10 years experience of SuiteCRM as a CRM system for a Start-Up

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I have used SugarCRM since 2008 and SuiteCRM since 2015 as the only CRM for the 5 start-ups I have been involved in, so I’ve been on this journey for over 10 years with it’s ups and downs. The customer promise of SuiteCRM is great. For any business manager and especially a start-up manager who is desperately looking for the first customer, keeping track of past customer interactions and being able to plan the future is the most important business process of the company. SuiteCRM has been of great help in this. Without SuiteCRM I would rely on a spreadsheet to maintain my customer contacts. My intention is to stay with SuiteCRM as long as it is developed.

The way I use the latest SuiteCRM LTS version:

  • Collect leads from all over
  • Send an introductionary email and/or newsletter to the leads
  • Schedule follow ups calls based upon the hits in the campaign
  • Calls are planned and documented in the Calls module
  • Make quotes for customers
    The positives
  • Open Source makes it affordable for a piss poor start-up
  • Understandable and pleasant user interface
  • Fast and efficient, performance is top notch
  • Feature rich, has everything my company requires
  • A complete and satisfactory CRM experience
    What could be improved- iCal integration always needs tweaking to work, I sync my phone calendar to SuiteCRM and this is critical
  • Living in a nordic country scandinavian letters need to work in the calendar, needs tweaking
  • Email configuration is complicated, it has improved lately but it still takes a lot of time

At the moment I pull the fixes manually from GitHub to maintain functionality of SuiteCRM after each update and am very happy about the performance after that.

These are the two fixes I pull from GitHub after each LTS upgrade:
Scandinavian letters show up as ?? in calendar
https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/pull/7691

iCal calendar sync asks for username and password
https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/pull/442

The iCal sync and character set problem should not be big problem to include in the active LTS code. With those changes SuiteCRM to me is a very good, stable and reliable work horse for the almost IT-illitterate start-up sales man.

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Thanks for sharing your experience, and for the favorable review :blush:

Have you seen the new possibility where users can nominate issues for inclusion in the current sprint? You can go here https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/issues/7717 and nominate your two issues, explaining why.

About the second one: the title you give doesn’t correspond to the PR number, maybe you got that number wrong? I found one with that title, but it was already merged… so you’re probably talking about something that isn’t merged yet (unless you’re not using the latest version, are you?).

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Here is the correct URL for the iCal fix. I had lost the last “0” from the adress.

https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM/pull/4420

I will go and vote now.

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