I would like to see better email functionality in terms of reliability of WYSIWYG when creating emails and a modernized UI to go with the updated P theme.
One of the difficulties we find is getting our chat information into our CRM, There are a few chats out there with integration, however they are limited with importing a chat as a contact, however I donāt want everyone we chat with as a client as they are mostly using chat to make a buying decision and for us only people we are already doing business with go in as a contact. I would prefer that I can put them in as a prospect or lead and have the option to put them in as a contact. If the individual or company is already in the system I would like to be able to search or verify and then upload chat into the history of the prefered module.
I see the marketing automation is a popular vote. I would suggest an advanced bidirectional integration with another open sourced project called Mautic. This project is phenomenal and competes head to head with complete marketing automation platforms. There should still be some marketing automation within Suite. Currently I use both Suite and Mautic. I use the marketing automation inside Suite for Clients, while I use the marketing automation inside Mautic for lead generation and nurturing.
I personally feel that If these 2 projects were fully bidirectional it could mean explosive growth for both projects and each can then focus on what they do best. Suite for CRM and Mautic for marketing.
SuteCRM is Awesome and is the only project like it. SalesAgility has done an incredible job and took a chance when Sugar decided to drop CE development and support. Canāt wait to see what 2017 brings to the table.
Feedback is important. Just not the staggeringly arrogant kind you gave about something being āacceptableā. If you want to come in here and lecture us on what is āacceptableā then you are not going to get a warm reception, especially when you have posted many, many questions and received many courteous and helpful responses. I stand by my comments. If SuiteCRM is not acceptable, then go elsewhere. This is both a personal and a project response.
I hate it when forums go negative, but it is all too common. Obviously SuiteCRM does have a minimum base-level functionalityā¦ or it would have no users. Different enhancements (and yes, an improved WYSIWYG email editor is an enhancement) has different value to different users. The purpose of this post, IMO was to gauge users value on various enhancements (even if some consider those enhancements necessary to maintain a basic level of product).
Would I benefit from an improved email template system? Sure!
Is it the highest on my list of improvements? Nope! I donāt even think I mentioned it in my suggested enhancements (donāt recall for sure).
I would like to commend SalesAgility for opening up this discussion to find out what the community wants to see in the future! I would also like to recommend they try and see through the BS to the underlying valuable inputā¦ as Iām sure there is some good meat in thereā¦ even if it may seem spoiled by its presentation. Even salmanās comments certainly carry some merit, even if presented incorrectly (or in salesagilityās words āarrogantlyā).
Hi Guys,
My two cents on improvements:
I am an end user that recently moved over from another CRM to suitecrm. Am very happy with SuiteCRM.
Here are the improvements that I think would really push the software over the top.
In workflows, template editors - all the dropdowns where you need to select fields by label are not sorted in any particular order. So it is very time consuming to find the field you are looking for. ( Note: The drop downs in the import wizard are sorted alphabetically. so its possible )
Times in workflow. The workflow module does not have an easy method to define times when actions should happen. In our business we saw a dramatic effect on how users responded to automated emails depending on the time the email was sent. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to set a time a workflow should fire every day. (Note: Scheduled reports does offer this functionality. Can this same functionality be carried over to the workflow module perhaps)
Layouts : I would love to be able to see more freedom in the layouts. The current design allows only 2 rows out of the box ( i know more is possible with code customization, but the studio layout editor gets very buggy when that setting is changed). I would like to be able to change colors, add notes, titles. be able to change labels in a layout without changing the label for the field.
Consider this scenario. I have different tabs. In each tab i have a field with label, name, phone, date. Currently I can not only label those fields name, phone, date because then when i try to use the fields in a workflow, i have 10 fields named ānameā and donāt know which one corresponds to which tab.
Is a detailview and edit view really needed? my previous crm only had an edit view. When you open a contact, it directly opens up in edit view, you change what you want and hit save and its done. I donāt think the detail view adds any value. but switching between the modes is time consuming specially if you are working on hundreds of contacts in a day.
A time field : Currently there is only a date time field and a date field. Would really love to have just a time field. This would also solve (2).
Smarty Template in the template editor. This would allow if then else logic in the templates.
A setting to edit default file and folder permissions from the Admin menu. I feel like everybody faces permission issues at some point or the other. Would be really beneficial to be able to have this setting in the admin section with some standard defaults that can be selected. This would help newbies alot.
Ability to add buttons connected to workflows in the layouts from studio. (that way, i could send out emails with one click )
Overall this is a great product that I really believe in and would love to help make it the best CRM out there.
Additionally, for item (1) if someone can point me in the right direction on where the function that collects the field labels and creates the drop down list resides, I would love to develop a fix and submit to github.
Iāll admit my comments on the referenced thread were posted after a lot of frustration and wasted time till I figured out it wasnāt my email templates which had a problem but the editor in SuiteCRM. I had hired someone to create a nice, responsive email template which I wanted to use in SuiteCRM. I could not believe that something so basic was broken! My developer told me itās not the template and he showed it to me in different devices. That is just one example. Iāve had to spend a lot of time trying to do basic stuff that any CRM should be able to do. In SuiteCRM, you either have to put something directly into the DB (solutions offered by some people here re. email templates), write web hooks for something as simple as birthday reminders, etc. Thatās why I said I donāt see a point asking for āenhancementsā when basic stuff is broken. Would be better to fix that first I say.
Iām glad you wrote what you did and I hope everyone here reads it to see what your value system really is. Thanks for you valuable advice. Iām just one user and I may or may not continue to use SuiteCRM. There are 2 reasons I even looked at SuiteCRM. Firstly, I use, develop with and support open source products and have done so for most of my career. I exclusively run Linux on my laptop and desktop even though I no longer do development or IT related work. Second, I met a developer who asked me to look at SuiteCRM because he knew some of the people who started it and said they were good people. Looking at your response here, I doubt that.
Iāve been using SuiteCRM for over a year now and, for me, it hasnāt progressed much beyond a glorified rolodex. I use PHPList to send my HTML emails because I canāt do it in SuiteCRM without it screwing up the template. Impressions are everything and if I canāt send out a good looking, well formatted, email to my clients it stops there. I began with SugarCRM because itās well know. Then I looked at vtiger and tried it for a while before coming across SuiteCRM. Yes, Iāve posted questions and gotten helpful answers from admins and other users which I appreciate. However, I have spent countless hours struggling with very basic stuff. Even with my tech background and comfort level messing with MySQL, PHP, etc, I find some of the basic things Iāve had to struggle with very frustrating. I canāt imagine non-technical people getting things to work. You may want to look up the meaning of CRM. If I canāt communicate with my clients/leads the way I want to, any piece of CRM software is useless for me (and many others, I imagine). I need to be able to send emails exactly the way I want to. I need to be able to easily set up birthday reminders for clients whose dates of birth I have. This is part of RELATIONSHIP management. I need to be able to do basic things without spending hours trying to figure it out or writing code. Not that I canāt but I shouldnāt have to.
There are many CRMs out there (for real estate) which are not expensive at all. Money is not the issue here. I wanted to use an open source CRM because of my background and what I wrote earlier. Iāve seen a lot of people avoid good open source software because they have a perception that it must suck if itās free. OTOH, these same people would gladly pay for shitty software because it has a brand name.
My post wasnāt meant to offend. I will stand by my assertion that basic, existing functionality should be fixed before focusing on enhancements or improvements. You can take that however you like. Thank you.
I do understand de feelings your feelings, I too had received some harsh replies but in the other hand they also was able to recognize their error and get back to me with an apologize. So they are not perfect but I can say Salesagillity (and Greg) are good people. Like me.
The main problem in opensource projects is a lack of communication over development plans. SuiteCRM product is a live example of this.
1- This topic was created to get feedback from users on what should be built for the CRM.
2- Yes there are things that need to be improved but no software can just solve issues and not evolve. Sometimes the evolution will even make some issues irrelevant as the software technology evolves too. Else people will claim that the software had not evolved or is stalled in the past.
So we need new features!
3- Forum users (its you here) should know its a bad idea to hijack a topic or go out of topic. Maybe a should also be quite here to avoid topic go out of focus! But I think we all need to cool down, so I placed this reply
4- If you had an issue with templates then you should post a topic on that. If your issues was not on a question over your setup but on the functionality (or lack of that) you should had create a topic requesting comments form others on the problem.
5- Its also true it there was a forum moderation in place here, this topic should have been split before Salesagility made a reply to you. And that would also make a difference. But the forum moderation and organization its very soft here. (I know it takes time as Iām used to be the one in charge for that in other sites)
And I still hope someone split this topic!
Now lets take the email templates example:
if some (lots of) people say its broken and Salesagility says its notā¦ then we need to establish what is the true.
This I think is a communication issue.
For users broken usually just translates as āsomething works and something donātā, or āitās not work on my serverā.
For developers if it works for them they canāt understand why not on others. As I often saysā¦ āEverything worked fine in my computerā¦ now what?ā
So people in charge for project management needs to lay back and do not take words too serious (unless people keep on going repeating it)
So is it really broken?
For many users yes: in the past they could past their code and it worked.
For Salesagility its a feature added on more recent versions. Feature? Yes, the HTML is cleaned up by the editor. Thatās usually when using some editors. Thatās also a safety measure and its common in many other software and its often considered good by the end users when they find they can be attacked on malicious code.
On the other handā¦ everybody knowsā¦ no email system will receive the email as you sent it! Gmail is a āgood friendā of them and often lock the visuals of newsletter for a plain text version.
So what we need here is a communication plan, so users can know what is the plan for Salesagility on code evolution.
This would require 2 questions:
Will the previous plain code copy/past get back to SuiteCRM
Will we have a feature to control what clean up the editor should do?
(orā¦ if users create that feature will it be accepted in the code?)
And please do not reply here, unless someone split this conversation.
Themes: I would like to see a theme that mimics safesforce ā really tight data entry - good use of screen real estate.
Reports: I expect 80% of the reports needed are standard ones: activity reports, sales funnel, etc. Why not include them.
In that Salesforce is a market leader and very expensive, Salesforce users who come to suiteCRM should see something familiar and inviting.
Jumping on this thread a bit late. I do not know if it was mentioned before butā¦
Documentation
I am glad to contribute on what I can myself. More documentation will make this easier for laymen to use. I know one of my favorite open source software has a user manual, manager manual, and Administrator manual. That might be a good addition for newbies.
Conditions with AND/OR as in Reports
For an easier management of workflows. There are cases when we can have different group of conditions with the same action.
Ability do enable/disable specific workflow audit.
Some workflows donāt require to be audited
Ability do delete specific workflow audit.
THEMES
SuiteP is a greate enhancement to SuiteCRM but I feel it need some tunning
The ability to customize SuiteP theme as SuiteR on the admin side.
Email Template Improvement
Allow more flexibility in creating a template.
Currently when we built a HTML template using a design program with a background image and paste the code into SuiteCRM template the image is stripped off by the SuiteCRM template program.
Currently sophisticated eye popping templates arenāt possible diminishing the impact of the email campaign.
@pgr I have tried 7.9 beta but, unfortunately, we are still far from something acceptable with respect to the editor and its output. I found a few bugs, which I assume will be corrected in the final version (eg: impossible to edit images, image links were all broken, and a few more thngs that were working in previous versions). However the main issue, for me is the one that has to do with the editor. This is still a pitty and I fear that, after the current effort to do something, which I really appreciate from SalesAgility, the focus will go elsewhere and the 7.9 status will remain for a long time.
For example: 7.9 allows to select a preferred userās editor. I believe, instead, that the possibility to edit html should be at the template level and not at a more general level.
First announcement (7.9 Beta):
āAbility to choose between three available Editors - Raw HTML, Tiny MCE and Mozaik editorā
Now (7.9 RC):
Ability to select a Userās preferred Email Template Editor (Direct HTML, Mozaik, and Tiny MCE)
Another point to be considered: what happens if a template is edited by two different users who use different editors among those available?
I must also say that, compared to previous versions there is an improvement but, as I said itās only minor and it could cause plenty of issues if different users do not agree on what to do.
In the release notes as well as the first announcement for 7.9beta I read that there would have been a template from Mosaico (which is not the same as Mozaik, by the way), but this comment was removed. So I went and tried to install Mosaico: I was unable to install it successfully and their support basically told me that they idnāt care so, if Mosaico is not included I think itās a good idea.
I will repeat what I said earlier. The capability to create/insert desired email templates without SuiteCRM screwing them up is a BASIC and fundamental capability IMHO. I really donāt care what else goes into it. If it canāt do this, I canāt use it as a fully functional CRM and I have to resort to using other software for my email marketing. This is quite sad and the only reason Iām still using SuiteCRM is that I believe in open source software and have a background in Linux, etc. Instead of listening to users and adding this basic functionality, the people behind this product blatantly tell you to go use something else.
@salman yeah, if youāre worried about that you can contribute code, otherwise itās best to just contribute some good-spirit. That also helps open-source projects and pushes people to do good things. If you prefer the whip (your bitterness, your repetitive complains) you might find people arenāt really under your command, and youāre not really motivating them to help you. At all.
@amariussi you make some very valid points there. I admit I wasnāt aware of how effectively the problems were solved or not, because I didnāt test that part of the Beta.
I think your suggestion of bringing the editor choice to the level of becoming part of the template definition might be wise, since changing editors will probably mess things up.
I was unable to test it thoroughly unfortunately. This was due to the bugs that didnāt allow to edit correctly as well as the broken images, etc. I checked also on the official SuiteCRM demo and the problem was already there.
