Vistech was a big part of my life. It was my first business, where I cut my teeth as a business person.

I have many fond memories of successes, great times, great people, great team spirit and great technologies developed.

Of course the latter years provided many tough business decisions and situations when I tried to recover the business to its former times after the damage done at the 2001 turn in the market. The last three years provided me with much more business experience that the previous six.

Am I happy how it all went at the end of the day? No, but I am happy that I dealt with all issues at hand in a responsible manner. I’m happy that when it mattered I had the support of many good people in the team to work through the tough times. Thanks.

Would I do it again?
– Yes I would, but better of course

Do you get what you pay for?

Does trying to save cash really cost you more and slow you down getting to where you want to go?

This is a decision between the SugarCRM open-source self-supported solution and costly Salesforce.com with its professional support to make you effective quickly.

Is it a Cost-Of-Ownership issue?
With Salesforce.com you pay the fees and it works with great eager assistance to ensure success. With SugarCRM you need to invest in getting to understand the system technically to support it internally for your business (if you’re a technical business).

I was always a person to hire the professionals to do what they do best and for me to focus on what I do best. But I dont want to decide on Salesforce.com and find I’m overpaying.

So, the question is to those who have installed and are using SugarCRM open-source installed on your own servers….

What is the time investment required on-going to ensure you have a working SugarCRM system for your business and does this compare to what Salesforce.com charge at E70 per user per month??

Any thoughts and experiences?

I have used Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Business Contact Manager as well as an Outlook plug-in, Email Templates to manage how I work with my over 1600 business and personal contacts.

We would have sent out many mailings using MS Word, bulk personal and personalised emails through Email Templates and kept a record of all contacts with each contact using Business Contact Manager.

The system we devised worked but was far from ideal and a little error prone at times. We used contact categories to group contacts and keep track of campaign status, sales progress status and type of company.

I’m done with that system and now need something more multi-user and scalable.

Every company, no manner how small, should have a shared CRM system maintaining details of all contact with their customers and prospective customers.

It needs to be web-based to be shared with a dispersed and travelling group, so I’m looking at Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.