** Full Circle Podcast <fullcirclepodcast@???> [2014-08-13 12:35]:
> Ok, here's a wide-open question on CRM...
>
> We're a registered charity in the social care space providing training,
> publications, conferences, workshops; we have members on subscription and
> sales to Joe Public; we're looking to move up to the next level, doing more
> in education and with the private care sector.
>
> So yes, we need to manage contacts, invoices, orders, products, events,
> mailings, prospects, reports and all those good things.
>
> My illustrious predecessor took on a commerical trial of Salesforce and
> promptly ran away.
>
> One of our Heads of Practice is leaning toward Open Source from cost and
> licensing concerns and not wanting to go bespoke or re-invent the wheel.
>
> And yes, I can run a Google search on Open Source CRM and get back a list
> of products that may be more or less Open Source and may be more or less
> 'CRM.'
>
> Anyone want to suggest feasible Open Source CRM that doesn't require a team
> of developers in-house to maintain it? Anywhere on the scale of £ less than
> Salesforce and more than free is an acceptable option.
** end quote [Full Circle Podcast]
Since you mention orders and products you might be looking at ERP more than
CRM, but there is a bit of crossover in the features of packages that class
themselves under each category. Three you may like to take a closer look at
are:
o vTiger - this is CRM, but does have stock control modules available
o Oodoo (which used to be OpenERP) - this is ERP so has stock stuff built in
o Zurmo - this is CRM and I know little about it other than the fact that it is
'Gamified', which seems to mean giving points for various actions to encourage
people to do their job properly - perhaps I'm a little cyincal there ;)
I've installed the first two without major hassles, but haven't actually used
them in anger as an end user as opposed to installing and looking after the
server. From what I understand vTiger is better on the pure CRM side of things,
but Oodoo wins when you expand into stock control. It will depend on what your
specific requirements are though. Both being open source means you can try
them out for as long as you need to get a feel for them. Oodoo is slightly
annoying with the download option on their site requiring registration, I'm
sure I don't remember that when I installed it (although it was OpenERP then,
so perhaps the rebranding indicates a change of direction - everything is on
Github though). vTiger was originally a fork of SugarCRM, although this is
going back a bit.
https://www.vtiger.com/
https://www.odoo.com/
http://zurmo.org/
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