We’ve been working with this software for well over a year and we can clearly state it has been less than ideal for any purpose whatsoever. With every new update things become broken to the point we have to restore our backup and wait for the next update. Relationships continuously disappear, the module menu filter fails to work 90% of the time, the lack of customizable workflow rule options forces hand coding of logic hooks, built-in out-of-the-box themes have locked us out of the interface all together, bult-in modules continuously lose their relationship to custom modules. Frankly, the software is a disaster. We had been hoping things would improve as updates were released, but alas we will be throwing in the towel here and moving on.
It’s been a nightmare attempting to support my client with this software and as far as I’m concerned, I will be vehemently opposing the use of this product to anyone whom might consider it.
I find a little bit irresponsible to trow trash to the hand that is giving you food. As we all know, this is not a perfect platform but we need to mention that it has a lot of good things. You should take responsibility for your errors. I will never update/upgrade my production installation until I test the new release as recommended.
Now. I know that a lot of us are been benefited by this platform in one way or other. Can you imagine how good will be for the community if all start contributing. I will encourage all to invest a little bit of time in responding question and trying to solve the issues to make this an even better CRM.
@Erin Dunn: it’s a pity that you came to this conclusion.
SuiteCRM is indeed a great product with plenty of incredible functionalities.
It is also true, as you say, that it has a few bugs, but they are continuously being corrected, while more great functionalities are being added. And all this is free.
Knowing the situation it is surprising to learn that you have upgraded several times for your client without making sure that everything was going to be perfect.
It is better to give up some new functionality until the version that carries it has not become super stable.
This requires more testing work but provides an insurance!
You say that your clients’ installation has quite a number of customisations. This makes it even more compulsory to act with extreme care.
On our side we never put in production the latest version because it may introduce a number of issues. In any case when we do upgrade an instance, before we proceed, we spend a lot of time testing it to make sure that everything works fine. Sometimes we have contributed by finding things that needed to be corrected and, in fewer occasions, we also suggested the solution.
There is no need to upgrade on every release. Apart from minor bugs, you can keep a stable version for a long time so that the testing can be done only very rarely.
On my side I am contributing to the project by helping as many users as I can in solving issues or finding solutions.
I don’t know what you are going to adopt instead of SuiteCRM but, maybe you are still in time to change your mind and stay in the community and adopt a more risk averse attitude keeping a stable version as long as it is possible and, when you decide to upgrade, to pick the more stable newer release (not the very latest) and test it thouroughly with all your customisations before deploying it.