ColinAke.com…until I write a book.

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