When hosting, customizing and supporting software, the landscape can change pretty quickly. Customer driven needs move you to places you never imagined. You must fill that void or be left outside looking in.

SugarCRM has great potential, however potential doesn’t fill most client needs. Rather, real-world working solutions drive us to new places and fill real-world needs. I have become increasingly aware that SugarCRM has some short-comings in the communications area, particularly email. Email functions are slow at best and don’t function at worst.

So, the quest was to find a CRM software with a low cost start-up and a healthy ROI. In stalks vTiger. It appeared to have similar features as SugarCRM, and as I found out looking over the code, for good reason. vTiger is a fork of SugarCRM and a great deal of the code is adorned by the SugarCRM copyright message.

I first set-up vTiger and the installation was quick and simple. I will write more about this in the future, but what amazed me was the speed of the application and it intuitive layout. Not to mention, features like email actually worked, and quickly. An test email campaign was set-up using one of the included email templates…and it worked too. Email campaigns have been an issue with a number of my clients, so this was a relief.

I’ll be blogging  more about my experiences with vTiger in the very near future, but I’d really like to hear your experiences.