Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

Open Source Book cover Hi! You've found a page that was previously published on OpenSourceSmall.biz, a web site associated with the book John wrote called Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems. This book is available for purchase at Amazon (affiliate link), but we've rolled all the web site content into John's business site.

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07. CRM

Chapter 7. Customer Relationship Management

Developing a Simple Workflow within SugarCRM

Submitted by John Locke on Fri, 06/27/2008 - 03:26

Packtpub is running a sample from a developer's guide for customizing SugarCRM. The author describes how to set up hooks for particular modules to build a custom workflow.

Custom workflows are a feature that is limited to the proprietary version of SugarCRM--they have not been available in the open source version. With custom development using techniques illustrated here, you can add your own workflows.

This looks to me like it's written specifically for versions of SugarCRM before version 5.

On Forks

Submitted by John Locke on Fri, 09/15/2006 - 02:59

Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don't: forked projects. What's that? It's when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original. It's practically the definition of open source, the ability to take the code and do whatever you want with it.

This frightens most business people.

Why sales is important to your business

Submitted by John Locke on Sun, 07/09/2006 - 00:38

Over at Freelock Computing, we're learning the fundamentals of business from experience. We've been doing technology for a long time, but are relatively new to business, so what we've learned is hardly innovative or new. But we seem to be honing in on different computing solutions to support the four key parts of any business: marketing, sales, operations, and finances.

As mass markets become micromarkets, marketing becomes ever more important. If people don't know about your services, how can they buy from you? But marketing is not always enough.

Calendar and contact sharing in Thunderbird

Submitted by John Locke on Sat, 04/22/2006 - 05:14

Just yesterday I was talking about calendar sharing with a potential client, and today I run across this:

IMAP shared Contacts and Calendar extension for Thunderbird. Originally started to provide Thunderbird support for the Kolab Server project, it works with an ordinary IMAP account to store contacts and calendars and access them from multiple locations. Using IMAP shared folders, you can also set up group contacts and calendars. Very cool.

Open Source Survey tool

Submitted by John Locke on Tue, 03/28/2006 - 04:15

Recently we were looking for a service to conduct a survey. We checked out a bunch of different services, including Survey Monkey, and Zoomerang. Each had limitations: memberships that run into hundreds of dollars per year, free versions with limited number of questions or analysis tools, etc. For some reason, we didn't even think of looking for an open source project. Well, there is one, and it looks like it does everything the services provide: PHPSurveyor.org

Zimbra, Joomla, What's in a name?

Submitted by John Locke on Thu, 09/08/2005 - 14:14

Names of open source projects are suddenly getting ridiculous. Two new names were just unveiled in the Open Source world: Zimbra, and Joomla. While the names may be silly and potentially off-putting, the projects themselves are compelling.

Joomla is simply a new name for a very popular web site management system that was called Mambo. Due to some political in-fighting between the company that sponsored Mambo and the core developers of the project, Mambo has now forked. For now, our bets are on the core developers, who have adopted the name Joomla for the project.

Hardware hacking an Internet phone

Submitted by John Locke on Tue, 07/05/2005 - 00:38

We're looking to set up an office phone line using Asterisk at Home. The latest version has added a custom SugarCRM package, allowing you to have Sugar dial out for you. Very cool feature.

Meanwhile, I ran across this hardware hack to hook a regular telephone to your computer:
GRYNX � Build your own Chat-Cord.

This CRM application looks like a winner

Submitted by John Locke on Fri, 10/22/2004 - 08:22

07. CRM

Just found this: SugarCRM - Commercial Open Source CRM Software . It looks like there's finally a decent CRM application out there... This project looks complete enough to drop the RetrieverCRM project, before we even get going!

Initial upload of Retriever CRM now available

Submitted by John Locke on Sun, 09/19/2004 - 09:12

The CRM software mentioned in the book, currently in use by the author, is now uploaded to a Subversion repository. It's mostly the Anteil CRM package modified to strip out the C database abstraction library. The code is quite ugly, and installation is not easy at this point.

The author of the book, John Locke, has forked the Anteil package and is now developing it under the name Retriever CRM. Many of the features do not work at all, and you'll find several ugly bugs if you go very far.