Open Source CRM Recorded Demos Added
As part of the the ongoing efforts we are putting into making open source CRM Guru the best source for open source CRM knowledge on the web, we have added two new pages:
- CRM Demos - the CRM Demos player presents recorded flash demos, produced by us, of the major open source CRM solutions - SugarCRM, Concursive and vtiger. The recorded demos will both provide an easy way to compare the different solutions as well as how-to guides for common CRM activities.
- Contact Us - we are really here for to serve our readers as best as we can. For us to improve open source CRM Guru, we would love to get feedback from you. We are especially interested to learn from you what interests you most about open source CRM. Feel free to contact us on any issue.
We hope you will find the new additions to open source CRM Guru. We have lots of surprises coming up, so make sure you stay tuned by registering to our RSS feed.
Open Source CRM Award Winners 2008
During the past few weeks, best open source applications awards were handed out by some of the world’s leading open source software organizations.
Obviously, open source CRM vendors were strong candidates in the different open source business applications categories.
Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards
Sourceforge, the world’s most popular open source development platform, let the community select its favorite projects for 2008. For enterprise software, there was only a single category, won by OpenOffice.org. I have to disagree with this choice - open source CRM and ERP are becoming increasingly viable solution for the enterprise, and Sourceforge should have acknowledged that, in my opinion.
InfoWorld’s Best Of Open Source Awards (Bossie)
For the second year in a row, SugarCRM wins the Bossie in the CRM category, dubbed as “most complete and commercial-grade free and open source CRM solution” by Infoworld editors who, selected the winners.
LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards
Although none of the open source CRM contenders won an award, there were two nominations - Concursive was nominated in the prestigious Best Business Application category, while Sugar was a nominee in the Best Desktop Solution.
I can’t really understand why Sugar was considered as a desktop solution (the winner of the category was Ubuntu Desktop Edition), and I would be happy to hear if anyone can explain the logic behind that categorization (are Sugar going to surprise us all???).
Congratulation to all the winners. We will keep you updated as more rewards are handed out. Registering to our RSS feed is always a good idea!
The SugarCRM Offerings Portfolio
SugarCRm is a very popular open source CRM solution. As a natural evolution of its offerings protfolio, Sugar is offering much more than just a CRM application. We will preview its most interesting offerings in this post. An in-depth analysis of each offering will follow.
Core Application - SugarCRM Suite
Sugar started as a stand-alone PHP application. You could download the php code, untar it to a directory on your Apache server (bundled with PHP and Mysql) and presto - you got yourself a working CRM solution. That was, and still is, the core of Sugar’s offering - a fully functional Customer Relationship Management application.
Current version of SugarCRM is 5.0 . It is offered in several editions - Community, Professional and Enterprise. You can still download and use it for free ( the community edition).
Sugar Services
Sugar, like many other open source business applications, offers services around its core CRM application. These services include installation, customization, technical support, migration and upgrades, to name a few.
Sugar divides its service offering to 3 main categories - support services, implementation services and professional services. I think this services schema is a bit too complicated.
If you plan on using any of them, I would suggest you to thoroughly research and understand what you get for your buck. Support services are a must for any production implementation of a CRM application, open source or proprietary, and nobody knows Sugar better than the people who develop it.
Sugar On-Demand
One of the main reasons for the success of Sugar is the fact that it is a native web application. It is built on top of the very popular LAMP stack. Offering Sugar in a CRM SaaS model (hosted software) is a natural evolution of Sugar. I predict that more and more CRM customers will go for Sugar’s CRM SaaS model.
SugarExchange
Microsoft Windows is a very successful software. Why was Windows such a huge success when it first came out? Microsoft realized, earlier than anyone else, that if you write software, it needs to be easily extensible. For an operating system vendor, that means it should be easy to develop software that run on your OS.
Sugar (and other CRM application vendors) realized that in order to grow faster than possible organically, it needs to open up its application and promote 3rd party add-on development around its core CRM application. The developers extend Sugar’s core CRM functionality, making Sugar a viable option for a wide range of customers.
That is what SugarExchange is all about - it’s a marketplace for 3rd party add-on applications written specifically for SugarCRM, enhancing its core functionality with features such advanced reporting, mobile connectivity, integration components and more.
I plan to cover Sugar’s entire offering portfolio in details, so stay tuned by registering to our RSS feed.
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