Hey guys,

I am assisting my old man in meeting his needs in terms of a CRM system.

Now I have a limited amount of experience in this field so I thought I would come to you guys for some tips.

His basic requirements are:

• Provide similar functionality to Business Contact Manager BUT on a server environment
• Integrate with BCM on local machines
• Manage and categorise contacts for email campaigns
• Auto trap email by client contact
• Categorise and track sales process
• Reminders and alarms
• Reports and analytics
• Notes fields
• Integration with Phone system
• EASE of use
• Integrity of system - robust
• Low cost – we have MS CRM 3.0 Small Bus Edition OR MS CRM Professional available free for our use….other systems are at cost.


We are thinking of trialing MS CRM 3.0 Small Bus Edition– is this going to be a good option?

At this stage, he is running an exchange server, which the CRM program (whichever we choose) would integrate with.

Any tips you can provide me with would be appreciated.

you looked at SugarCRM ? it's free. no idea if it meets your criteria though.

vtiger CRM

Whoa awesomely fast responses, thanks I will check those two out

Edit: Just to confirm - are these able to integrate into an exchange server or similar ? I want something centralised if possible ??

not much will integrate that well with exchange, unless its something like sharepoint
zimbra will integrate exchange with email/contacts/calendar etc

Haven't used it myself, but a lot of the usergroups I'm on love SugarCRM, particularly for SBS environments.

None of these will be integrated solution with your MS Exchange. If that's the requirement then you'll have to either get MS CRM or a more expensive CRM solution. Or their new product that has CRM and more integrated, it's called Dynamics:

http://www.microsoft.com/australia/dynamics/crm/default.mspx

I'd say it'd be pretty pricey. But it'll do all of what you wanted and more.

So - if I go for something that doesn't integrate with Exchange, but still put it on the same centralised server - how much functionality am I going to lose ?

Am I just making s*** up asking for it to work with Exchange ? Does it really need to ?

depends on your idea of 'working with exchange'. If it's just for email sending/receiving, should be fine. If you want advanced calendar/tasks them maybe not.

you should be able to read up on their capabilities pretty easily.

Well I guess my main interest was in having contacts central - IE the same contacts that are in Outlook are tracked through the CRM

Then you'd need to use a CRM application that can Sync the contacts in its database with Exchange's contacts database. Of course MS product does it, in fact that Dynamic product requires Exchange server for it to function - so they locked you in heh.

But if you decided to go a new route then there are plenty of other ones other that that can do the job, though not sure about integrating it with the phone system and stuff (I don't know what you mean by this either).

Well say we get some plebs in for example - and we want them to call:

Tom
Bob
Alice
Tony

Ideally they click on them and it goes POW and dials them, then:

First two are unavailable for another week because they've started easter holidays early, so it makes a note/reminder for 7 days or whatever...

Does that make sense ?

If you need that level of integration you'd be shelling out heaps of $ because the application will have to be able to communicate with either your PC's Modem/Phone card or your IP Phone system.

I believe Exchange 2007 has this feature called Unified Messaging that you're talking about. Though it'll require your telephone to be an IP system.

Unified Messaging

Currently, most users and IT departments manage their voice mail and fax messages separately from their e-mail. Voice mail and e-mail exist as separate inboxes hosted on separate servers that are accessed through the desktop for e-mail and through the telephone for voice mail. Fax messages are not received into a user's inbox, but are instead received by stand-alone fax machines or a centralized fax server. Unified Messaging offers an integrated store for all messages and access to content through the computer and the telephone.

Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging provides a single point of message administration for Exchange administrators in an organization. The features within Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging enable an Exchange administrator to:

* Manage the voice mail, e-mail, and fax systems from a single platform.
* Manage Unified Messaging using scriptable commands.
* Build highly available and reliable Unified Messaging infrastructures.

The Unified Messaging server role in Exchange 2007 lets users access voice mail, e-mail, fax messages, and calendar information that is located in their Exchange 2007 mailbox from an e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Web Access, from a mobile device that has Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync enabled, such as a Windows Mobile� powered smartphone or a personal digital assistant (PDA), or from a telephone.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb123911.0f83ffb6-c515-46bd-a8a6-8f3fefb7d594(en-us,EXCHG.80).gif

The MS Dynamics CRM supports Exchange 2007. Either way it's no real silver bullet I'm afraid, there'll be some tweaking etc. But if that's your wish list then MS Dynamics CRM's probably as close as you're gonna get from shrink wrapped solution.




last edited by Opec at 16:53:57 18/Mar/08

Wow OK - well maybe the integrated phones can wait, don't really want to move to Exchange 2007 either.

Do you think what I want is going to be achieved easily enough without it ?

Well there are ways around that I mean you could use poxy old Windows Dialer + Modem card on the PC so the user can dial out. But the problem is of course if you're in PBX environment you may not be able to do this easily etc.

That or use hacked stuff like Skype (LOL) or whatever VoIP clients you can get so they can basically dial out from their PC using headset then record the leads/follow up as needed.

Not an elegant solution but workable in some fashion.

Yeah fair enough, well thanks heaps for your advice thus far

dynamics is good. good api's for developing on. ive done alot of developing for InterAction too... i think it sucks balls, but its big in the legal sector.

Having been through the development of a custom CRM system w/ Lotus Domino and CISCO Callmanager integration trust me when I say... most important thing in picking out which CRM product to use is to outline the scope of what you want to achieve.

Nothing worse than getting something in and finding that it needs to do something it can't even if it is something that might not go in straight away.

I cant be bothered reading the thread but saw exchange ... Saleslogix integrates with exchange but I think only with 2003