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Why Crust is Ideal for Not-for-Profit Organisations

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For many, either being part of something bigger than ourselves or standing up for closely held principles are important. In June 2019, Crust Technology contributed all of its software intellectual property to the Commons Conservancy, an independent open-source foundation. In doing so, we created Corteza, “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”.

Corteza

The objective of Corteza is clear – to deliver a 100% free, open-source, self-hosted cloud platform for growing your organisation’s productivity. It enables relationships and protects the work and the privacy of all those concerned.

This effort began by producing a fully-featured alternative to Salesforce – the cloud leader in CRM – and an alternative to Slack Enterprise Messaging. All of this is presented via a unified interface on the frontend, joined up with automation on the backend. Very recently, we also released Service Solution, a self-hosted enterprise-grade alternative to Salesforce and Oracle Service Clouds.

Everything is delivered with modern, hyper-efficient code. Organisations can benefit from the impressive low-code development facilities to build their own custom apps, reducing costs and lowering time to delivery.

The publicly stated values of the Corteza project are as follows:

Public Good:

Corteza’s software and other offerings are designed and provided as a public good for the public benefit.

Open and Transparent:

Corteza’s governance and operations are open and transparent. It uses the best practices from across the not-for-profit, private and public sectors.

Diverse and Inclusive:

Corteza’s members, policies and programmes are designed to actively foster diverse, inclusive and non-discriminatory participation.

Built for Humanity:

Corteza’s software and other offerings have a real impact on people’s lives. As such, they are designed, built and provided with a strong emphasis on quality, privacy, security and usability.

Crust for the Not-for-profit sector

All Crust software is built 100% on the Corteza code-base. Professional versions of Crust software are made freely available to the not-for-profit sector, including all professional software maintenance.

On top of this, Crust is beginning to push development of Corteza’s outreach Programmes, which range from Humanitarian through Ecological to Privacy Programmes.

Delivering a standards-based public good, then constantly striving to push those standards higher is a lot of work. Being part of something bigger than us is key to the Crust team’s identity and to our brand. Since the launch of Corteza, we discovered that the more we give and the better we give, the stronger our business gets.

The Not-for-Profit sector deserves an approach to building software that is inclusive of its requirements and which ensures organisations in the sector do not fall out-of-step with developments in the private and public sectors. Crust and Corteza successfully deliver this approach, feature-rich and with ever-reducing economic barriers to entry and participation. Our low-code philosophy is central to this ethos and we go out of our way to ensure that, where coding is required, it’s limited to well-supported and inexpensive JavaScript skills.

The cherry on the cake? Crust Essential Support subscriptions are completely free-of-charge for Not-for-Profit organisations and their customer bases – subject to the condition that the organisation is fulfilling its purpose by using our software. Digitally transforming and managing your relationships with your donors, advocates and volunteers have never been easier.

Try out Crust

Are you working in a Not-for-Profit organisation? Get your free online Crust demo here.

 

 

 

Is Salesforce Copying the Crust’s Product Strategy?

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Last week brought us the news that two of the most significant players in the CRM market, Salesforce and Microsoft had struck a deal. Salesforce Marketing Cloud will soon be hosted by Microsoft Azure. At the same time Microsoft Teams, a Slack Messaging alternative, will be integrated with Salesforce Sales CRM and Service Cloud.

When we were first designing Crust’s product strategy, our research showed that Salesforce Chatter, the internal messaging system on the cloud-only platform, was the most disappointing element of its portfolio. In its place, we decided to implement a core Messaging system inspired by Slack’s architecture and feature set. This feature set is already included in our Sales CRM and Service Solution.

Why was Slack-like Messaging of such interest? At Crust, we believe that openness, consistency and standardisation of data architecture are critical to the healthy long-term functioning of a business. Cobbled-together data architectures are expensive to maintain, and it’s always the customer that pays. Crust and our community project, Corteza, avoid such complexity by default. Our Messaging can suck in data from thousands of different sources if we wish and standardise that data for use across our various applications. Try to do that with email…

At Crust, we believe that openness, consistency and standardisation of data architecture are critical to the healthy long-term functioning of a business.

It remains to be seen what Salesforce’s decision to hold hands with Microsoft means in terms of businesses’ data sovereignty. Recently, Google’s been accused of health data stockpiling, and one of the concerns is that data from one service will be used to promote others. Is it possible someday that Microsoft buys Salesforce outrightly, giving it unfettered access to all activity on the powerful trio of Salesforce, LinkedIn and Skype? That’s a lot of sensitive trading data and intellectual property, and it highlights the big question of a data grab where Microsoft may find itself wandering into antitrust territory once again.

However, let’s face it; this is all about money. The real costs of Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics365 already border on extortionate. How much more customers can be “locked-in” by dependence on the vendors’ closed business logic implementations and hoisted with new charges remains to be seen. If history is any measure, then they usually find a way.

Crust will always aim to include market-leading features, will always provide familiar UI’s and UX and will always be 100% free and open. Our strategy to offer a robust, self-hosted alternative to Salesforce looks more aligned than ever.

So is Salesforce copying Crust’s strategies? Maybe just a little wink in our direction with their Microsoft Teams integration, but for the rest, we’re a whole lot safer and less expensive a bet 😉

Online demo

Want to check it out for yourself? Get your free online demo here.

User stories as a key project management tool

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One of the first challenges in software development is gathering clear requirements and keeping them unchanged during the implementation. Requirements documents can be lengthy and too technical.

At Crust, we implemented user stories as part of our project management and business analysis process and we acknowledged that this is a powerful way of defining the required functionalities from a user’s point of view. They reflect what a particular user needs and what value is gained from using ‘plain English’ without technicalities and implementation details.

 

A typical user story template looks like this:

As a [role], I want to [requirement] so that [benefit].

The role describes who is going to benefit from the feature. We want it to be more specific than “the user” so consequently, the first step in the process is to successfully identify all types of users involved as end consumers. In our case, these are usually, but not limited to, “CRM admins” with administrator privileges and “CRM users” with restricted access.

The requirement part briefly describes what the user wants to accomplish. The story shouldn’t be specified in too much detail and it has to reveal the perspective of the user who will benefit from the function, not the developer who will be coding it. We also try to avoid using technical terminology (e.g. we might write “I want to remember my login details” instead of “I want to store my login credentials into a cookie”.)

The benefit states why the user wants this feature and what value it brings. This part helps product owners to better prioritize the requirement and gives the development team more freedom to find innovative ways of implementation to solve the objective. If the benefit can’t be articulated, it might be a good sign the feature is not necessary.

I recommend checking out INVEST technique to validate if you’re writing efficient user stories:

  • Independent – can the story stand alone by itself?
  • Negotiable – can this story be changed or removed without impact to everything else?
  • Valuable – does this story brings value to the end-user?
  • Estimable – can you estimate the size of the story?
  • Small – is it small enough?
  • Testable – can this story be tested and verified?

From our experience, this approach empowers product discussions along with the product development team and external stakeholders. Writing user stories often saves us time as it helps us to define high-level CRM requirements without necessarily going into too many details too early. It gives us cross-team clarity on what matters most to the user – what do we need to build, for whom exactly, why and what’s the priority.

User stories are easy to define and understand so they became a standard way to summarize the functionality by both technical and non-technical team members. Instead of confusing specifications with complex terminology, we provide our clients with a requirements list that they can understand and with which they can identify. If you want to encourage the participation of non-technical team members, why not give user stories a try?

9 Reasons why Crust’s CRM Suite is the True Salesforce Alternative

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Many CRM applications claim to be an alternative to Salesforce, the cloud-only market leader, but very few can actually justify this claim. Planet Crust’s CRM Suite has been designed to be superior in many ways to Salesforce whilst delivering a competitive feature set. If you’re looking for a Salesforce alternative, here’s why Planet Crust’s CRM Suite should be the top of your list. Read more

Crust Technology Announces “Crust Service Solution”

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16 July 2019
Cork, Ireland

Crust Technology, the driving force behind the most advanced open source CRM in the world and the No. 1 private cloud alternative to Salesforce, has announced the upcoming release of Crust Service Solution.

Crust’s Service Solution will deliver the following feature set:

  • Agent console with 360 degree view of any customer
  • Advanced Case Management with integrated omni-channel communications
  • Attachments Management
  • Products Module
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) Tracking and Monitoring
  • Knowledge Base
  • Integrated Response Templates
  • Dashboards
  • Escalation Automation
  • Scripts Module
  • Self-service Portal
  • Integration with the Corteza Application Ecosystem
  • Skills module for intelligently and automatically assigning tasks to the most appropriate staff member
  • Complete integration with Crust’s CRM
  • Mobile ready

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Why choose Crust and Corteza?

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“Because Customer and User Trust are Sacred!”

I’ve been asked a good number of times over the last few days why Crust Technology decided to donate all its software intellectual property to the Commons Conservancy Foundation and created Corteza “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”. Why give away what many tech businesses consider to be the crown jewel in their commercial portfolio?

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Crust Technology donates Corteza, “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”

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Date: 20 June 2019
Place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Crust Technology (www.planetcrust.com) today announced that it is contributing all of its private cloud software infrastructure to the Commons Conservancy Foundation. The independent project will be named “Corteza” and marketed as “The Digital Work Platform for Humanity”.

A modern cloud architecture written predominantly in Golang and Vue.js, Corteza delivers powerful CRM, Urban Data Platform and Low Code Development platform for building records-based management systems.

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