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Thread: CRM on the cheap?.....

  1. #1
    Cul-de-Sachian sybrows's Avatar
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    CRM on the cheap?.....

    Hi all,
    I am currently working for a new business startup for a free to pickup recruitment magazine, we are getting together a pretty big database of clients now and are looking for a good tool to enable us all to write notes on what happened after a sales call to the advertisers, and to hold their contact details and maybe even past adverts (artwork etc) that they have.

    In the office there are three of us, two do the marketing and one does the Quark and photoshop stuff (and a bit of marketing too.)

    There are currently three machines (soon to be four) one XP Pro machine that acts as simple server, the rest are XP Home. The network is a workgroup at the moment with one shared printer.

    As the company is running on a shoestring what would be the best method for us to have a central DB with all the contacts that we could call up records to conduct sales calls with and write notes on the outcome that could also be used by the other members of the team for the artwork and design setting portion of it.

    Currently everyone is working from an excel spreadsheet, but this is not proving at all efficient for large amounts of calls that need to be made from it and also the fact that it cannot be edited freely.

    I have used a few CRM solutions in the past (goldmine, act and some bespoke ones) but in this scenario do you think getting in a seperate machine as a sql server database (mysql or something) would be the best answer? and if so what would be the best (and cheapest method or handling the data for the processes that we will be doing with it ?

    any help would be much appreciated as productivity is steadily decreasing with the current situation!

    Cheers
    BrOw

  2. #2
    Treasure Hunter extraordinaire herulach's Avatar
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    if youve already got a server machine it should easily be able to handle database serving too, provided youre not too worried about it being lightning fast. i think you get sqlserver free with the server versions of windows, which shouldnt be too difficult to knock together a quick and dirty front end for.

  3. #3
    Cul-de-Sachian sybrows's Avatar
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    Yea the server is only an xpPro machine which is basically a fileserver, and a central point for all the files to make backups to an external drive etc, so that would mean that I would have to get w2k3server (or 2000 server) and the database and then the crm software to run on the data, which is gonna cost I reckons (not sure how much at the moment as am just looking into it for them)
    BrOw

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    Administrator Moby-Dick's Avatar
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    ACT! is preety cheap and not bad at what it does !

    as far as db server software goes , you can get SQL 2005 Express for free

    or if you fancy a challenge

    http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/
    my Virtualisation Blog http://jfvi.co.uk Virtualisation Podcast http://vsoup.net

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    Cul-de-Sachian sybrows's Avatar
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    Yea decided that i'm gonna setup SQL express on my server at home and trial a few packages, see which is the best one for the jobs we are trying to do with it (using some of the data we already have ) then liase back with the others, should be a cool project though.
    BrOw

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    I don't know if this it suitable or not but I found it useful for a site I used to manage. PHProjekt (http://www.phprojekt.com/) includes lots of features for example a crm but also a helpdesk system and lots of other bits.

    The problem is that its designed mainly with PHP/apache/mysql in mind...

    edit: if it is useful then theres a howto for windows here: http://www.phprojekt.com/documentati...PInstallGuide/

    Nick
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