From: Donncha O Caoimh donncha.ocaoimh@tradesignals.com
Organization: TradeSignals
To: ilug@linux.ie
Subject: Re: [ILUG] CRM sofware
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 10:01:57 +0000

Ok, I'll just get this off my chest first. Goldmine is crap, as an MUA
that is. We use it here at work and it is very useful for tracking
emails. I think it's used to track phone conversations but as you can
see if you look at the headers of this mail, I use Kmail and I wouldn't
even consider using Goldmine. (There's no native Linux port
of the client either, and it doesn't run too well under Wine.) Anyway,
the latest version of Goldmine doesn't crash anywhere near as
often as earlier ones, but it produces the most horrible HTML
mails. All Kmail sees is HTML tags all over the place, even when it's
configured to view HTML mails.. Oh, and Goldmine re-enables the HTML
option at random after you've turned it off.

You can run Goldmine off a Linux Samba server too, although the latest
version seemed to cause us some trouble until we (de)tuned Samba a bit,
more info on my blog:
http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/index.php?m=200206#77648069
AFAIR, after Goldmine was installed I was able to enable those Samba
tuning parameters again.

Take a look at a browser based product like OTRS (http://otrs.org/)
We've used it here for several weeks and it's excellent. Unlike
Goldmine, when an email comes in to a particular email address, say,
"sales@..." then you can configure OTRS to reply using the same sales@
address, no matter who you've logged in as. It also inserts tracking IDs
in the subject to maintain a history on a particular problem. OTRS also
has a "Phone view" where you can record phone conversations. You can't
create messages to people though as it's a trouble-ticketing system
which is a pity :( There's a demo on their site, it's good! RT is
another popular one, although OTRS is a lot easier to install IMO.

Donncha.

Compiere, http://www.compiere.org/ (Required Oracle for now, which
obstacle will be fixed eventually).

Ohio Edge CRM, http://www.ohioedge.com/product_crm.html

Hermes CRM, ERP, and Business Tools Dev Kit
http://hermesweb.sourceforge.net/

Hermes can bring a truly flexible approach to CRM and ERP to your
business, and this allows the CRM capabilities to grow with your
business needs. It also allows CRM to be implimented in a modular
manner, so that the information you need and use is always avaiable.

Hermes is still very much in a development stage, and although most
parts of the program are implementable in a production setting, we
recommend using our download only for purposes of demonstration,
testing, and development.