My lead developer Travis Spangler and I were discussing our options for how we could integrate the functions of our current CRM system with something that tracked open issues and timelines on our projects. He spoke with the folks at sales.com and although their solution would do what we desire the cost and learning curve for the application is very high. Right now we are pleased with out CRM system which is called Big Contacts and our project management system is something that we built in-house and runs on our Windows 2008 Server that we also use for development testing and customer demos of Quillix. In the past we experimented with the community edition of Sugar but found out that this was going to require extensive development in order for us to accomplish our objectives. We would rather not bite off another large learning curve just to integrate the functions of our existing two systems.
Has anyone out there come across any reasonable alternatives?
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This is a really tough challenge. I have done extensive research on my own. I have found some source code that can be purchased. But mostly I found hundreds if not thousands of hosted CRM solutions. I am leaning towards the decision that using RAD tools like .NET and developing a solution is the best way to go. Avoid as much code as possible for things like reporting by using available third party tools. And also use other available SDKs to reduce development time and allow you to do things like display documents in the CRM system using AJAX. Yes you will have to maintain the code. But you will get the exact solution you want. And if you develop it well enough you may find that you can launch it in a hosted environment yourself and begin marketing it.
ReplyDeleteI would have to agree with Joe's comment. It can be tempting to purchase a solution, but with the amount of time you spend configuring and customizing, you could have written it from scratch and had a full integration into your business processes. Here at UFC, we have a project management and licesing portal application that use the same internally developed framework, but our CRM solution doesn't connect with that which is causing a major disconnect. So our plan in the next 6 months will be to write our own CRM and be able to take advantage of the platform that was built for the other applications.
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