As a CRM system I have always liked sugarCRM and vTiger CRM. vTiger has released version 6.2 which is meant to address some of the stability issues from before. sugarCRM is still the first rate CRM it always was. They both have the same roots.

We recently implemented this version of vTiger at a client on a remote machine with very little memory. The system works very well, the customisable fields are fantastic and the import facility worked well as long as we kept the import records below 500 at a time.

Using the mass email function caused us some issues so we bought a German add-on for 50 Euros which really helped with the “From” settings and gave use the ability to use nicer templates and an unsubscribe function. It took some figuring out but as long as you actually change the codes to exactly what they show in the example it will work – their default codes were rubbish. IT took our staff the best part of 4 hours to figure that out 🙂

We are experimenting with memory on our server to see if it will speed up bulk actions. At the moment we try not to make our lists nor bulk action deal with more than 200 records at a time. This does cause some slow down during peak mailing and data cleaning exercises but as the client didn’t want to spend money on memory they won’t normally use we live with the initial compromise.

CRM is important for any size business and if you don’t have a regular place to keep tabs on your communications with clients, may I suggest you install or get a hosted version of vTiger and change your customer experience forever.

With vTiger you can even do help desk and customer portal activities and there are modules for invoicing and product management which we haven’t even started exploring yet. These are our next steps.