Suitecrm is an awesome product and has come a long way. If I was a PHP programmer, I would have loved to contribute. Until then I will try to provide feedback.
Email is the most important component of a CRM. Yet, it is severely lacking in features and is extremely buggy. Looking at the v8 roadmap, email updates are nowhere to be seen. IMHO, the items in 8.1 and 8.2 do not add any serious value and at the outset appear just nice to have.
I would urge to give email the highest priority. It deserves a major facelift and features upgrade. It will make suitecrm so much more better and useful. Email update should be the major focus for 8.1.
Thank you for reaching out and yes, Emails are extremely important - I whole heartily agree. In order to get to the point to have this overhaul that email module deserves there are a few stepping stones to tackle first certainly in the 8.1 (and some in 8.2).
What makes up the backlog for 8.1 is missing functionality like SAML, Recently Record and Favourites that didn’t quite make it into 8.0. But in order to even begin working on the Email module we need functionality (and secure) HTML/WYSIGI fields so they are a must. This also leads into 8.2 which includes the Email/HTML template engine. This will help immensely with generating good, rich email content as well as displaying it correctly (that’s another problem targeted which exists today).
So yeah, the roadmap currently doesn’t explicitly say an overhaul of Email module (yet) but there are the stepping stones in place to do so.
Of course the roadmap is there for members like yourself to highlight the importance of other areas which we take back to the backlog grooming and see what else needs to be considered so we can get to this overhaul task faster.
Nice feedback -SalesAgility have built a great product over the years - full congratulations to Greg Soper for his 100% committment to open source from the start.
Email is a weak point, definitely.
Tell us more about how your team uses Suite day to day -what do they think are the best things about it?
Have you modified it lots, or mostly run it out of the box?
We use everything out of the box. Mostly use Accounts, Contacts, Quotes, Opportunities, and email. Most time is spent on emails.
Tried using email and new letter campaigns but honestly, they are so unusable that we gave up on them.
Unfortunately for SuiteCRM, there are way more advanced sales enablement platforms out there with tremendous functionality, ease of use, and at a very good entry price. Some of the Suitecrm addons people provide are ridiculously priced and I have no idea how they can compete with the commercial offerings. All sales enablement platforms pretty much integrate with Salesforce or Hubspot. Sadly we are on a path towards them, away from SuiteCRM.
Email automation with workflow cadence is pretty much mandatory nowadays and something that no salesperson can live without. I understand there are building blocks etc but 1. email and 2. workflow is what is most needed and it is needed now. Now, Suitecrm has a workflow module, but again unusable. So, IMHO, the only thing that you guys need to do is make a kick-ass integration between emails and workflow. The rest of the stuff works quite well. Feel free to poll the rest of the community to see what is important to people for whom this is made.
Opensource is always competing with commercial software and it is a very tough battle. But the only way opensource can survive is by offering a far superior alternative to commercial otherwise it is an unfortunate slow death spiral. Just my 2 cents and not intended to aggravate or offend anyone.
