Joshua Jacobs
SugarCrm is one of the most recent software apps to catch my attention. I’ve heard a lot about it in the past, but until recently have not played with it. Recently, we installed on our server garden and I’ve been very impressed. While it starts as a contact management system, it has some design features that allow you to extend the data model, creating modules that include full CRUD capabilities (from what I’ve seen so far at least). I’ll write more on that later. Right now I want to focus on what I found about the different features.
Evaluating commercial open source software lately has been a bit disappointing because at least in one case, Alfresco, the sales team explicitly state that they would never consider a production installation of the OS version. That shocked me. What was equally shocking was the number of end-user bugs we discovered in the OS GA release. To add insult, the community was essentially non-responsive to wiki posts. Evaluating SugarCrm, I wanted to make sure that I know what I’m getting into.
After listening to this podcast from SugarCrm, I’m encouraged by what I heard. Commercial adds the following value to the community edition:
Commercial Only Support
Standard: E-mail, portal, forums; extended, or premium support includes phone support.
Commercial Only Functions
Quotes, contacts, sales forecasting, contracts, partition data among teams, sales reporting, workflow development for processes, word and wireless updating
Professional Services
SugarCrm professional services only work with commercial customers.
I think the core of SugarCrm should be enough for 110% of what I’m looking for, which makes me happy because the commercial version is not cheap. Perhaps that’s the way to do it: make the community version very high quality, but limited in certain ways; make the commercial version expensive enough to support the entire project and make a profit. Sounds like a win-win to me.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Do you use SugarCrm? What do you like about it? Dislike? What version did you chose and why?
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First I would like to mention that the contacts module is the same in all versions which differs from what you have stated.
Secondly it is great to hear that you tried SugarCRM I use it personally and do SugarCRM consulting.
What I enjoy most about SugarCRM is that it is open and with enough time I can make it function in almost any way that I need. I also enjoy that a small business can get started on a CRM package for little to no cost and keep it as their business grows.
Thanks for your reply, Josh.
When you say that the contacts module is the same in all versions, I’m guessing you mean that the features and/or code are identical?
Since I’m new to Sugar, can you let me know how mature the Studio and Module Builder features are? From what I can gather in testing it looks like these feature let a web user create some pretty sophisticated apps. Coming from an app development background, this is a pretty significant achievement!
Have you built custom modules with Sugar in your consulting gigs? What are some examples? Is it as straightforward as it seems, or are there limitations that show up as soon as you try to build a production quality module?
I would love to hear your feedback!
Also, since this a pretty new blog, I’m curious about how you found it?
Cheers,
Joshua