Story: We developed the website www.akumulatorionline.com 7 (seven) years ago. At that time the owner asked to create a modern ans simple website, where she can get orders for single product (most of the customers were purchasing only one product) by email. We developed a modern for that time design on Drupal 6 with form with sequential fill of a form using webform module and submodules. All orders were kept in a form table. We developed two different fomrs for different range of products.

Task: First complain was that design was not responsive. On mobile devices site was looking ugly, users were not able to fill the form and this lead to loosing customers.We offered two options - upgrade to Drupal 7 and changing the template with responsive one or to migrate the site to Drupal commerce and targeting Drupal 8. Another concern was if site will loose its position on Google first page for some keywords.

Result: First attempt to use Drupal 8 Commerce was unsuccesful - several issues, that would require too much customization on standard modules. Then we moved to Drupal 7 Commerce. Result is similar like in the past view, but responsive with drupal commerce and several new functionalities to promote better products.

You can visit the site live: http://www.akumulatorionline.com/

After careful investigation we were looking for Ticketing system thou we tested OTRS, Drupal based solutions and at the end we reached Redmine. Redmine out of the box is great but we used also redmineCRM free plugins (will consider buying them soon as needed) and started using it. Redmine is great for the following:

1. Manage several projects with separate teams with precise security - common users can see/do whatever they have to do, but other projects may be fully hidden for them.

2. One person for different projects can have different roles - perfect, as different projects members can contribute with different skills and activities.

3. Very good time and tasks tracking

4. For general support we built structure like a tree - root is client, one sub-project is for general support (like never ending project) and several specific sub-projects - main projects for the client

5. Redmine has builtin email to issue, email update functionality (requires specific configuration)

As we have several projects in different areas - media, web sites, application software, pure IT etc. I wanted to include at least for existing projects some of major past issues most resolved. This was going to create some easy to access knowledge base  and to show clients major past activities. One source of those problems was our mailing. We use Outlook. So we started looking for integration with email we hit a solution called Redmine Outlook Add-In  - with its free trial we started testing. Some of direct advantages we found:

1. Creation of an issue from email is easy and allows you to properly enter issue or task title and modify description (coming from email body)

2. Automatically attaches email attachments to the issue including the email itself

3. Picking the email date as start date helped me extremely to build the history for current customers, saving lots of searches, clicks and copy/paste

4. Convenient interface at Outlook with specialized buttons for Projects/Issues/Tasks management. Very nice Calendar integration.

Here are highlights from Ahau Software channel in Youtube:
 

Nice job! from Ahau Software

The first Hyatt Regency Hotel in Bulgaria will be built in Sofia at the site of the former cinema "Serdika" and is expected to open in 2018. Construction will be carried out in partnership with the Bulgarian company. Hyatt Hotels Corporation is a leading global hotel company with a portfolio of 12 brands and 652 properties in 53 countries. Projections indicate that the subject will attract the interest of more foreign visitors, including longtime guests of the chain of event and congress tourism as well as cultural and historical city tours in the capital.

http://www.epicor.com/uk/service-industry/hospitality-software.aspx - Hyatt use solutions of Epicor

One of the largest hotel chains in the world - "Hayat" enters Bulgaria with high-class hotel in the city center. This was announced today at a meeting between the Minister of Tourism Nikolina Angelkova Mr. Takuya Aoyama, vice president for development of the "Hyatt" for Europe, Africa and the Middle East and Mr. Lachezar Todorov, CEO of "Terra Tour Service" partner Bulgarian side.

"The hotel chain is very high class and will give a new impetus to the development of tourism our sector," he said earlier today Minister Angelkova told reporters. She reported that the Ministry of Tourism in talks with several large chains, which also consider entry into the country. "Even with the creation of self ministry, the main goal for us was to attract large investors and proven brands that will bring in its wake more and more wealthy tourists," said Nikolina Angelkova.

"We are working for the realization of this investment plan over seven years, but we believe that now has come the right time," said Lachezar Todorov. He stressed that it is very important that already has its own Ministry of Tourism, which coordinates the work in the sector, while there is a strong ambition and commitment of the management of "Hayat" with this project. "Bulgaria welcomes many tourists and we want them to stay longer here, which will offer them the best services and facilities," said Takuya Aoyama.

Original source in Bulgarian from: http://www.tourism.government.bg/bg/kategorii/novini/ministur-angelkova-svetovna-hotelska-veriga-vliza-na-bulgarskiya-pazar

Peter Aberg of Alfa Laval explains how they have rolled out Epicor iScala globally and how it's helped them grow their business at a much faster pace than before.

Published on Jul 22, 2015