Somewhere out there!

Still considering which CRM product to use. Although it seems there is really only three good choices in the LAMP/OSS world.

SugarCRM has released a new 2.0 version. This time round there is some difference between the OSS and professional versions. Here is a useful review of this new version. One of its major new features is a Calender plug-in. There is a quotes modules in the professional edition. However, the main feature missing from the OSS version which the Pro version has is decent ACLs.

SugarCRM also has a plug-in to Outlook. Given how easy it is to development plugins to Thunderbird/Firefox it would be nice to see something like this for Sunbird whenever it gets a extension option.

Being purely OSS driven XRMS does not have such clear cut version releases. There is some comparison here of XRMS to Sales Force, although the comments can apply to any consideration. XRMS also has a calender plug-in, although it seems to be still under littler more development.

Dark Horse CRM has released a new 2.9 version and changed it’s name to Centric CRM. Seems to have a more open OSS license now, although its hard to tell if the user number is restricted like the previous Dark Horse Free version.

In all Centric is the most mature product, although the fact it is JRE oriented makes its difficult to maintain and develop. XRMS seems development pretty rapid, although its hard to tell as the online demo is obviously not updated as much as the its commercial competitors due lack of developer time.

I suspect I’ll finally get the time to development something in the next month. So I’ll be putting these products though some testing.

One unfortunately thing, is that none of them seem to have a good work flow management system. Although I think Centric is close to something. Plus for neither has a good system for tracking internal tickets/jobs associated with other work flows related to the business. It would be nice to integrate this, at least on a simple scale.