In order to answer this question, I have to ask you about yourself, and what you do. Are you a small business owner? Are you a Corporate developer? Are you a Consultant/Developer who provides application development and integration services to your customers?
I’m going to try and answer this question in as plain a way as I can, and try to keep the “marketing speak” out of the answer, but forgive me if I do fall into that a little bit.
At its simplest TotalRM is an application that allows you to manage any type of relationships that exist within your business (or the business you work for). When you first install and launch TotalRM, you’ll be stepped thru a wizard interface that helps you build out your entities (the basic record you define, examples: Customer, Employee, Vendor, SalesPerson) and their relationships. After the wizard is complete you are presented with a customized interface built from your inputs in the wizard. The advantage to this approach over traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, is that typically you must fit your business into the mold of how the CRM application has been laid out and developed. With TotalRM, the application adjusts to fit your needs. Every business is different, and the fields needed as well as the relevance (placement on the screen) of those fields is different.
From the ground up TotalRM was designed to be modular, and allow for myself and others to develop add-ons (called providers and modules) as needed. As a matter of fact, with the exception of the main application executable and the Application Programmer’s Interface (API) library, every other piece of TotalRM could be re-written by other developers to suit the needs of their implementation. Need to have TotalRM use the usernames and passwords for an existing system in your business? Fine, write a new Authentication Provider. Would you rather TotalRM use your Oracle or DB2 server instead of MS SQL as the default storage for its data? OK, write a new data provider. Need to add a custom button to one of your entity forms that generates a spreadsheet based on the data from the current entity? Easy, create a custom module. If someone was so inclined, they could go as far as writing a brand new User Interface (UI), to give TotalRM a COMPLETELY different look and feel. “Out of the box” TotalRM will come with many default providers, and modules. Our Marketplace (Launch date: TBD) will offer providers and modules created by Purple Ant and other developers for an additional fee. So if you have a need for additional functionality, and it’s not included with TotalRM, the Marketplace will be a great place to see if someone else has already created something to fit your needs.
To a small business owner, TotalRM is Customer Relationship Management application that can be customized to work within their business, and capture the information that is relevant to them. For a corporate developer, TotalRM is an Line Of Business (LOB) application framework, that can be used within their organization to quickly develop a LOB solution to fit the company’s needs. For a company CEO, TotalRM is the integrated desktop providing them a 360 degree view of the company and its customers, helping them keep a pulse on their organization. For a solutions integrator/consulting company, TotalRM allows you to help provide a solution to your customers for a lower cost, shorter implementation time, and greater functionality.
What is TotalRM to you? Hopefully it will be your primary view into your business, where you create and track all the interactions that occur in your business.