Articles by Adam Stone
Other than my personal life and hobbies I am all about the system integration and A/V industry. I started in 1981 as a “TV delivery specialist” for the Good Guys a west coast CE chain. From there I started my own big dish satellite installation company which morphed into a home theater installation company in the early 90’s. I got out of the installation business in 1996 and went to work for an electrical contractor as project manager of their residential division where I was exposed to the complexities of old school/analog job costing, estimating, blueprints and project scheduling. Being a long time PC geek and creator of some database driven estimating tools I knew that there had to be a better way to deal with these complex projects. During the course of my employment there I was exposed to Visio as an easy to use drawing tool. After spending some time with it I realized that I could hook it up to a database and automate many of the disparate processes I needed to do to accomplish my tasks. That let to the formation of my current company D-Tools which is the leader in the marketplace with thousands of companies using our design, engineering and business management tools. My direct contact information is on the About tab.
We just got back from the CEDIA Expo (Custom Electronic Designer Installer Association) trade show in Denver. I consider this our “home” show because I launched the D-Tools product line at this same show in …
My good friend and D-Tools Certified Partner Kevin Mikelonis from Process DSG (Dealer Services Group) is giving a free Visio tips and tricks webinar on October 3rd. I have seen some of the stuff that …
In this post I went over some of my history with Middle Atlantic Products (MAP) and how we created the first version of RackTools the Visio based equipment rack design software. If you read that …
I am a big fan of Middle Atlantic Products (MAP) and have been using their products for around 15 years. When I was a system integrator I used to pour over their catalog looking for …
The clever folks at Zoho just came out with a new release of ZOHO CRM, For the most part it is a solid release, they fixed a few bugs and greatly enhanced the usability. You …
In part one I went over the process of getting synchronizing your contacts in Zoho CRM with MS Outlook. In part 2 I will go over the process of getting your contacts that are now …
I think MS Visio is one of the most misunderstood, mainstream software applications in the market today You can do so much with it but for whatever reason (actually I think I know the reason …
Part 1: Zoho to Outlook
Before we start we need some basic definitions.
What is a Contact? In Outlook a contact is a single, stand-alone entity that typically contains some basic information about that person such as …
This is interesting; I just read that Zoho has acquired its One Millionth user (link 1, link 2), Prestige Home Automation who is also a D-Tools Customer. Apparently Dean Dutton the Principle at Prestige heard …
Managing duplicate records is one of the hardest things to accomplish in CRM software. Just trying to determine what is a duplicate is hard enough and when you find a duplicate somehow you have to …
This post does not have anything to do with business or software but I was out for the past few weeks and everyone is going to ask “how was the trip” so I thought I …
Introduction here
As far as I know Sheet View is exclusive to ZOHO CRM. A common task (chore) in the management of any CRM system is editing large swaths of data at once. Some systems like …
