Open Source CRM and ERP: Bending the Back Office
SugarCRM, Openbravo and Compiere tap the power of open source development to make customization easy, but the line between community and commercial is quickly crossed.
I think SugarCRM is doing a good job of supporting both the open source community and the substantially larger set of businesses that just need something with a few more guarantees. The forums are actively monitored by paid, official helping hands, but most of the discussions are focused on the trials and tribulations of installing the community edition in different environments. There's an active community of non-employees that maintains the simpler versions for businesses, and many are digging into the code to move around buttons, change URLs, share a log-in with another package like Moodle, or even modify the database tables.
The vitality of this world seems to bleed over into the professional editions. SugarCRM seems to have more newer features, like integration with third-party databases and social networks, than either Openbravo or Compiere, if only because there are so many projects in various stages of completion. The experimentation from the open source community fertilizes all of this creativity.
The module builder for SugarCRM lets you create new data tables and then build the panels for editing and displaying the tables with drag-and-drop tools in your browser.
At the same time, the company is clearly looking to help whenever it can for a fee. It just introduced Sugar Express, a product that matches hosting with the community edition. It's $499 for a year's subscription for up to 5 users and $799 for a year's subscription for up to 10 users. The prices rise if you go for the features in the professional version. The first tier is $30 per seat per month, and the full "enterprise" tier is $50 per seat per month.
The extra reports and widgets aren't the only elements available for sale. SugarCRM will also bundle hosting into the services on either shared or dedicated machines, a set of features that seems to be rapidly evolving. Two of the products (Sugar Express and Sugar Professional) come with hosting, but you can always move the installations to your own servers.
[ JasperServer Professional and Pentaho Reporting build on famous Java open source libraries for generating reports, but they’re no longer for developers only. See the Test Center review, "Open source reporting goes corporate." ]
SugarCRM is rapidly exploring the tools for managing these deployments. Its latest tool, called Cloud Console, is beginning to help businesses knit together a variety of Sugar installations that span a big company. The versions don't need to be exactly the same, and the different divisions can have their own templates and features.
