After a month playing with Highrise from 37Signals, I started to find failings, and set about evaluating the next option in my list - SugarCRM - the open source client relationship management solution.
After an aborted install attempts last month (which led me to try out Highrise), I finally got SugarCRM installed last night. I had to hack the PHP code behind it a little due to my website hosting configuration, but once that hurdle was cleared everything went smoothly.
So what does SugarCRM provide? It helps you track companies, contacts, leads, opportunities, projects, cases, support calls and more. Perhaps it’s most intreaguing feature is integration with email - providing a full email interface to manage email accounts within SugarCRM - which then lets you import emails and attach them to clients, projects, opportunities, and so on.
There are rough edges - a couple of features are not working for me at present - but there is a huge community around SugarCRM that share knowledge (a benefit of open source software that Highrise does not share). I will be tapping into the community over the coming days to hopefully solve the few niggles I have.
If you are interested in implementing your own CRM solution, you could do far worse than SugarCRM - check it out today at www.sugarcrm.com.