Hi all,

I'm hoping to get some guidance from experienced Sugar users, hopefully to avoid another contact/CRM wild goose chase for myself.

My company (a travel wholesaler) has an ACT2000 installation with a dozen or so mobile users who have PocketPC PDAs with ACT for PPC.

The ACT instance has been customised to a point where maybe 100 custom fields have been added at Account level (travel agency sales figures & targets mostly). Sales data is uploaded from our travel system into ACT and then replicated down to the respective PDA-based clients.

Some standard field data (contact info etc) is occasionally replicated up from the PDAs as well, so it's a bi-directional sync.

I'd dearly love to ditch this and replace with a SugarCRM system.

Please note that I want to ditch ACT primarily because this replication is extremely unreliable, the customisations make it impossible to get decent support, and the "closed" nature of ACT's database + the custom mods just gets right up my nose (because I have to drag automated reports out of it using Crystal and that's a pain for several reasons).

I like Sugar for the core system, but mobility is the issue I think. I'm after advice from you good people on two counts :

1. Is there a robust PPC/PDA solution that will reliably behave in the field as a mobile client to SugarCRM ?

2. Whether that PDA solution turns out to be Outlook-based (using maybe JRabbit, blupsync or similar) or not, has anyone seen this successfully done in our situation where there's lots of custom fields/data ?

I know this is starting to touch on Sale Force Automation, but we're not likely to make that leap in either cost or discipline. I'm wondering if a slightly tweaked SugarCRM + plugins will do the trick.

Hoping this waffle makes sense. Looking fwd to any advice or suggestions

Regards,
Brad Cook