Posts

Why Do Teachers Prefer Smart Schools?

/0 Comments/in , /by

A smart school is defined as the use of advanced equipment and digital technology in classrooms to enhance the overall educational environment and learning experience.

This includes using education management systems and mechanisms such as video projectors, digital note-taking tools and cloud-based database storage. The global smart learning market is expected to reach a value of $56.5 billion by the year 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.5%.

With the rise of remote learning, smart schools are becoming a more and more vital aspect of providing a satisfactory academic experience. Smart schools can fundamentally and successfully remove geographical, technological and digital barriers to expanded and diverse educational and learning opportunities. Read more

How can you work remotely with open-source?

/0 Comments/in /by

Remote work has become a necessity in the corporate world. With the pandemic giving way to a striking shift in the corporate paradigm, organisations are now favouring remote work over office work. Just today, Salesforce announced that they’ll give their employees the possibility of working from home permanently.

But while an onlooker will simply attribute its success to the pandemic, remote work has actually gained popularity on its own in the past decade. With Gartner reporting an increase of almost 173% in remote work between 2005 and 2018, it is clear that remote work existed and thrived long before COVID-19 forced it upon us. An example close to home is that in Crust, the majority of the team already worked from home every day, long before the pandemic.

How can you work from home? Open-source software can help you. There are several benefits. Read more

How Do You Manage Tasks?

/0 Comments/in /by

Building and managing a business empire is extremely challenging. Lack of direction and ineffective allocation of tasks can threaten an enterprise’s status. 75% of the companies fail within the first 18 months of establishment. All it takes is one oversight, one clerical error, or one operational mistake to jeopardise a project. This is why, in the time-specific corporate world, task management is a crucial practice.

Task-management is a process used by managers to start, execute and complete a task through its lifecycle successfully. It helps teams identify the tasks that need to be done, set deadlines for their completion, and assign them to the various departments and team members. Tasks concerning sales, resource-allocation and operations require extreme scrutiny, detailed descriptions and in most cases, an automated workflow to support managers. Read more

How and why a low-code CRM will help you close more deals

/0 Comments/in , /by

A customer relationship management solution isn’t just a service tool; it is also a sales instrument. Managers across the globe have realised that an open-source low-code CRM is a useful ally to their sales teams. It not only improves customer-provider relationships but also enhances the company’s lifetime value. A study published by Tech News World revealed that 54% of all businesses are expected to improve their sales with CRM.

CRM software assists company employees to keep track of clients’ contact details, business interactions and other activities. The Corteza open-source low-code platform, developed and maintained by Planet Crust, is a powerful Salesforce alternative, that helps operatives interact with leads and team members more efficiently now than ever before. The low-code base allows fast communication by enabling customization and flexibility. Read more

Why is Employee Onboarding So Important?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Most companies often underestimate the importance of onboarding while hiring employees. In fact, 70% of the companies have a partial or no employee onboarding process, which leads the new employees to be anxious, less productive, and disconnected from working with the team. The onboarding process is a challenging factor for every organization to overcome.

Has your company improved the standard of the onboarding process, or is it still troubled with a tedious working structure? If not, your organization needs some help from CRM and low-code platforms. Read more

What are Team Collaboration Tools?

/1 Comment/in /by

Apart from all the challenges that the pandemic has thrown upon us, one of the most daunting tasks is to manage all the working teams at an organization. Be it work from home or the regular workplace standard, it is common to find yourself amongst piles of sheets, people running around in search of documents, tasks waiting for approval, and a list of several other delayed activities. The pandemic introduced the idea of remote work, which seemed to make things even worse for many businesses that were not adept with digital transformation.

In such cases, all you can think of is a solution that eases workload, reduces the pressure, and makes everything streamlined. That’s where team collaboration tools take charge.

Team collaboration tools are tools that help people work efficiently together. Some examples of team collaboration tools are:

  • team messaging
  • video conferencing solutions
  • project management tools
  • online document editors with collaborative editing features
  • online whiteboards

Collaboration within teams is directly proportional to the performance outcomes one can expect. When one or more groups of people are working towards a common goal, a collaboration platform can be extremely useful in ensuring a productive outcome of the entire workforce’s efforts.

Why Choose Team Collaboration Tools?

Did you know that 83% of professionals choose technology to collaborate in professional spaces?

Modern workplaces are changing dynamically, and digital business transformation is the soul of this change. Professionals are choosing their working standards and drifting away from monotonous tasks that take unnecessary time and effort. They’re choosing a comfortable working environment to increase their productivity and maintain harmony within the teams. Open-source software solutions that can facilitate the working of teams from anywhere, anytime. So, like this businesses can satisfy their employees and boost their productivity.

Team collaboration does not necessarily mean management of tasks and deadlines only. While business process management software can do that, collaboration tools are specially designed for bringing employees together. More than 80% of businesses rely on social technologies to enhance business outcomes. For any kind of information sharing, inter-team or intra-team communication, meetings and discussions, everything can be made more smooth with the help of these collaboration tools.

More than just productivity, effective communication and collaboration have a direct impact on employee morale as well. Encouraging creative collaboration over all tasks and processes can significantly accelerate the pace of the company and deliver good results. Above all, these tools save time and resources, which is a good sign for any business.

Onboard Your Team with Crust

Paving the way for newer and better platforms for teams to collaborate and work in synergy, Crust has developed specific solutions for small and medium businesses as well as large enterprises. So, climb the ladder of productivity and success, and try Crust for your business today!

What is Smart School?

/0 Comments/in /by

As the name itself reveals, smart ‘connected’ schools make use of advanced equipment and smart technologies and are very much different than the traditional schools. Today’s teaching and learning patterns have been completely flipped from what it used to be a few years ago. It’s not “Progressing through Learning” anymore; it’s more inclined towards “Learning through Progressing.” And that is why students require a learning environment that is more interactive and smart schools are here to provide them with every resource they need. Read more

What is the best open-source CRM for enterprises?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

There is a wide arrange of open-source CRMs on the market. Some are forks of old SugarCRM versions, while others are built on new technologies. So the question arises about what the best open-source CRM is.

Crust to participate in the OpenExpo event: “Discover the best open-source CRM for enterprises.”

To help enterprises figure out what the best open-source CRM is, OpenExpo Europe has organised the online event: “CRM DAY 2020”. The Crust CRM Suite is one of the solutions you will see in action at the event. Additionally, Crust Technology will participate in the round-table at the end of the event.

OpenExpo Europe is the leading Enterprise IT Innovation, Digital Transformation and Open Source Community & Summit in Europe. They aim to spread, present, discover and evaluate open-source solutions and trends. The OpenExpo fair is currently the largest congress and professional fair on IT innovation in Europe.

Crust is excited to participate at OpenExpo’s upcoming event. Firstly, because the event’s topic perfectly aligns with what Crust offers. Secondly, we see it as a recognition of our work to be the leading open-source CRM. And thirdly, because we will be able to reach enterprises that didn’t check out open-source CRM solutions before.

Read more

Is Salesforce Copying the Crust’s Product Strategy?

/0 Comments/in , /by

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.