Have you looked at the offerings at http://www.onyaktech.com ?

 

 

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Bill, WESNet Designs
Team Lead - DotNetNuke Gallery Module Project (Not Actively Being Developed)
Extensions Forge Projects . . .
Current: UserExport, ContentDeJour, ePrayer, DNN NewsTicker, By Invitation
Coming Soon: FRBO-For Rent By Owner

Tony-

With Vtiger you can, if you want, just have it hosted by Siteground who will install it for you. Their hosting is as low as $4.95 per month. Then you just go into the settings and turn off the features you don't need. Then you would just use an auto login module (there are two or three of them on Snowcovered) on one of your DNN pages to connect to the Vtiger site. This way the user couldn't even tell that it is a different site. To tell the truth, I'm not overly sold on Siteground, I haven't used them yet and I have read all the forum posts on Vtiger's site and many people like them. I always try to host with companies who know alot about the product I'm using which is why I use PowerDNN for my DNN sites. Siteground does know Vtiger but those $4.95 hosters always make me leary.  I would say it would be fine for small group or to just start out with - ask around about them. I'll probably end up using them and Vtiger in another week or so for one of my clients.

With regards to Onyaktech - I bought their subscription a year ago when I first got started with DNN because they advertised CRM abilities. That was a $100 mistake. I wouldn't go there.

Will at Active makes very good modules. They work as advertised. But Vtiger for free with all of it's features is pretty hard to overlook. Especially since they are both systems outside of DNN. Sorry Will!  I will probably not use most of the CRM features of Vtiger as I will be using it just for contact management but it's nice to have those features that you can just turn on if you need or want to.  I've been following Vtiger for almost a year while looking at other options - I can say their support is very good.  I've heard that Active has very good support as well.

Hope this helps

Greg

Thanks for the tip on splendidcrm.com - always willing to look at new CRM systems.

Back before I started with DNN I looked at just about every hosted online CRM package out there both fee based and open source. I learned that there was one thing to look for first thing out of the box because it would quickly seperate the offerings - the ability to print snail mail (letters, invoices, etc.)  Only a hand full of the 100's of offerings out there have this ability. Which in my opinion was one of the original reasons for a contact management system (think Act! 1.0) in the first place. Yes, most all of them will allow you to email to a record but if you compare open/read/impact rates (b to b) email doesn't help me much from a cold call standpoint.

One of the big reasons I like Vtiger is that it has many of the "higher" end features (such as the ability to print snail mail from Word templates) as an open source package where most of the other packages (Sugar, etc.) you have to pay the $60 - $70 per month per user for their "enterprise" solution to get.

I did think of another solution I forgot to mention. Sadly, it is also a solution that is outside of DNN and it is not open source but it may offer some serious value if you want to build more than one application. -  AwareIM  (www.awareim.com)  Stupid name - most people instantly think of instant messaging - they need to change that. This is a very powerful web application builder / server that allows you to build web applications with no programming (at least in the sense of computer code). One very cool thing is it's business rules. You can configure it to receive emails and then do things with attachments in those emails! It also has a scheduler for business rules. If you're in sales think "auto follow up emails". And it's relational.

Greg