CRM for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday January 17, 2002 @10:45PM from the how-much-difference-does-a-year-make dept.

diwolf writes "I've looked high and low, but haven't found a real Customer Relationship Manager for Linux. I used to use ACT! for Windows (bad word, blah, blah, blah), and loved it. But, I can't find anything similar on Linux. Does this mean I have to dust off my progamming skills and write my own? Or, is there an ACT! clone that's GPL'ed and just waiting for my download?" A ZDNet article from over a year ago also makes this point stating that Linux "still falls short when it comes to supporting workloads required by applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning), business intelligence, CRM (customer relationship management) and supply chain planning". Now it's a year later, and SourceForge has racked up an impressive array of CRM related projects. For those with experience with some of these Linux CRM solutions, how well do they stack up to other well known offerings in this arena?

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CRM? by SuiteSisterMary · 2002-01-18 08:00 · Score: 3, Informative

A CRM is the thing that ties into your phone system, and brings up the customer info as soon as you pick up. A CRM is the thing that brings up 'similar problems' as you type in whatever your customer's problem is, as you do it. A CRM, out of the box, is something like 30 to 50 percent complete; the rest you need customized. You might be looking for a server-side address book, you might be looking for an incident tracker, you might even be looking for bugzilla. But if you're looking for a CRM, you're talking heavy duty shit.

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Re:Begging your pardon, you're a bit confused by hot-swappable · 2002-01-18 13:55 · Score: 2, Informative

sorry, but I have to disagree. CRM can be the heavily integrated kind- true- ACT cannot integrate with your JDE system for example. But, ACT does track sales and is capable of some great reports on its own, or you could use Crystal Reports to get data that would rival if not surpass anything you could do with JDE world writer. ACT can handle synchronizing data for a nationwide sales team and call center- tracking sales and customer contacts. Hardly a PIM on steroids. More like an affordable solution if you don't happen to be big business.