The scalability issues often happen not only to businesses, but also to technical solutions. When a project faces lack of functionality of a CRM system, it needs to take a challenge and transfer from an enterprise-ready solution to a custom system. For that case we have made an Electron based inner solution for a Portuguese freight company.
The Concept
There were a set of requirements that had to lay as a foundation for the system: both local and hosted storage, scalability, easy interface, free of annual charges. Additionally, the system needed to have an easy interface, the ability to make comments to every field or cell, and the history of changes. While there are a few CRM systems that may satisfy the requirements, annual costs may be similar to developing a custom system from scratch. Moreover, CRM systems presented on today’s market suffer from a lack of integrational problems, and cannot interact with outside applications.
The realization
The application was made on Electron, so the process of development was quite the same to developing a web application:
Backend
Based on Node.js platform, with MongoDB integration for hosted data storage. Servers were run by client’s representative.
Frontend
The frontend part is written on Vue.js.
Assembling
Electron is a native desktop interface for web applications, so, to make the application run, we needed to wrap up a web workflow to a native desktop interface using Electron instruments.