Is SugarCRM a good solution for this small project?

[ragness]

In between contracts (been there, done that?) I took a three-month position with a local nonprofit. (Remember, low pay and low budget.) The organization is organizing a city-wide program through local churches where individuals host a discussion group in their home, and we reallly need to keep track of people and church involvement, registration payments, etc.

SITUATION:

Currently we have data in two Excel tables: Churches and Individuals.

- The Churches database has 28 fields and 1600 records, and will not change appreciably.
- The Individuals database has 38 fields and 700 records, but will grow to potentially 10,000. Data comes from an online registration form.

There are multiple/redundant copies of data on five different computers, that are not networked:

Windows XP laptop - Excel and Access
Windows XP desktop - Excel and Access
Windows 98 desktop - Excel
Windows 98 desktop - Excel
OpenOffice desktop - Calc and Base

SOLUTION:

It would be ideal to have one central copy of the data accessible to all, but without an office network it would be need to be on a web server with access through a browser?

There is no specific software preferred, but it should be user- friendly and easy-to-use (due to varying levels of computer expertise in the six-person office team) and free or low-cost (as this is a four-month project by a non-profit organization). MySQL has been suggested. Our ISP guy has recommended SugarCRM.

These two separate tables could become a relational database because they have a common field Organization: the name of church or business that the Individual attends or belongs to, in a many-to-one relationship.

Standard CRUD access: Create, Read, Update, Delete, and import

Password protection good but not required.

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I am not a DBA or CRM person, and we need to get this up and running soon. I looked at the SugarCRM site a lot over Christmas, went through the Open Source Edition Demo, and built my own custom online demo on their On-Demand server. Everything looked good, easy to modify, easy for me to learn so as to train the office staff, and of course way overkill for the simple needs of this project.

Does this look like a match?

Thank you for any help and advice you can provide.

[andrewb]

It looks that SugarCRM suites your needs. It may be good to look closer at requirements. But in overall it should be good for you.

[johnnyrover]

This thread is old, but I do wonder about how well Sugar would work for Member Management in a religious organization. I have searched, but found only this thread.

If anyone has used the OS for applications in a church environment, please let me know.

J