“vtiger CRM is a full-featured, 100% Open Source CRM software ideal for small and medium businesses. vtiger CRM is a widely used product with thousands of users in dozens of countries. It has a vibrant community of users driving the product forward, and contributing to it’s development. Over a million copies of vtiger CRM have been downloaded by users. vtiger CRM provides a complete set of CRM capabilities, such as: Sales force automation, Customer support & service, Marketing automation, Inventory management, Activity management, Security management, Calendaring, and E-mail integration. vtiger CRM provides many extensibility and customization features to enable your CRM solution to meet the needs of your business. In cases where you need new functionality to be added, the vtiger team provides customization services to meet the need. vtiger CRM also provides, enterprise grade business productivity enhancement add-ons, Customer Portal , Outlook Plug-in for Microsoft Outlook users, Office Plug-in for Microsoft Word users, and Thunderbird Extension for Thunderbird mail users. All these add-ons are part of the 100% open source vtiger CRM project available in SourceForge.net.”
I have performed several installations of this CRM System as a robust alternative to the two powerhouses, Salesforce and Goldmine (and in my opinion, vTiger due to it’s cost effectiveness is a more viable solution for small and medium sized businesses). The first installation I did with vTiger was on my own stand alone server with dual 1.8 Ghz Xeons (installed linux, MySQL, apache, php 5, and vTiger) to set it up as an local intranet behind my firewall. I then wanted to see how Godaddy would treat the install. The install went quickly on Godaddy because Linux, Apache, PHP, mySQL are already already loaded. Creating the database, uploading the tar.gz file and unpacking it, modifying the php.ini file in the root (actually, on the Linux box, you have to create another file called php5.ini in the root), running the install.php file from a browser, and configuring it to tie to the database that I created and the install was done in less than an hour.
Below are some screenshots of a typical installation of vTiger:
