Net Data Design, LLC Blog

The more you use and read about the capabilities of vTiger, the more I’m convinced you’ll find a solid use for it in your business. It has fast become a great tool in my business and I can see how it would benefit any SMB and all businesses as an intranet. Does it pack the punch off say Salesforce or Microsoft’s CRM? No, but it doesn’t pack the price tag either! And don’t get me wrong, because it may not contain all the bells and whistles of the aforementioned, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t meet or exceed them in a lot areas either.

The ease in which you can customize and configure vTiger to meet your needed, without having a team of developers, is astounding. Just recently we followed a published “how-to” on setting up vTiger as an automated help desk ticketing system. The how-to was straight forward and utilized a number of already built in modules and methods to create a custom [support] ticketing system. This particular system allows for the customer to send an email to a predetermined  email address and if that customer was a “know” contact in vTiger, a ticket was auto-generated and a “canned” response returned to them. In this email response are details that gave them the ability to track the tickets progress through the Customer Portal. Also through the Portal, the customer can comment on a ticket in real time, very handy when troubleshooting.

I’m certain that I will be revisiting the vTiger subject again soon, but I’d really like to hear what you have to say about it.

While the newest DotNetNuke release (5.2.1) is primarily a stabilization release, it does pack a much needed new caching provider that allows the application to run much better under load with improved performance. There have been a few cases, from what I can see, with some minor upgrade issues but as a whole this is a worthwhile upgrade.

The major highlights are:

• Fixed issue where banners were not properly rotated according to the specified views/clicks.
• Fixed issue where upgrades could fail if the the user account did not have permission to update objects in some db schemas.
• Fixed issue where list values were visible outside of the Portal where they were created.
• Fixed issue where caching providers were not rendering unicode characters properly.
• Fixed issue with missing Telerik assembly in the source package.
• Fixed issue where Ajax HostSetting was not properly set on upgrade from 4.x installations.
• Fixed issues where upgrades would fail with a unique index violation.
• Fixed issue with the Starter Kit which was missing HTML module files.
• Fixed issue where page templates were not working correctly.
• Fixed default settings for the module and output caching providers.
• Fixed issue which prevented Blog module from working after some upgrades to 5.x.
• Fixed issue when creating a new module in the Module Definition Wizard if the .ascx extension was not specified.
• Fixed issue where localization was not working if the application virtual directory name was also part of the module name.
• Fixed issue where the FriendlyName for Schedule Items was not being saved.
• Fixed issue where GetUserCountByPortal was making excessive database calls instead of using cached values.
• Added binding redirect setting in web.config to prevent versioning issues with Telerik assembly.

Providers:

• FileModuleCachingProvider 05.02.01
• MemoryModuleCachingProvider 05.02.01
• SchedulingProvider 05.02.01

As I previously stated, I held SugarCRM as the defacto open source CRM software. This has changed, the more I delve into vTiger, the more I find functions that rival some of the high-end, high-dollar solutions. And some of these functions are found in SugarCRM, the difference is in vTiger they work!

The vTiger user interface (UI) is easy to navigate, well laid out and is consistent across the application. The icons are decorative but informative design elements, making it easy to spot and move to different options within a given task. The ability to move from item to sub-items is also very easy. Lets say we’re in an Accounts (company) file. From here, we can easily access every aspect of that account, such as its individual employees (contacts), invoics, services they use, service contracts, trouble tickets, quotes and documents. Just to name a few!

I have also discovered a few must have extensions (add-ons.) Such as Timesheets, Trouble Tickets Updates and the Add to Google Calendar. All are easily installed and share a common layout as the core vTiger. The Timesheet extension does require a patch. If you have vTiger on Windows, then you’ll need to move it to a Linux environment to patch it, then move it back to Windows. Fortunately, I have my installs on Linux.

Some other features I’ll cover in my next installment about vTiger will be the outstanding Customer Portal, the ability to create a PDF on demand, invoice templates, EMail templates and custom field values.