Getting up and running with a CRM
July 12, 2006 12:42 pm gnome, marketingWe have lots of contacts we need to organise – friends of GNOME, journalists, distributions, user groups, governments, deployments, ISDs, ourselves, and people whose paths we cross from time to time – people from other projects, or employees of big GNOME users, or previous keynote invitees.
I’ve worked out the main usecases for a CRM system for GNOME – using it for anything outside this would be excessive.
- Adding a new CRM administrator or user
- Importing an address-book, and filtering GNOME contacts from non-GNOME contacts
- Adding a new contact
- Associating a new event (IM conversation or mail) with a contact
- Receiving a notification when a contact you’re related to has some new content added (being able to watch people or groups of people)
- Associate people with events (centralise information about user-group participation in events)
There may be others I haven’t thought of – that’s what blog comments are for 😉
So far, the feedback I’ve received says “don’t use SugarCRM if you value your sanity, CiviCRM is where it’s at”. As a non-connaisseur, I’m going to probably take that advice, unless there are othr recommendations that people might have that I should consider.
I would love something which had a possibility to integrate with desktop apps (mail, contacts, IM) via a web service API, but that’s not a requirement.
A problem I’ve thought a bit about is what the default level of visibility for a non-privileged user should be. I would like to have 3 levels of security – anonymous users see some stuff (names & events, but not email addresses, for example), authentified users can add contacts and events, and see everything, and administrators can add new users. Anything more than that seems overly complex.
Anyone have experiences with CiviCRM – or anything else – which they’d like to share? Is there anything we’d like to do which isn’t available?
July 13th, 2006 at 1:28 am
http://www.compiere.org/ is the most mature ERP/CRM system available and blows sugar away. I won’t even bring up the fact that Sugar is quasi-evil in that they changed from MPL to the Microsoft Shared Source License and so shouldn’t really be considered OSS software.
July 13th, 2006 at 5:31 am
Compiere depends on Oracle 10g and Java 1.5.0 – so, um, thanks, but no thanks. Sugar is also a weak free software supporter at best, so they’re likely out of consideration. So that leaves us with CiviCRM, for the moment. Which I’m going to try seriously.
July 13th, 2006 at 6:48 am
Some of the answers to Dave’s questions about CiviCRM:
> Adding a new CRM administrator or user
CiviCRM works within Drupal or Joomla. Within Drupal you would just create the appropriate user role and give it the appropriate permission. Creating a new CiviCRM Admin is as simple as granting a user that role.
> Importing an address-book, and filtering GNOME contacts from non-GNOME contacts
CiviCRM has strong, wizard-based import functionality from csv. So you would create a csv from your source and then import that csv.
The best thing would be to take out all the non-Gnome contacts from the csv. Alternatively, you can import them into an “Import” groups and people can decide whether they are Gnome contacts at a latter date.
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/import?reset=1
> Adding a new contact
You can create individuals, organizations or households.
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/contact/addI?c_type=Individual&reset=1
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/contact/addO?c_type=Organization&reset=1
> Associating a new event (IM conversation or mail) with a contact
http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/civicrm/contact/view/activity?activity_id=2&action=add&reset=1&cid=36&log=1
(sample of logging a call)
You can also create custom activities (IM) and log those.
> Receiving a notification when a contact you’re related to has some new content added (being able to watch people or groups of people)
This would be a good community contribution. We just implemented basic logging for record create/modification, so the basics are there and you could build the functionality from CiviCRM APIs.
> Associate people with events (centralise information about user-group participation in events)
This is accomplished easiest through Drupal.
> Receive event-based notifications (“I’ll get back to you at the end of the month”)
Schedule your activities for the future.
Actual notifications would be a community contribution.
Here is a community contribution that builds a task list from pending activities:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Task+List+-+Listing+of+Scheduled+Activities
> Integrate with desktop apps (mail, contacts, IM) via a web service API
We have SOAP working for most of the APIs… you just would have to excercise them.
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+Public+APIs
Integration with desktop applications would be another great community contribution 🙂
Find out more: http://www.civicrm.org
July 13th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Hi Dave!,
as far as I could seen (after a 15 minutes demo visit), CiviCRM is very simple and easy to use.
Maybe it’s enough, but just in case, you should try Tutos also, a free software groupware/CRM solution: http://www.tutos.org/homepage/index.html
Tutos is not a specific CRM solution, but a grouware/CRM/bugtracker. We have used it for the last 3 years, as CRM and groupware.
A problem in Tutos is that it doesn’t have a strong community supporting it. The last version was released more than one year ago.
If you want to know something more about Tutos characteristics, please ask me, I am an advanced user 🙂
javivázquez
July 16th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Dave:
Your best bet for opinions/support/question with regard to CiviCRM is our mailing lists. You can sign up at:
http://lists.civicrm.org/lists/lists
Our permissioning model matches drupal’s permissioning model which is fairly simple (but quite powerful) right now. We hope to move to a more comprehensive ACL based solution in a following version
Our wiki at http://wiki.civicrm.org/ has a fair amount of information and comments. the community is pretty strong and growing at a nice rate. Would be awesome for the gnome group to use civicrm 🙂
lobo
lobo