[wellylug] CRM

Jonathan Harker jon at jon.geek.nz
Thu Oct 11 13:48:32 NZDT 2007


nic wrote:
> I know a crowd running SugarCRM. It's OK as long as you don't want to make any significant
> changes to it: the code base is apocryphally horrible (Jon Harker: would you care to 
> comment?).

Apocalyptically horrible.

Rumours of Vtiger being any better are greatly exaggerated.

Here's just one example of retarded: user-defined enumerations for 
dropdown lists are stored as arrays in php files (which requires 
apache/php to have write access to them in order to update them) instead 
of caching from the db.

> Performance is adequate, and there are some tweaks I haven't got around to yet. 
> It does most of what they want, and it is still better than the proprietary system they 
> were using.
> If you'd like to see it, let me know by email off-list and it could probably be arranged.
> Nic

This is true - by some fluke of history SugarCRM is still better than 
most other things out there, and you can even customise it as long as 
you have a sense of humour and stand well back.

I still think a well written open source CRM is an opportunity waiting 
to happen for some like-minded well educated programmers to cobble 
something together really quickly in turbogears/django/rails. CRM suits 
that sort of ORM-based stack really well.

But I always have other things to do in my spare time like books, cats, 
and drinking...

J




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