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The long and sometimes sad story of how we find, implement and use CRM systems at D-Tools

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Information about the D-Tools/Google SketchUp integration

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Written by D-Tools Founder and President, Adam Stone

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Technical and product information written by the D-Tools technical support and development team

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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.

New EZ Match Data Import/Mapping Feature
12/10/2007 – 7:37 pm | View Comments
New EZ Match Data Import/Mapping Feature

Check this video that one of our product managers, Jeff Freeeman, put together on the new EZ Match data import function of SI5.1  This feature allows our users to very easily just update price/cost information …

Good residential business process article
12/07/2007 – 5:13 pm | View Comments

I saw this post in CE Pro today. Electronic Systems Consultants: Making Data-Driven Decisions.  I like this article for a number of reasons.

Process first.  They identified a number of areas where software (not ours BTW) could …

Web to Case Form Test
11/19/2007 – 4:01 pm | View Comments

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Round Tripping AutoCAD (DWG) files in Visio 2003
05/01/2006 – 12:00 am | View Comments
Round Tripping AutoCAD (DWG) files in Visio 2003

Getting a DWG file in and out of Visio has always been a problem.  The file needed to come in at the right scale so the Visio shapes would match the CAD shapes and then …

Rough wire installation and labeling methodology for the SI industry
02/15/2006 – 4:17 pm | View Comments
Rough wire installation and labeling methodology for the SI industry

Rough wire, unlike other electronic components in a project presents a special challenge for installation and documentation because a rough wire will actually exist and need to be documented in two locations, the start and …