It’s funny none of the options in the poll appeals to me, I think I’m looking at this project with a different mindset.
Here is my list:
A proper, deep, fix of the permissions problem. It plagued SugarCRM and it plagues SuiteCRM. We can do this right.
Really get the documentation going. I think we should start from Jim Mackin’s book and expand from that. I think we should quit these forums and go for a Q&A site, so that the knowledge builds, instead of just being endlessly repeated. It’s exhausting.
Keep up with Github. When samus-aran is working full time there, happiness. When she’s off (doing other important work, one supposes) it gets very demotivating for the rest of us trying to help there. Faster, more effective bug fixing would make this project more consistent, and it badly needs consistency (at least for some unlucky people who get hit with bugs that really block their work).
New features? No, thank you. Just make this a better project technically. The rest will follow. : - )
I agree. I have the paid version, so I can link it to any module but it needs to be integrated by default. Furthermore, it needs to be built into the Reports module for data filtering, so you can create one report and the user would only see the data they have access to. Currently, you have to create a report per user.
Many thanks for all your feedback. It is energising to feel the passion and commitment many of you share with us. Truly, thank you.
There is a consistent theme running through this of increased stability. We know this is a requirement. Please consider the following:
We have no external funding. We don’t have the benefit of tax-avoiding venture capital in our quest to be the #1 CRM on the planet. We do all of this organically from the revenue we create on client projects. If we don’t create this revenue then there is no project. So we flex up and down as resource allows. We do have full time engineers working on the project but not everyone who touches it here is a full-time project resource.
We always need to strike a balance between form and function. Consider the giant strides we have made in three years to take the Minimum Viable Product that comprised SugarCRM Community Edition and extend it to the beautiful, powerful and extensible product that we have today. If we hadn’t extended the functionality so far and so fast, we wouldn’t be in the position we are today.
We are focusing increasingly on stability and community. This will become apparent over the next six to 12 months.
We will not stop innovating. The world of CRM will not stop to let us catch up. There is more we need to do and there is more we will do.
We cannot do everything and we cannot please everyone. So, we will make decisions that you may not agree with. While that may be regrettable, it is also inevitable. Please cut us some slack. We always work with the best intentions.
I have said this so many times - but I do think it’s worth repeating (ad nauseum). We are an open source company. This is an open source project. There is no other agenda than “the world’s best CRM product with every line of code published as open source”. We won’t be doing a SugarCRM and abandoning the community. We won’t be doing a VTiger and commercialising premium code and we won’t offering enterprise, ultimate, extreme or any other variant.
We don’t tell you everything we’re doing/thinking. Be prepared for some very pleasant surprises in the next 12-18 months
That’s enough to keep my hopes up. As long as I feel this is part of your concerns, I’m perfectly ok with waiting, respecting your priorities, etc. As far as I’m concerned, you are a company that brings me a valuable asset for free. I’m in no position to complain : - )
Looking forward to the positive surprises! Keep up the good work, and thanks for everything.
Am a huge fan of SuiteCRM and thanks for all the hard work you guys do!
I would love to see an app make it onto the Android and Apply marketplaces. I am playing with QuickCRM but its pretty limited without spending $500. I would rather be using a pure SuiteCRM app that allows me to create and edit records on my mobile devices. Being able to quickly create tasks and contacts on the go would be amazing!
Don’t mean to thread jack but I had been looking for a similar mobile app on iOS/Apple - check out iSugar (note: I have no affiliation with them what so ever). I’m able to edit contacts and create tasks and a lot of other items on the go for free and without having to install anything else.
I would like to see major improvements to the email client; ideally with built in synchronisation of contacts, calendar, tasks and notes to an email server.
For example, I use Zarafa ( an open source alternative to exchange). It has an outlook style webapp and the server allows pop3, imap and active sync connections and push to mobile etc.
I’ve wrestled with third party apps to integrate suitecrm with email for years, but with limited success.
Some kind of a Navigation Tree, that makes it possibly to quickly navigate through all objects in the database. E.g. a tree with all Accounts that I can expand to quickly see all related opportunities/contacts/activities etc, which in turn can be expanded to see all related objects within the opportunities/contacts/activities etc…
The ability to send HTML emails using custom templates AS-IS without SuiteCRM screwing with the HTML as it does now? TinyMCE issue?
Ability to send birthday emails using a date of birth or other similar field without writing any custom code. This is a customer RELATIONSHIP management software right?
I was a SplendidCRM user, so some of these come from stuff I miss from SplendidCRM.
Upgrades: would be nice if it could provide a pretty extensive list of what files were touched and what changes were made to the DB. This is an extension to another user’s suggestion for upgrade improvements.
Significant continued improvements to reporting. I currently use KReporter & phpReportBuilder 9… would like to only use one tool, and would like it to be standard. I came to SuiteCRM used to the power of SplendidCRM, which utilized SSRS, which was awesome/powerful.
I would be happy to write my own SQL from within the CRM if it would just format it correctly/pretty, allow for charts, expand/contract.
2.5) Ability to combine multiple reports in to a single report (nested reports). Also drill-down reporting would be helpful, where you can click on summary information and get to another report with parameters passed that is the detail data of the summary data.
2.75) For scheduled reports, allow us to be able to specify different paramters & different email addresses. So, for example, if I wanted to send a report to each salesman, I could schedule that report 10 times and in the scheduling definition, specify the email-to-address and the parameters to limit it to that salesrep.
I would like to see more effort put toward supporting the forums… concerned SuiteCRM is losing new users (and old users) when they never get answers to their questions (or not in a timely manner). This seemed to be a larger effort in the past than current.
Smart Themes. SuiteP is fine for mobile, but too much wasted space on a desktop. Somehow let a user select when logging in between touch-friendly and desktop-friendly. An easy way to do this might be to create two versions of the SuiteP theme and then just let users select a theme from a dropdown on login… that way it isn’t just limited to SuiteP functionality.
I would like to see a “messages dashlet” that can be required. Users with appropriate permissions would be able to put messages in there that scrolled for users… maybe after a user has read it, they could hide it? This should take up very little space so users don’t reject it pushing other dashlets down. Example messages would be like: birthday cake in the breakroom at 12:00, or Recent Bug Fix Applied: [Details], or whatever administrators/managers want staff to know.
Impersonate: It is really helpful for an administrator to be able to pretend to be any other user for troubleshooting or phone support. It also helps evaluate security settings.
Field-Based-Security: I should be able to limit, by role, who can edit each field on the screen.
Default-Role Option… just to ensure people don’t accidentally get added and have full permissions by default.
Directed Donations -> In your donation section of the website, let users choose which features they want to fund. When you get enough donations for that feature, it gets done. This might seriously increase the number of donations. For example, if you had an option to fund the stuff above specifically, there are several I would get behind immediately.
I also like other user’s recommendations:
Administration Suite should be more powerful to reduce code editing required.
HTML Field Type
Calculated Fields <- I currently do this with logic_hoooks and use an extra field in the cstm table, would be better if it were calculated.
Dashboard Manager <- Even just a user preferences decoder so you can cleanup preferences or move them manually between users.
Documentation <- Both for users and administrators
I agree with more testing and code review to reduce bugs in new releases.
Exchange/Office365 Integration/Sync/SSO
Votes Down:
Implicit leading wildcard… you can’t get rid of it when you don’t want it that way… very bad idea. Non-implicit works because you have it if you want it, implicit doesn’t work because you cant get rid of it if you don’t want it.
Please Note: Overall I LOVE the product. And I know we can’t see everything happen, and appreciate that SuiteCRM is OpenSource and will continue to be.
SplendidCRM is a .NET based version of SugarCRM. I previously worked at a different company, and their standard development environment was .NET. That is where we used SplendidCRM.
In 2014, I started working at a new company that didn’t have a CRM at all. I chose SuiteCRM because…
I know php much better than I do .NET
SplendidCRM was like SugarCRM in that it had a tiered pricing model with annual support
I much prefer to maintain a *nix server than a Windows server
SplendidCRM is primarily developed by a single individual, not a team, and there are no community contributions that I see
I’ve been very pleased with my choice to work with SuiteCRM. I obviously think there is a lot of opportunity for advancement in the product, as my post indicates. I hope that the team can dream up some methods of funding some of that advancement more steadily/significantly, without having to add a tiered pricing model. As I mentioned in a previous post, I really like the idea of putting a price tag on various advancements and asking the user community to fund the advancements they want to see implemented. Once they’re adequately funded, development on that feature/improvement is launched. Maybe only 90% of my dollars go to the feature I want, and the other 10% either goes to big picture stuff that Sales Agility wants to accomplish, or maybe the other 10% goes to general bug fixes, moving past depreciated code, and keeping forum posts up to date.
By the way, another cool feature SplendidCRM had was an integrated HelpWiki. Although it would’ve been nice if it would’ve been partially populated by the developer (instead of a bunch of blank pages), it was really nice to be able to provide users with contextual information by module/view.
I suppose it would be easy enough to launch a separate Wiki application and create dynamic hyperlinks to that Wiki from within SuiteCRM modules. Hmmm… perhaps I will do this with my own installation now that I think of it.
