Crm

CMS & WordPress
1

Hi there.

I need a simple CRM system, preferably open-source. It must not be complex like SalesForce, 37signals, etc.

Any suggestions?

2

You could investigate vTiger or SugarCRM. Both are open source. I’ve used Sugar, it’s pretty nice (unless you want to customise it a lot, then it gets complicated like SalesForce).

vTiger: http://www.vtiger.com/crm-products/crm-open-source/
SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/

Good luck!

3

Thanks for the reply.

vTiger and Sugar look a bit too complex for my requirements. Are there no simpler alternatives?

4

Not that I know of, but perhaps someone else does?

5

CRM packages by virtue of what they need to do just are really complex. I’ve used civiCRM and it has all the bells and whistles you would ever want but again kind of complicated to wrap your head around. On the bright side, once you know the features you’re after, you can get pretty proficient at whipping through the interface to get at them.

For simpler CRM systems, on several occasions I’ve used Drupal, created custom user profiles so that I have all the additional fields I need and then created views that bring out the information I want to report on. You kind of need to know your way around the CMS to do that but you can make it very specific to your needs without a lot of additional stuff.

Those are the two methods that have worked for me.

6

Yea, I actually went that route and whipped up a basic CRM in an afternoon using Organic Groups and simple node relations (Basically Creating a relation between Client and User or Company, along with Relation between Invoice and Client). It really wasn’t that tough … but working with Drupal does kind of require you to get your hands dirty, initially, if you’re not already familiar with the idea of CCK and Views.

Another option might be to take something like VTiger, and simply get rid of the options you don’t need. Which isn’t incredibly hard, but you do have to do a lot of searching around to find the right documentation – and it would certainly be a lot quicker than learning drupal cck, views and node relations. But the end result wouldn’t be quite as clean and tidy.

7

@CMS Dude, That sounds like a nice tidy solution. I agree about the learning curve… It takes some getting used to CCK, Views and Organic Groups as well.

  • I spend pretty much all of my waking time working in Drupal so it sort of becomes second nature. I’m a bit of a nerd that way :cool:
8

I’ve noticed Drupal people are kind of that way. :cool: Ha ha. So you at least have an excuse.