A look at BigMachines

BigMachines product configurator sales software is a selling engine to quote, order and generate proposals - also referred to as a SaaS (software-as-a-service).

It is commonly used together with for example Salesforce or Oracle CRM as a product configurator for more advance configuration and to create quotes and generate dynamic and printable proposals.

It is built on Java as the backend programming language and Oracle for storage. Furthermore it uses Ext JS for the Ajax eperience. The entire application is rather complex and advanced and the company and their clients are growing heavily.

Now, this is not an advert although it might sound like that. I attended an admin training course last week in Frankfurt to learn how to administer a BigMachines product configuration site. And since I will be working with this to a great deal from now on I suspect, I thought I should introduce it here so that future administrators and developers of BigMachines applications can take advantage of things that I come across as well.

We are currently working with a solution from BigMachines that is integrated with Salesforce. The idea is to manage all Accounts, Contacts, Cases, Opportunities etc. from Salesforce. When a configuration needs to be done the action is started in Salesforce with a button click that gets the user into BigMachines. In here the configuration- and commerce process is started to create quotes and proposals. When we are done information is pulled back into Salesforce.

Now this is very briefly explained but I hope I can get back to this in more detail later on. I will definitely talk more about the Document Engine for instance. The sales- and commerce process is currently a much bigger task for me than the technology