The Open Learning Centre

September 28th 2010 saw the latest release of the Free and Open Source vtiger CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

As an experienced UK partner for vtiger The Open Learning Centre provides help with design, implementation, hosting and support to clients of all shapes and sizes. Please feel free to contact us if there is anything you would like to know about vtiger CRM or other Open Source Business Solutions.

This article comprises a quick précis of vtiger CRM in general and introduces some of the great new features in this updated release. Hopefully we'll also explain why we think this CRM application is the best Open Source CRM available today and what it is able to do for your business.

In a nutshell then here are the main functional areas of vtiger CRM:

• Sales Automation (SA): is an important CRM function that streamlines and enhances the operations of your sales process. SA includes the key activities needed by your sales team including Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Account & Contact Management, Sales Pipeline Management, Sales Forecasting, Sales Analytics, and more.
• Marketing Automation: provides Campaign Management, E-mail Marketing, Online Lead capture and Product Management; specifically useful for your organisation-wide marketing requirements. You can also use other marketing-related modules, such as Calendaring, Contact Management, Document Management and so on.
• Activity Management: record and catalogue all the interactions you have with your customers, suppliers and prospects. Emails, Documents, Quotes, Proposals, Invoices, telephone calls, meetings and tasks etc. All activities can be recorded and are available for searching and analysis.
• Customer Support & Service: vtiger CRM provides enterprise quality Customer Support & Service features, such as Ticket Management, Knowledge Management, Customer Self-Service Portal, Reports, and Support Statistics specifically useful for your organisation's customer support force. You can also use other customer support-related modules, such as Products, Activity Management, Calendar, Contact Management, Project Management and others.
• Product and Inventory Management: vtiger CRM extends beyond traditional CRM to provide complete sales and product life-cycle management by integrating Inventory Management functions, such as Products, Price Books, Vendors, Sales Quotes, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders and Invoices with the conventional CRM modules, such as Leads, Accounts & Contacts, and Opportunities. Using vtiger CRM you can achieve seamless integration between pre-sales and post-sales activities in a single application.

In addition to the comprehensive CRM feature set above, there's another aspect of vtiger that, in our opinion, really sets it apart from other systems. vtiger CRM is extremely customisable:

• You can add, delete and rename almost every field of the CRM to suit your company's terminology and procedures.
• You can add new fields, picklists, and entire blocks of information capture within almost any module on the system.
• You can configure vtiger CRM to use your own numbering schemes for things like invoices for example.
• You can create custom fields and add your own formulae to provide dynamic data that is always up-to-date and specifically valuable to your business.
• You can create custom workflows to perform some arbitrary function when a specified event occurs.
• Users may configure their own filters to display information the way they want it displayed.

And very importantly, all of this customisation is supported within the administration user interface itself and does not require any software "hacking".

vtiger CRM also is very extensible. It has a well defined and documented API that supports the development of custom modules that can be easily integrated into the CRM should you have a special requirement. You can also develop distinct or standalone applications that can communicate with vtiger using a webservices (REST) API. Good illustrations of this are the extensions for the Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook desktop clients for example.

Here are a few screenshots showing various aspects of the vtiger CRM system. The primary interface to vtiger is using a standard web browser, meaning that you and your staff can access the CRM from any normal computer and, if you wish, from anywhere too.

There is also a Mobile interface module designed specifically for the small screens and browsers found on phones:

What's New in 5.2.0?

If the vtiger CRM does all this already then what has been introduced in 5.2.0 to make it even better you may well ask? Well, there several major new features and many smaller updates and improvements. The key new features are:

• Project Management: This new feature set supports the creation, management and progress monitoring of projects. The Project Management feature comprises three new modules; Projects, Project Milestones and Project Tasks. With this facility you relate a Project to Account or a Contact and use it to measure progress. The Project module also includes a Gantt chart displaying the time-line and the Project Tasks & Milestones.
• Timestamped Comments: This new feature greatly simplifies the process of quickly adding notes or comments to many entities within the vtiger CRM. Each new comment is stamped with the author, date and time and is displayed chronologically enabling a more rapid access to the history of a Contact than before.
• Asset Module: A new module for the Product and Inventory management system, the Asset module can be used to record and track physical items that are shipped to your customers. This is especially relevant for products that have serial numbers, or items that have mandatory "service schedules" for example.
• SMS Notifier: This new module in vtiger CRM is developed to communicate with your clients faster, by sending personalized SMS Messages to customers. Using this module you can, amongst other things:
• send bulk SMS to Clients,
• send SMS Notification to your sales staff when new Calendar events are created,
• schedule SMS Notification of Calendar events,
• send SMS to individuals or groups of users of the vtiger CRM,

In addition to these key new features many other additions and enhancements have been incorporated into vtiger CRM 5.2.0. The most notable include:

• a new Mobile API to enhance the existing mobile web access so custom applications can be developed for the new generations of mobile smart-phones such as the Apple iPhone and Android based devices.
• enhancements to the Custom Workflow system to add new triggers.
• a new PDF generator library to improve flexibility and customisation when generating PDF documents.
• enhancements to the report generator adding new functions to enable even more flexibility in analysing your data.

Along with these enhancements and new features there have been many small improvements and bug fixes and a very noticeable increase the overall speed of the application too.

Finally, for those who don't know, vtiger CRM is one of very few really "Open" Open Source CRM applications. This means that there is one version of the application and it is freely available. Other so called "Open Source" CRM applications tend to provide only a subset of features for free and then require you to upgrade to a professional or enterprise edition to get the really useful tools.

With another well-known CRM for example the following features are absent from the Open Source/Free version: Forecasting, Reporting, Mobile Access, Customer Portal, Workflow, Module Administration and Field-level Security. vtiger CRM on the other hand provides all these features, and more, in the one version. In short, there is only one version of vtiger.

I hope this brief overview of vtiger CRM has been helpful. The Open Learning Centre is an experienced UK partner of the vtiger company and is able to offer various services and solutions including:

• Consulting
• Training
• Implementation
• Support
• and our recently announced vtiger On Demand service.

Please do contact us should have any questions or feel free to leave a comment below.