Thanks for the reply. Yes, I read the development road. Perhaps my english was not enough. I meant to ask if it would be possible to consider adding not only the image type, but also a file type.
Thanks!!
What does SuiteCRM do for you?
My organization is in healthcare. Essentially, we are a staffing agency for a certain type of healthcare professional. We happen to be the largest provider of these services in the U.S. Currently, we are using SuiteCRM for the following:
- Managing prospective hires and potential partners through the Leads interface. We capture all of our data using Wordpress web forms and Zapier, which integrates very well with SuiteCRM.
- Managing the entire hiring process from start to finish. Each employee is a Contact, and each employee Contact has an “Employee Record”, which is a custom-built module. We use that record to store sensitive information.
- Managing billing specifics, facility/hospital qualifications, and surgeon’s preferences by using 3 different, custom modules. This one works very nicely, and was a major hit with the billing department.
- Reporting is very useful to us, since it has given us demographics that we did not previously have.
- Maps are also very useful. We are currently embedding iframes for “Nearby Contacts, Nearby Accounts, Nearby Leads, and Nearby Opportunities” into the Leads records. These are simply linked to “Quick Radius” queries, with dynamic URL’s generated based upon the Lead’s city and state.
- Also using Workflows, heavily. I have something like 90 workflows defined. While I really like this feature, I wish that it had extra functionality like “AND/OR” conditions.
Why do you use SuiteCRM?
Are any other open source solutions viable? I tried a few others before deciding on SuiteCRM, including SugarCRM, vTiger, and ZurmoCRM. The latter two were just terribly designed, and poorly coded. SugarCRM was good, and we started an implementation with it, but I quickly became fed up with the lack of a community.
Did you migrate from another CRM?
Negative. This was a project started by me ~9 months ago, and forced upon my users. Oddly enough, after the initial resistance, EVERYBODY loves it now!
What do you like about SuiteCRM?
- I love the interface. SugarCRM is just so dated by comparison. The responsive design for SuiteCRM 8 has me hugely interested.
- Love the automation using Workflows. I love even more that I rarely have to drop down into code because of these.
- Zapier integration is just awesome. We use it heavily. One example is that we redirect users to a Wordpress web form to “Take a training course”, passing field information to Gravity Forms via the URL. This allows the user to automatically capture information about themselves on that form - like the “Assigned To” ID. Then, when Zapier ships the completed course back into SuiteCRM, a “Courses” record is automatically created and related to the assigned user.
- Discovering more reasons to love SuiteCRM every day…
What does SuiteCRM do for your business?
- Manage the entire employment process
- Manage surgeons, partners, and vendors
- Is a central repository to contain all of our important information. Previously we had dozens of disparate systems that only a handful of people could access, which led to increased email and phone questions. Now, these users just look it up themselves.
- We’re also automating emails by defining standard templates that send based on various criteria. This has cut back immensely on typing out multiple emails about the same thing.
Other Notes
- I am seriously going to push for my company to make a large donation to this Kickstarter. You guys deserve it.
- I would love to see calculated fields. I can envision a system in which the surgeons that we partner with are “rated”. If you view those surgeon’s parent “Account”, I would love to see an average of these ratings in real-time (or even calculated daily would be fine.)
- I also wonder if SuiteCRM’s website should have a user-maintained “extensions” section, similar to Wordpress.org’s “Plugins” repository. It seems like all the best open-source projects have this function, and SugarCRM’s implementation of this page is just about the worst one I’ve ever seen. At the least, this feature is a sure-fire way to get users interacting on your site, and with the people downloading their extensions. There is no better way to grow an open-source project then to have an active community, and actively-maintained extensions look really good to people “on the fence” about using SuiteCRM.
2 Likes
Great feedback!
I completely agree with you that having an actively maintained extension list and community is crucial for growing a project. This is why we started SugarOutfitters.
For user-maintained extensions for SuiteCRM check out SugarOutfitters (https://www.sugaroutfitters.com). Each extension goes through a 33 point inspection before being accepted and each listing must maintain good documentation and support. Anything on our site that supports CE 6.5.18 will work with SuiteCRM 7.1.4.
Cheers,
Jason Eggers
Co-founder, SugarOutfitters
Hi you lovely folks at the SuiteCRM team
I built a small company on SugarCRM Community edition, but ran into the same woes as yourselves with regard to upstream patching and releasing. Personally I think that using Open Source as a loss leader is a failed business model. Crippling product features as a lead in to license fee’s is always going to leave a bad taste in the customers mouth, and that is not a good place to start your marketing.
I am convinced that the FREE software approach you are taking is the correct one, and I will be doing my level best to support you guys and this community as much as I possibly can. Good luck and Best wishes for a successful ongoing project.
Here is my feedback
What does SuiteCRM do for you?
It provides a host of features over SugarCRM, which make deploying and mapping business process into the CRM system easier
Why do you use SuiteCRM?
Having access and understanding of the code enables me to change and customise it to match the business requirements, and to integrate with other tools.
Did you migrate from another CRM?
Yes from SugarCRM
What do you like about SuiteCRM?
Advanced Open Sales, Quotes, Invoices, Document PDF Templates. Multiple Dashboard Tabs, Workflow, Reporting module ( this is very useful )
What does SuiteCRM do for your business?
Sales, Marketing, Quotations, and Projects with road map for plenty of other areas too.
agree … but putting the code to a foundation costs … we have judgements to make … pay lawyers or developers … so far my money is on developers … kickstarter is designed to create the space to do both.
Thanks eggsurplus, I actually just bought SecuritySuite from you! I love the layouts feature, and my co-worker is loving the “Login as…” option!
I’m a little hesitant to utilize your extension too much though, with it “technically” being developed for SugarCRM. I don’t want to get too integrated with it if the support will not be there in the future. Do you intend to support this plugin “officially” in SuiteCRM, going forward? It does appear that SuiteCRM will be the platform of choice when SugarCRM support finally dies in 2015.
Glad to hear that you are loving it! Both of those features are my personal favorites.
The basic version of SecuritySuite is already part of SuiteCRM so you can bet that the full version of SecuritySuite will be around for the foreseeable future.
Hi Greg
Funny how when you read your own post back you think, Ooo I didn’t explain that well. What I meant was that I feel SugarCRM got the model wrong with the Open Source as a loss leader. I feel that you folks at SuiteCRM have got it right.
Anyway, I would like to invite you to Join, Dr John Wordsworth, Jackson Matthews and Me, to talk about SuiteCRM, the Kickstarter and delivering Open Source the correct way. On Wednesday 15th October, at about 8.30pm UK Time. The Podcast gets put out on YouTube, G+ and AtRandom.org.uk, and is one of the ways I would like to help you folks reach your target.
Reply, of PM me on Google+ https://plus.google.com/u/1/+RickTimmis/
I’m a software developer, 15+ years. Programmed Salesforce for 6+ years.
I’m reviewing SuiteCRM for my employer and so far, so good. With some study, I’m getting the features we need to work and identifying where we may need/want to put in some customizations.
So far so good. This is a bit of a pilot with no guarantee we’ll be putting Suite CRM into production.