Customer Management software

KoolKid

I am looking for customer management software for a small company.
Something they can host themselves that will handle Contacts, Tasks , meetings etc.
There are loads of options out there but they are all hosted with monthly charges. Anyone any experience of something open source or chear that can be installed on an existing site?

mneylon

Sugar CRM open source?

KoolKid

Thanks blacknight. Taking a look at it now

Bob the Builder

following advice from blacknight a while back, I chose SugarCRM.... great application...

KoolKid

I ve installed it & it looks good..
I am having problems importing contacts using csv file.
It just seems to freeze at this stage

Import Started:
Sat Apr 12 15:49:11 UTC+0100 2008..............................

Any ideas??

mneylon

Check the logs. It's probably a badly formatted entry or something that is causing it to barf, but without seeing them I can only make a semi-educated guess

KoolKid

Is there a log somewhere in admin?
I ran diognostics & saved the file but log text is blank.
I tried importing from agendus insted of palm & used a smaller file (Contacts A only)
It just seems to pick 2 random contcts & imported them then stalled again.
There has to be an easier way

I think it may be that not all contacts have a last name ( a required field) Any way to ignore this?

KoolKid

Any one any thoughts on this?
Any help would be appriciated?

mneylon

Sugar CRM have a user forum. You're more likely to get answers there

KoolKid

Very little on their forums to be honest. This software seems very limited with its import capabilities. I imported palm into Outlook which Sugar claims to import from , still the same results.
Do you know of any other software I could try?
Thanks for all the input.

KoolKid

If anyone is looking for a good solution I ended up using http://www.vtiger.com/
Imports went well & its very user friendly

mneylon

Vtiger is a branch of Sugar

scribs

Salesforce.com

Enough said.

Eoin

scribs wrote: »

Salesforce.com

Enough said.

That starts at $16 per user per month and in general is designed for large scale organisations.

Zascar

spend the money and get salesforce, its street ahead of anything else

Eoin

Zascar wrote: »

spend the money and get salesforce, its street ahead of anything else

I don't agree, but have a vested interest

OP, this page has some features of a few providers; not too sure how many of them are hosted solutions though: http://www.qiem.com/

Zascar

OP how much is this sytem going to be utilised? How big is the company, is it growing, how much use wiull this get? What are the primiary reasons for wanting this? All important factors to consider...

I had a look at sugar, its very good for a free open source app, but if you get a demo of salesforce, you'll see the difference.

Bob the Builder

Zascar wrote: »

I had a look at sugar, its very good for a free open source app, but if you get a demo of salesforce, you'll see the difference.

I did, and I preferred Sugar to be honest... and it'd free, so it's definetley well worth the price. I emailed sugar support at about 11am in the morning(so 6am, their time), and I got a reply within half an hour which sorted all my problems..

KoolKid

There is no logical reason to pay someone $16 a month to host this it you have hosting already. Just a rip off. Sugar are hopeless in my opinion. Could not get it to import & could not get any support.

Eoin

koolkid wrote: »

There is no logical reason to pay someone $16 a month to host this it you have hosting already. Just a rip off. Sugar are hopeless in my opinion. Could not get it to import & could not get any support.

Salesforce is not hosted on your own hosting package, you access their services. Also, you are not paying for the cost of bandwidth alone, you're also paying a license fee.

KoolKid

A licence fee is fine. I have no problem paying for good software. But why pay for hosted when you can host it yourself. There are other providers who charge a monthly fee per user. Another rip off IMO

Eoin

koolkid wrote: »

A licence fee is fine. I have no problem paying for good software. But why pay for hosted when you can host it yourself. There are other providers who charge a monthly fee per user. Another rip off IMO

I don't think I understand your problem - what's wrong with a monthly fee per month?

You can choose to buy an on-premise license if you have your own webserver (a shared hosting package wouldn't suffice), or you can pay to access a hosted service removing the hardware requirements altogether.

I would imagine that the hosted solution is going to be much cheaper than if you bought an on-premise license and installed it on your own server.

Some more info

Bob the Builder

koolkid wrote: »

There is no logical reason to pay someone $16 a month to host this it you have hosting already. Just a rip off. Sugar are hopeless in my opinion. Could not get it to import & could not get any support.

were you importing from outlook?

KoolKid

Not in the case of a lot of users..
Just speaking from my experience in setting this up. I spend a lot of time searching the net for suitable ways to do this. The wast majority were ongoing payments based on the number of users.
I used vtiger in the end which suited me perfect. But there is no problem.
BTW thanks to all for their advice on this subject

KoolKid

nevf wrote: »

were you importing from outlook?

Yes! Actually Palm using csv. But also tried after importing palm into outlook. The import just froze every time. vTiger import worked perfect first time

scribs

eoin wrote: »

That starts at $16 per user per month and in general is designed for large scale organisations.

Was browsing over old posts and saw the reply so thought id respond. Better late than never

Salesforce.com has 4 Editions that cater for companies of all sizes small and large.