Which Software To Use?

[DGD]

Hi,

a friend of mine holds private seminars and is looking for a software to manage his customers.
I have installed the Community Edition of SugarCRM and he's a little unsure if the program really fits his needs as the user interface looks a little overloaded and he probably won't need most of its features.
Therefore, I'd like to know your opinion on whether SugarCRM is a good tool for this task (perhaps by disabling some components and/or installing extensions) or if we should rather look somewhere else.

The features he's looking for are:

• Being able to see which courses people have attended (and which offer they have booked), grouping by kind of course etc.
• Managing courses, being able to dynamically generate a calendar for his homepage would be perfect
• Support for activities (e.g. he would like to be reminded when a customer hasn't paid his bill, when a contract is about to expire, ...)
• Customers shall be able to log into the system to sign up for courses, change their address and so on
• Community features for the customers (forums etc.) would be nice
• MS Access import
• Different security levels
• Uploading documents that are accessible for different user groups (participants shall be able to download course materials)
• Automatical creation of lists over course participants
• Storing customer correspondence, being able to send bills through the system (or at least automatically filling in a MS Word template), ...

Not all of the points mentioned above are requirements, also it would be possible to combine several products.
What do you suggest?

Cheers,
Marvin

[ptemplin7]

Looks like you need a custom solution.

Most of sugar will do this or something close to it. There are a few things that would be difficult to implement or would need so other coding to make it work better. (For instance the customer changin addresses should be done from a java or form web page not htrough the sugar interface. Customer login management would get to be a bear!)

Customizing would likely get him most of it though.
Send me an email with a larger list and I can get into the detail of what it would take. I am currently customizing Sugar for use at one of my customers and have very reasonable charges.

I look forward to talking with you more.

Paris Templin
ptemplin7 at yahoo.com

[DGD]

What additional information do you need?
Which of the things I've mentioned does Sugar provide "out of the box"?
What would be alternatives? Perhaps there are other products that would suit his needs even better?