vTiger

Still my CRM of choice.

Had a furious row in the forums with some idiot who still believes that Open Source means 'free'. There are some good people there helping & developing, but at the end of the day you have to put a roof over your head and feed yourself. Why SHOULD a developer spend a morning trying to sort out your problem for free ?

Why don't these people get it ? I do my best to help where I can, mainly pointing people to documentation etc etc, particularly when you get a 'Help, panic, jump now' post by a newbie who hasn't even bothered RTFM. And I get a grilling for being 'patronising & condescending' or somesuch.

The whole experience has put me off posting now - I can't be arsed to try and help and then have my doors blown off for it. Better things to do with my time.

Ironically enough, though a fork of Sugar, I do remember when I visited their forums I thought it felt far more commercial than vTiger, hence my choice.

Anyway, if you haven't tried vTiger, give it a whirl. Pretty good out of the tin but with a powerful API allowing you to extend. Yes, it has it's faults (don't mention Marketing, Webmail, and documentation all over the show) but it's good at what it does.

It also has various connectors - Thunderbird, Firefox, and under development is one to PHPList. All very promising. It would be nice to see something developed to hook it up to some form of accounting system - it could be a real killer then.

Anyway, if you need to organise your business, whether you are a one man band or employ thousands, go have a play.

www.vtiger.com