| Introduction |  | |
Features | | |
How we tested | | |
Verdict |
Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a tricky business. Most people think that it's mostly being cheerful on the phone and making sure your clients' complaints are dealt with promptly. Of course, that is an essential part of it, but that's nowhere near the scope of business customer relations.
A customer, in its broadest possible definition, is someone with whom you or your company have any sort of relationship, which can be anything from someone who rings out of the blue to enquire about your products, or a long-standing client who has bought lots from your catalogue in the past, and may well buy some more. Each of these customers, whether in potentia or very real and on the other end of the phone, have particular requirements which must be met to establish or maintain a successful relationship.
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| [Click to enlarge] The homepage provides a comprehensive summary of tasks, appointments and communications. |
To further complicate matters, from the perspective of the home business there are many people who must work cohesively to meet these needs -- sales teams, customer service staff, technicians, account managers, helpdesk operators and so on. To genuinely make a customer feel that their needs are not simply being met, but are being taken seriously, each of these disparate groups must have access to all the relevant information about that customer. How many times have you called a company and had to explain the same problem to five different people? Off-putting, isn't it?
Needless to say, we're talking about an awful lot of information here, and making it readily accessible, meaningful and dynamic is no easy feat. This is the realm of CRM solutions. In this review we take a look at SugarCRM's Sugar Suite 4.0.1, which aims to provide comprehensive and cost-effective CRM solutions to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Sugar Suite 4.0.1 comes in three flavours: open source, professional and enterprise.
Specifications
For businesses keen to implement Sugar Suite, the minimum recommendations are ridiculously low. The application can run on pretty dated hardware, so the only requirements are the practical ones -- more users will require better performing machines.
Sugar Suite installs on either Windows or Linux, and only requires Apache, MySQL and PHP to be pre-installed. The open-source download is a mere 6.14MB, or 30.23MB for the install package plus all necessary AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) software.
This super-low footprint makes testing the application incredibly easy -- just fire up an old desktop and you're away.
Commercial open source
While Sugar Suite is open source in the sense that its code is open and freely distributable, and it leverages off open-source backend services (Apache, MySQL and PHP), it is not distributed under the General Public License (GPL).
Instead, Sugar Suite is distributed under the SugarCRM Public License (SPL), which is a slightly modified version of the Mozilla Public License. This in turn is largely based on the GPL, but was re-written to cover only Mozilla's source code. The only changes SugarCRM has made are replacing "Mozilla" with "SugarCRM" throughout the licence, and adding a section which deals with how the SugarCRM name and logos are to be used.
The SPL is still very open and flexible. You can download the open-source product freely and apply your own bug fixes, build new applications which leverage SugarCRM technologies, distribute the source code and contribution, and sell any non-derived modules or applications. You can even host SugarCRM products on your servers and charge a hosting fee.
| Introduction | | |
Features | | |
How we tested | | |
Verdict |
Sugar CRM is a great product for small to medium companies looking for an entry level customer management tool.
We have a number of startup and small to medium businesses where we have implemented Sugar CRM and it is now handling all customer relationships.
The installation is easy, normally deployed on a low end Linux server.
We simply 're-skin' the web based application so the product looks and feels just like their other systems displaying company logos and colours.
Good review! Sugar is a great product which we also run across our businesses.