CRiMson Logo



This is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that I developed and constantly updated for my work at Lockdown Networks.

It was initially designed to manage customers in a Company => Department => Contact heirarchy, but eventually morphed into an appliance tracking and management tool (we used SalesForce for the customer aspects).

I was continually praised and thanked by the support staff, as this tool saved them hours of manual work every day.

We used it for six years and it became an integral part of the company:

  • The support team used it to determine the health (HD, CPU load, RAM, etc.) of each appliance as well as enable/disable various parts of maintenance contracts as well as track inventory.
  • They could also generate reports for contracts with OEMs (mySQL, OpSWAT, NAS, etc.) so we knew who to pay each quarter and how much per unit.
  • The development team used it to morph the appliances from Auditor, DataSafe, Enforcer, Commander (we used the same code base, but toggled features based upon the type of appliance).
  • The sales team used it to reserve inventory for evaluations as well as actual sales.
  • It was used to turn an evaluation unit into a purchased unit, and we could also remotely disable a unit that was not paid for and not returned.

Features

  • Note the XML RSS feed which shows which appliances are checking in.
  • Tagging is a concept we came up with to toggle various features for individual (or even groups of) appliances.
    This was done via SOAP calls when the appliance checked in daily.
  • We had an internal and external version of CRiMson -- we could Publish an "update" or "product" once it was approved via the test team and signed off.
  • There are also some nice Reports => Graphs generated.
  • Setup a crontab for daily emails for each alarm a rep has setup.
  • Export to CSV features were incredibly useful for our P.M. and S.E. to use in their weekly reports.
  • In many of the report pages, viewing the source will reveal a "SQL QUERY BEGIN" block to aide with our PM generating custom reports in Microsoft Access via ODBC.

Check out a live demo here. (username: test / password: test1234)
Please do not alter or delete any data.

Download the current tarball here. (version: v03.24.08)