BBeans.biz: Viz Overview

Viz comes in 2 flavors: VizCRM and VizWeb

Viz is a customer research tool which runs in a browser, making it ideal for: Customer Self-Service over the Internet and Remote Sales Force Support. Viz provides real-time customer information stored in your back-office database displayed a rich user interface running in a JavaScript-enabled browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Any device running such a browser -- from a desktop to a laptop to an iPhone -- can see the information provided by Viz.

VizCRM is intended to be embedded in a compatible CRM product such as GoldMine or SugarCRM and has been tested on: GoldMine 8 and SugarCRM 5.

A software product hosting VizCRM must:

Support launching a Viz-compatible internal or external browser window
Support dynamic URL data injection, mainly for customer and user identifiers.

VizCRM is typically hosted on the same intranet or VPN, as the CRM product, and often the same server. The back-office database must be accessible to Viz via the network. VizCRM relies on the CRM to supply 2 key services: Security and Customer look-up.

VizWeb is a stand-alone application intended to work over the internet. It supplies configurable security and look-up services. The server portion is hosted on the same intranet or VPN as the back-office database, and often the same server. The client portion is hosted on any web server accessible to the internet. The web-accessible web server can be on a shared hosting service (your ISP) or it can be on the same server as the server portion of Viz, so long as that server is accessible via the internet.

Information:

Selecting a Customer
The starting place for Viz is your customer. Your customer is identified in your back-office database by a unique code or ID. Viz must have this unique customer identifier in order to find the customer's associated information in your back-office database. VizCRM relies on your CRM software to provide that customer identifier to Viz. The usual means for accomplishing this is to include the identifier as a field in your CRM contacts database. The mechanism for passing the customer identifier field from your CRM database to Viz is specific to the CRM product. See Viz: Developers Guide - Embedding in a CRM.

Configurability

The information that Viz can display and the way Viz displays it, is highly configurable. The configuration of Viz is covered in "Viz: Developers Guide".

Components Viz was developed using: " Eclipse IDE " Google Web Toolkit (GWT) version 1.7 " Ext GWT (GXT) version 2.0 " Jetty 7 " Java 1.6 " Windows Vista.

It has been tested in runtime environments using: " Internet Explorer 7 and 8 " Firefox 3.5 " Jetty 7 " Java 1.6 " Windows XP, Vista and 2003 Server.

The test environments should be considered the minimum requirements for browser and OS platforms. Other browsers or OS platforms may also work. There are very slight differences in the appearance of Viz in different browsers. (See Appendix A for known issues.)

Appendix A: Known issues Internet Explorer 6 " Occasional and apparently harmless Javascript error message pop-ups.

Jetty is a Java web application server. Other web application servers that support Java servlets should work fine, but deployment of Viz may differ slightly from server to server.

Licensing
All components used by Viz are copyrighted and licensed.

These are the licenses involved: Eclipse Eclipse Public License 1.0 http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html GWT Apache License 2.0 http://www.apache.org/licenses/ GXT Commercial License http://extjs.com/license Jetty Apache License 2.0 http://www.apache.org/licenses/ Java Java Technology Licensing http://www.java.com/en/download/license.jsp Windows Microsoft End-user License Agreement (EULA) Viz Lindsey and Lindsey Design Commercial Software License GXT, Windows and Viz are commercial products. You cannot copy or distribute them. The other components are free and open source libraries whose licenses are meant to protect you the user against unwanted restrictions on your use of the libraries. Eclipse is a development environment and is not needed for running Viz.