We're finishing up a trial of the SugarCRM system and our biggest issue is the search capabilities.

It seems to me to be absolutely basic that any CRM system should let me define complicated queries (ie. "Find all customers who have previously bought any of products X, Y, or Z" or "Find all Opportunities with forecast > 40% who have not been called in the past 2 weeks.") to do segmentation, find overdue actions, neglected opportunities, etc. SugarCRM can't do that. Even the Advanced Search capabilities are frankly what I would normally call "Basic Search."

Amazingly enough, before we evaluated Sugar we took a quick look at SalesForce.com and saw that they have the same problem. I can't imagine why they haven't built something more reasonable.

We've installed the Dispage Enhanced Search product (http://dispage.com/products/enhanced-search/overview) and it seems to do what we need it to do - we can define any reasonable set of criteria including on related objects and do quite complicated searches with AND and OR criteria and conditions on any field.

What I don't understand is why this isn't part of the core SugarCRM product. I could see if they didn't add it to CE, but why isn't it in the premium editions? I don't see how anyone can run a serious sales operation without the Enhanced Search tool or something equivalent.