ColinAke.com…until I write a book.

Happy Monday to you all out there.  Wanted to share a little bit about the weekend and talk about a new purchase I made.

The weekend was great - my cousin Lauren got married and I got to shoot the wedding - which is always tons of fun.  I shot with Tracey Long, a photographer friend of mine I’ve shot with for a year or so.  The wedding was at the Canton Theatre - a small, old timey theatre with almost no light to speak of.  So I was thankful we rented 24mm f/1.4s (for those of you unfamiliar with photograph speak, that low f number means it lets a lot of light in).  The wedding was simple and small, but I thought it was very nice.  I’ll have some pictures for y’all to look at Wednesday night or Thursday, most likely.

I made a purchase I think will get some good use in the months and years to come - a nice flash unit from AlienBees and a nice stand, boom arm, and softbox.  Should let me shoot some sweet portraits - which I’m sure I’ll post here soon.

The day has been good so far - finally to a point in the summer where I can turn from researching CRMs and their capabilities to beginning to become an expert with one of the systems.  Off to dig more into the world of open source.

What did you do with your weekend?

Take care,

Colin

We’ve been looking at SugarCRM as an open source CRM solution to customize.  The more I dig into Sugar, the less impressed I am.

There are a few elements that could be viewed as crucial for a large organization’s adoption of a CRM.  These three key things I need to implement a CRM properly

• Team Functionality - Allows me to group users by team or group.
• Workflow - Automatically assigns tasks to users upon certain events (I’d use this to manage leads)
• Outlook Integration - Links contacts, emails, and calendars from Outlook to Sugar.

The problem with Sugar is they’ve got an Open Source version of their software, but none of these features are there.  If we want these features, we have to pay $275 per year.  Per user.

Now, when we’re a 1200 person organization that will eventually require people to use this to manage their potential opportunities, that gets prohibitively expensive.  If we wanted everyone to be able to log in, that’d be $330,000.  Every year.  Even if you wanted only 100 people to have access, that’s $27,500/year.

So I’m looking into vTiger - a true open source “fork” of the SugarCRM software.  It has all three functions built into it, completely open source.  There are a couple hangups, but I’m less and less impressed with Sugar right now.

Open source shouldn’t mean “We took out all the really useful features and would love to charge you for those.”  That’s not true to the purpose of open source.  And that’s why vTiger made the split.

Til next time,

Coin