should take one no more than two hours to understand and use the validation framework. Here are some of pointers that help new users of the framework.

Ok, generally I agree that Maven is a good tool, its just that it promises to be a great tool but fails to deliver on its central promise of easy dependency management. The main issues I have with Maven are:

Configuration of Asterisk for South Africa

Echo cancellation on TDM400p

If you use Trixbox, to get rid of the echo on the Digium TDM400p cards, download the latest Zaptel drivers, at time of writing the latest is 1.2.9.1, and compile them yourself. You need to edit the zconfig.h source file and comment out the line #define ECHO_CAN_KB1 and uncomment #define ECHO_CAN_MARK2 on about line 52. You also need to enable aggressive echo cancellation by uncommeting #define AGGRESSIVE_SUPPRESSOR.

We recently launcehd our online GPL software CD store using the Drupal ecommerce plugin. Since all the supported payment gateways do not support ZAR we knew we would have to write our own. We integrate to payment gateways quiet often so I didn't think it would be much of an issue but the poor documentation for Drupal developers meant it took longer than it should have.

I thought I would record some of my learnings for others benefit. I would like to make this a more detailed tutorial but I just dont have the time. So here goes with some tips. Hopefully this helps some-one.

Telkom sells Skype phones!

I wanted to consolidate our various telkom business accounts into one, to make all the bills easier to manage. The only time I have available for this stuff is on the weekend, so I went to the Telkom shop at Fourways Crossing to sort it all out.

vTiger 5 - Beta -- A much improved offering

We have decided to start testing the upcoming release of vTiger intermally and recently installed it on our servers. Besides being early adopters by nature there were a couple of reasons why we did this: