Shawn at the Linuxworldnet.com has a good review on vtiger titled .
The second tool is vTiger. vTiger is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. It is completely open source (unlike the nearest competitors which seem to be only partially open source), and has a very polished interface. I understand vTiger was originally based on SugarCRM, but could be wrong on this. The difference is that vTiger is a LAMP/WAMP application (using PHP), rather than a Java/Tomcat/Perl/some other system application. This means vTiger can be installed damn near anywhere you have a web server. Oh, don’t have a web server? The binary version of the the install file(s) builds one for you, with PHP support, and the needed MySQL server.
How is a CRM package related to programming? Well now.. other than tracking your customer contact information, keeping track of your meetings/schedule, and providing web based email access, it will also do invoicing for you. But more importantly, it provides a trouble ticket system, and a method to track activities and emails for the customers or products. Yep, emails too. They have an extension for Thunderbird, and MS Outlook that let’s you link an email to a customer account, or contact. So now, anyone on your team can determine if an issue is being handled and if/when required data has arrived.
While a CRM package is normally aimed at sales people, there’s room with vTiger to possibly support any person in any type of company. I see this tool being of immense value to us as we grow and have more hectic schedules.
The ONE tool missing from any CRM I’ve looked at thus far is a time tracking system. I mean a detailed time tracking system, where I can say from 9:05am to 10:18am I was working on bug fix #33 for customer X’s project Y, and from 10:18am to 13:00pm, I was at lunch, etc. vTiger has a community around it and there’s already a project there to provide this type of functionality. I haven’t yet evaluated it, but will be soon. At which time I will either contribute to this project, or write my own solution. Seeing as vTiger is PHP and MySQL based, there’s little barrier to a developer tweaking things to meet their needs.
Thanks Shawn, for considering vtiger as one of your favorite program.
Gopal
