Evaluating: is SuiteCRM the right system for us?

Folks, we are a small company using VTiger. It was good for a while but it’s time to look for something better.

We have a few things on our wishlist, and I would like to ask you whether it is a realistic approach to use SuiteCRM.

First of all, we are only 5 user internally. We sell our own products directly to customers and indirectly through dealers. Each dealer has between 1 and 5 sales guys. So far, vTiger does not really support such an approach properly (or we are too stupid to find out). How would you organize this with SuiteCRM? One user group per dealer? Role for sales guys? It is really important that all information shared by a dealer with us never gets into the hands of a different dealer.

A second point is emails and calendar. We use Kerio Connect for these purposes. Normally, me and my colleagues use the Mail and Calendar apps from Apple on our Macs. It would be much better to have everything that has something to do with a customer in the CRM. But of course there are other mails from other people. How do you handle that?

And them comes the phone. We have a Sipgate VoIP. Pretty good but so far we never managed to link this with vTiger. Instead, I use a Firefox plugin named click2dial to dial numbers displayed on websites. Of course, it can only do exatly that and does not create an entry in the CRM about me calling a customer or a custiomer calling the company. Could we link SuiteCRM with Sipgate to achieve exactly that?

The separation by teams can surely be achieved with Security Settings, see

https://www.sugaroutfitters.com/docs/securitysuite/example-of-a-typical-setup

The email and calendar: yes you can do it with SuiteCRM, however I would recommend some testing because sometimes there is some detail you find extremely annoying and makes you give up Email (and go back to your Macs, for example). It’s not a perfect experience; you have to check if it’s enough for you.

You will probably love the QuickCRM app for smartphones. Free for basic use, premium subscription available.

About the SIP integration, you can get click-to-call with basic SuiteCRM, but to integrate more fully you will need to pay for an add-on. I’m not sure if they integrate with your particular brand (probably yes, if it is Asterisk-based).

Well, Apple’s mail app sucks :slight_smile: Anything special that you think is not so great in Suitecrm? I would love to get the name of the customer like “Dear Mrs. Applebee” as the starting line; Apple’s mail can’t do that. Newsletters? Apple’s mail can’t do that. Listing all mails exchanged with a customer in one place? Apple’s mail can’t do that.

It can only be better than the stupid vTiger smartphone app :slight_smile:

Sipgate can handle Asterisk, that should do the trick. Great.

Of course in stuff like Campaigns and Email Templates (that “Dear Mrs Applebee” thing you want) SuiteCRM has tons of functionality for you.

A more central question for your success is how much technical support you’ll have. Can you handle Linux administration? Are you willing to pay someone to integrate and customize SuiteCRM? Because I don’t think it’s an easy beast, there’s a learning curve and there are moments of hair-pulling. Of course you can get around anything - it’s all open-source. But I hate it when people assume everything will work out of the box and then get into trouble, and then they can’t even handle basic Linux configurations…

In fact my colleagues are very experienced with Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat/CentOS as well as VMWare. They even love vi :sick:

But there might be some extras we need to add. I guess there are integrators around here that might be able to help B)

Cool, then go ahead, fire up a new VM and try out SuiteCRM.

I posted my install notes here:
https://suitecrm.com/forum/installation-upgrade-help/11561-installing-on-ubuntu-16-04-1

it might save you some time.