Importing Salesforce Cases - STILL painful

[chewie]

Ok, so I'm having better luck importing chunks of data ~400 rows big, however still running into annoyances:

* I want to be able to merge cases by a particular field, e.g. SF Case field. I've set it up to be a mergable field, but it still doesn't show as something to merge by on the import screen.

* Merging kind of sucks...I expect that, when I merge, that all data gets lumped together..not deleted...so what's really going on here..why is all data getting deleted?

* I want to import the salesforce case's comments and shove them into the notes, which seems to be SugarCRM's equivalent field/type...how is this possible?

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Still inching closer and closer to adopting SugarCRM as my replacement for Salesforce and I'd like to do this before the end of the year...

[chewie]

Well, the lack of decent support from SugarCRM's community, let alone their own engineers has pretty much left me with an empty feeling regarding the use of the product.

For me, if I were using it strictly for a customer database, maybe SugarCRM would be the way to go.

However i'm finding its just lacking so many general items that make it not only not as robust as I thought it was, but also inferior to other packages...such as:

* Decent support of the product..c'mon, the community should be able to do better...

* Lack of out of the box reporting for cases, customers, etc info

* Difficult module installation..partly the fault of the creator of modules, partly the fault of SugarCRM

* Importing Salesforce info is just too painful..
* No ability to put comments from Salesforce into notes for a particular case
* Even with small data sets its difficult to get cases imported without any kind of errors being returned

* Merging doesn't actual merge..it deletes everything else but 1 instance of what you want to merge...engineers please look up the definition and actual usage of merging...'yer doin it wrong'.

* Lack of out of the box customer portal access..this is vital in today's society for a growing # of businesses and thus should be something that is included. Think about integrating Zend Portal..it works very nicely from what time I spent with it and seems to have a large following.

* Email2Case..as I pointed out previously, include the ability and option to just move read emails to another folder for archival purposes.

Overall I'm sorry I didn't go for vTiger first.
VTiger honestly has everything you need out of the box and seems to be the better way to go, for me at least, but I'd urge Sugar to look at their product and evaluate it against other existing CRM's and while I'm not saying that SugarCRM should be a clone, it should have the basics, and it definitley does not have the basics...