A new feature has been added to the CRMunicipal private beta release that will be of great benefit to municipalities.  One of the elements of the system that sets it apart from any other Project Management or CRM system is the Citizen Complaint Tracker.  The Tracker monitors all progress made in resolving a citizen complaint once the complaint has been entered into the system, and gives a Town Manager or Administrator the ability to track the assignment to the appropriate department and back again as it is investigated and resolved.  The Tracker gives a constant status of all outstanding complaints as notes are passed down the chain of command and back up again.  A log is maintained of all actions taken within the system, and at-a-glance status is always available.

We’ve now made it even easier for constituents to file complaints.  With the simple creation of a page to be added to a Town’s own website, a citizen will be able to file a complaint online.  That clogged catch basin or broken street light, suspected illegal dumping or tree removal, or even just a simple question, can all be brought to the Manager’s attention online through the Town’s existing web site and entered automatically in CRMunicipal’s Citizen Complaint Tracker.  When the Complaint form on the Town’s web site is completed and submitted, it is emailed to a private address.  CRMunicipal will check that mailbox throughout the day for complaints and enter them automatically into the CRMunicipal system and ready them for assignment by the Town Manager or System Administrator.

We’re very excited about this feature, and see it as another example of why CRMunicipal will be the most feature-rich system of its kind for municipalities.  Accountability and responsibility is important in a well-managed Town Hall, and CRMunicipal is the perfect tool to measure and maintain.  The private beta remains in testing, and public beta release is anticipated in the very near future.

We’re happy to report that CRMunicipal  development continues, and the system has been deployed from its development platform to its permanent hosting environment.  Several modules are already completed, while others are at the 40% completion stage.  We expect to have a full testing version ready for private play by the end of April.

Assuming we meet that scheduled version date, we’ll take the first few weeks of May for extensive testing and the development of a known issue list for final tweaking and editing.   That should put us in several Massachusetts town halls who have expressed an interest in CRMunicipal use, and then shortly thereafter reach the public release point.

We’re going to take the time until then putting together print materials and a marketing plan to put into action.  We expect to be on the road throughout Massachusetts during this time introducing the system to Town Managers for consideration in FY 2009 accounts.

Our development team at KISS Computing, Inc. remains busy and productive in moving both CRMunicipal and TSS closer to completion and public beta release.  Each of the web sites associated with those projects was updated on production status this week, and you can read about that progress on each site’s blog.

For Team Solution Software’s blog, click here.  For CRMunicipal’s blog, click here.

Meanwhile, we at Business Team Solutions are busy working on the marketing materials and making plans for our promotional strategies for each of these systems.  We anticipate an aggressive online marketing campaign for TSS beginning in late April.  As for CRMunicipal, our strategy will be much more personal and hands-on, as our principals, Richard Bienvenue and Michael McGrath, call upon town halls in Massachusetts to introduce the system to town managers and selectmen.  We expect that campaign to begin sometime in early May.

Generally speaking, if you can describe a process in words, software can be developed to perform that process. In the world of custom software, the answer to the question “Can you do this?” is, most often, yes.

Business Team solutions is a partnership of professionals in the auditing business, helping companies and municipalities determine whether there is a software solution to their needs. Each of us is a small business, under 20 staff, and each of us has multiple offices, including offices in our homes. We use the software we’ve built, use it every day, to stay on the same page, to share files and calendars, to maintain track of our projects and tasks, and to make the process of running our businesses and doing our work efficient. Every member of our respective teams is involved in those processes every day. This gives us a front row perspective, a practice what we preach business model, and aids considerably in the consulting work we do for our clients.

There are companies for whom a “canned” solution works, the kind you buy off the shelf at a Staples or Office Depot. You know who the developers are - - the biggest names in software development. Those applications are large, perform many functions and offer many features. It’s likely that your company doesn’t need all of them, however, and you end up paying for more than you will actually use. If your company’s business operation is not in sync with that “canned” solution, though, your operations have to change and adapt to the software.

Every business is different. Of course, there are common practices among all of us, but there are processes unique to each company’s history and habits, too. Software should take those unique practices and habits into consideration and meet them comfortably, and that’s the benefit of the Open Source philosophy that technology should adapt to business practices and not the other way around. In the software world, it is possible to fit a round peg into a round hole, and the fit will always be better.