Vadim Chobanu

Recently I had a task of streamlining the contacts and team collaboration workflow. As the business grows, the usual outlook contacts, tasks and appointments are running out of functionality, so the natural choice was a good CRM solution. A custom software was probably the best thing, however the budget didn’t allow for it, so I began my homework on researching the ready made solutions available, ideally a free one or not more than £10 per month per user. I came across SalesForce free, which was integrating nicely with outlook, however I didn’t like that all my outgoing emails sent from CRM had the ’sent by salesforce on behalf of’, plus a few more downsides. The paid version obviously didn’t have this, so I felt like doing a bit more research before making any decisions. I came across a few more ready made free solutions, out of which SugarCRM seemed the next best choice at the time as they have an open-source community version, which means that all I have to worry is about hosting it myself. Sounded very promising, so I installed it on my server and then moved on to making it work with the email. The Community version has a slight downside – they didnt provide outlook integration, however there are a few 3-rd party softwares that do the same job, so next thing was to obtain a trial for them. As I am running windows 7, 2 of these applications didn’t seem stable enough, so I was about to give up and go back to salesforce. Then I came across another 3-rd party application which was integrating the CRM with exchange server, however the problem with it was the actual price – from $1400. No budget for that, sorry. Next! was I just about to say, when I found one more 3-rd party soft which was integrating contacts, tasks and calendar with an exchange-like-server called Zarafa and was free for up to three users. How handy I thought – we are three partners in the business, so we will even save some money by not paying for a hosted exchange solution each month.

Read the rest of this entry