Salesforce for 1 year then migrate to SugarCRM?

[Stace]

Hi all,

We are a small professional services business of 30 people looking for software to help us. I am tasked with the search

To put things in perspective, I am a techy, LAN/WAN, not a business user so all this CRM stuff is new to me.

Initially I found Salesforce and liked the Appexchange functionality, with this I could add HR, candidate functionality, project management etc. It seemed almost perfect. Trouble was document management was a problem and all my data was on their servers.

I then found Sugar. Opensource, data on my server, very configurable, wonderful .... but it lacks the add on modules salesforce has. I can see how in another year sugar will probably have all that salesforce has and more.

So, I was thinking we will use salesforce for a year, get knowledgeable on CRM etc and then migrate over to sugarCRM in a year or so.

I know we will take a financial hit for the year but I feel the added functionality we get with salesforce offsets that. After a year I will get sugar up and running, hire a PHP programmer and get stuck into customisation.

Anyone know how easy it is to import salesforce data into Sugar? I assume many people have done this.

What do you people think of this plan?

Regards,

Stace

[johnstevens]

Hello Stace,

It's not necessary to stick that long with the "Dark-side" :-)

But if you walk on the stairway to heaven in one year, you can bring your stuff with you. Sugar make every bodies life easy, especially for those who had to struggle...

And if you need tickets to that stairway, you always can knock on our heavens door....

Goodluck,

[Stace]

Ok, now I am confused. After looking at some of the salesforce appexchange stuff it seems to me it would be easy to pay a php programmer to write these for me in Sugar. For example, invoicing.

Is there another good open source or even paid for solution I could use for invoicing, candidate management with workflow, HR stuff?

As far as I can see it should be easy for a programmer to whip something up as long as I have the processes defined?

There are so many CRM solutions out there but I want more. I want a whole life cycle application that I can datamine and use to automate our everyday processes.

Does such a think exist off the shelf, I doubt can't find it. I don't want to create one from scratch.

Stace

[daryll]

That sounds to me like a poor plan unless you want to stay on Salesforce.

The problem is that you're neglecting the cost of switching systems, education, etc for an organization of your size. Once you're set up on Salesforce, you'll find that your staff has gotten used to it, and doesn't want to change. Not that it's better, just that they're used to doing things in a certain way.

Sugar can import Salesforce data (and I've never done it) but I'd put money down that the translation won't be perfect. So there's added cost to get everything in to Sugar after the year is up.

I suspect if you take that route it'll go like this. You get Salesforce in. You spend a bunch of time teaching your users about it. You spend more time entering your data. You spend more time tayloring it to your business practices. Everyone is pretty comfortable with it by 6-9 months. No you go to them and say "Hey we can save money using Sugar, let's swtich" and they all throw their shoes at you! (We'll maybe they don't throw their shoes, but you get the idea) You end up staying on Salesforce, because the hassle and money involved with switching is too high.

I suspect you'd be better off starting with Sugar and figuring out the business issues. Take the money you would have spent on Salesforce over a period of a couple years and hire someone to write additional modules and customize Sugar for you. Maybe release those modules at open source. By the end of the year you understand your process and you have a customized tool. If you get a few months in to Sugar and it really isn't doing the job for you and you think that getting the functionality you want is going to cost too much, then you bite the bullet and switch to Salesforce with the expectation of staying there for a reasonable period of time (a couple years at least). At that point you can reevaluate your costs and revist the decision.

I suspect you'll find that if you're realistic about the overhead of switching and therefore plan on spending at least a couple years on whatever platform you choose, that Sugar will be a cheaper decision overall.

[longreach]

Is there another good open source or even paid for solution I could use for invoicing, candidate management with workflow, HR stuff?
...
Does such a think exist off the shelf, I doubt can't find it. I don't want to create one from scratch.
Stace

You might want to check out Info At Hand - built on top of SugarCRM OS - with invoicing, HR, etc...

[Tesmond]

Ok, now I am confused. After looking at some of the salesforce appexchange stuff it seems to me it would be easy to pay a php programmer to write these for me in Sugar. For example, invoicing.

Is there another good open source or even paid for solution I could use for invoicing, candidate management with workflow, HR stuff?

As far as I can see it should be easy for a programmer to whip something up as long as I have the processes defined?

There are so many CRM solutions out there but I want more. I want a whole life cycle application that I can datamine and use to automate our everyday processes.

Does such a think exist off the shelf, I doubt can't find it. I don't want to create one from scratch.

Stace

I have been looking at CRM solutions for a while now and have had sales demos from Touchpaper, Touchstone (MS partner selling MS CRM 3.0) and Maximizer. I have also installed and am trialling SugarCRM. I am looking at this for my company and will be a 25 user system, with a primary focus on a support system rather than a sales system.

So far the most complete solution was MS CRM, but it still requires a lot of initial customisation and some really basic elements are missing. Also I would recommend avoiding Touchstone as they are a company who do not care for their customers. SugarCRM out of the box is a fraction less complete, and at the moment I cannot get the Outlook plugin to synchronise calendar items...unsurprisingly MS CRM is full integrated with Outlook and in that respect (which is an important one) is superior.

Maximizer came next, and its automation of processes is very good, however there are some glaring problems. It uses modular windows so you can only see one case / one note / one acocunt etc. at a time. You cannot get a full summary of interaction, and the only way of accessing closed calls it by using the search function!

Touchpaper is essentially rubbish, it has forms that appear on a single window with no tabbing possibility, so for example all the account information is on the same screen as the call information and the application does not scroll off the primary screen so all of this data is crammed into 1 1024*768 window. They chose to do this because it makes their customisation software easier to write/use and it makes their web access simpler. I do not believe that people are willing to pay X thousand for such a piece of software!

Currently if I can get the Outlook plug-in sorted I will probably program in all the stuff that is MS CRM has and that Sugar does not myself, so that I have the best CRM system.

My recommendation would be to test out SugarCRM and to ask a MS Partner to demo MS CRM to you. There are a few other pieces of software I am still to trial, but it is still a choice between Sugar and MS... Please note I do know the price different is huge, but that decision is not what I am evaluating...

[ftreml]

Please note I do know the price different is huge, but that decision is not what I am evaluating...

the price difference is not so huge when you compare MS CRM to Sugar Enterprise, and if licenses for the required components for MS CRM are already available within the company (Outlook, Exchange, SQL Server). Compared to Sugar Open Source, all the other CRM software is lot more expensive, of course ...

[Nomado]

I am also looking for something similar to the Appexchange functionality found in Salesforce.

We want to send surveys when we close tickets. These surveys are best contained inside emails as HTML forms that send info to our DB when the email is sent. We are reluctant to write the code, and hoped we could find functionality inside of Sugar, an add-on, or know when the functionality would be coming. Seems that Salesforce offers this now.

any thoughts?