Greetings and Salutations all!,

I require a flexible CRM (one I can add customised fields for, change pretty much anything in it) mod for DNN.

The client is a local ice hockey team and they need to track players, members etc.

I've looked at Singma Pro Draconis and Active CRM server / DNN mod; but wondering what else is out there?

Has anyone had any experience using these or got a better idea?

Cheers,

Dan

Hi Dan,
Check out splendidcrm.com. There is talk about DNN integration, but I don't think anything has solidified yet. It's ASP.NET and SQL and there is an Open Source version.
Thanks,
Mike

Hi Mike,

Great stuff. Thanks for that. Checking it out!

Cheers,

Dan

Make sure you read some of the posts about how Splendid is considering changing their licensing policy. Also, take a look a the number of bug reports versus regular posts. Splendid is a .NET port of SugarCRM.

Sigma Pro really excels as a project management/help desk tool. Active CRM is built from the ground up as a true CRM application with tight integration with DotNetNuke. Hope that helps.

Hi Nuke Newbie,



Thanks for that. I have been looking at Sigma Pro and Active CRM and I think I was favouring Active Over Sigma. So it will be interesting. I will had a quick look at Splendid, and was turned off by the pricing. Hopefully they seriously look at it.

Thanks for letting me know.

Cheers,

Dan

Hi Dan,

I just read your post on DNNCreative.

I am currently finding a CRM solution for our company. I am interested in Active CRM as well.

Wondering if you have already started to use Active CRM yet?

If yes, could you share some user experice?

Hi rc_kemal,

I've not used anything yet unfortunately; though it's high time I do. I need something to keep track of all the enquiries, quotes etc.

I have been using BaseCamp (online software) project management which is excellent. I am yet to see how I can effectively use it to manage deadlines.

I'd be interested to hear about your experience as well.

Cheers,

Dan

Hang on! SigmaPro is on the cusp of a major release that is a significant upgrade. Keep you chin up and don't make a hasty decision. SigmaPro offer much more flexibility going forward than the previously mentioned options. Pay huge now for a decent solution or wait a half a minute (or a month) for a super value. Ask Chris, I'm not in love with Onyaktech as I am often comparing his solutions to others including salesforce.com, but I am compelled to contribute. Onyaktech offers much more than others with the H20 & Axon modules which others charge an extremely shinny penny for comparable solutions. Keep an eye out for SigmaPro - if I change directions, I will be sure to post it here.

Hi aggiedan97, do you have any idea when an update is ready? You also comented that you have made comparisons between SigmaPro and Salesforce, would any of these comparisons be on the web, if so where?
We have had an install of SigmaPro for over a year now and we are very excited about what it promises to do, but whenever we approach it we get very confused when trying to configure it.

Don't know if you settled on a CRM yet but you should check out TribalHut CRM just released on snowcovered.com  If you like basecamp you will like this module.  They have a live demo at http://tribalhut.com.  I quoted the description below.

"TribalHut CRM is a DotNetNuke module that lets you know who you talked to, what was said, and what needs to happen next.  Enjoy the minimalistic, task driven web 2.0 interface to easily manage all of your contacts, companies, tasks, deals, and projects.  This module requires NO configuration, get started right away.   Ajax used throughout module, Google style auto suggest searching, tagging and much more."

http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcove...geID=16035

Earlier this year, TribalHut CRM was released. This is a top-notch CRM module in my opinion!

http://tribalhut.com/ (EDIT: I love how this site says I am a "Nuke Newbie"... Hehehe...)

Newbie or not, Will, it's great to see you here!

TRIBAL HUT CRM is clean, neat and functional. Does what it says it will do. But it is very primitive in terms of features: Security model not flexible at all, No reporting capability, no admin area. Just like using sticky notes on your desk. Hope the next release will address some of these issues, until then, I don't know if it is worth spending money on, because you will soon discover these handicaps. I am looking at other solutions.

Hi Roger,

I'm sorry to hear you were disappointed with the lack of some of the features you would like to see in Tribalhut. I do appreciate the feedback though and some of the concerns you mentioned are being addressed in the next release of Tribalhut (4-6 weeks from now).

When creating Tribalhut CRM our main goals were:

1. A CRM for the small business by a small business
2. Zero Clutter
3. Zero configuration
4. Looks and behaves great by default
5. Zero clutter... it bears mentioning again

With these goals in mind we set out to create an install experience that would flow like this:

1. Install the module
2. Drop it on a page
3. You are done. You have a professional looking CRM ready to hit the ground running without any complex configuration necessary.

Tribalhut was born out of the need of our own small business, it flows in the way that small companies flow, and it does not try to add the more advanced feature sets that you can typically find in the corporate CRMs like SalesForce, SugarCRM etc. It is a CRM for the small business.

At our company we used several of these larger systems and always ended up with the same result, an outdated CRM. We always felt that these CRMs placed to much of a burden on our users, and don't flow the way that you would want them to for a small business, they suffer from feature bloat by trying to be all things to all organizations. This is exactly what we didn't want Tribalhut to become, just another bloated CRM.

So with these principles in mind we continue to enhance Tribalhut's featureset by following the priorities that our users set for us through our UserVoice site (http://tribalhut.uservoice.com).

Regards,
Mitch Labrador
http://tribalhut.com

I'd like to thank you folks for this thread. I found it while searching for project management tools for our extranet portal. As we also have use for Help Desk functionality, I decided a CRM rather than stand-alone project management was the way to go. (Wasn't a hard decision, my first survey only turned up one stand-alone project management module. I don't want to mention any names, but GOOD GRIEF what a buggy mess!)

Among the sources mentioned here plus a few others I found elsewhere, the decision process rapidly came down to Tribal Hut or Onyak Tech's SigmaPro.

Tribal Hut is a study in simplicity. I really don't see how software of this nature could be made simpler to install and use. The TribalHut folks have done a good job of maintaining a zero documentation requirement. If you can't figure out how to use that software, I don't think you could figure out how to boot a computer, and certainly couldn't install and maintain DotNetNuke!

SigmaPro has many more features, and you can implement a much more sophisticated system with it. In particular, Onyak Tech offers a suite deal on all their modules which is in the running for the best value in software I've ever seen, even in the DNN world. However, the extra features do require configuration, and it takes a bit of study to understand how all the pieces play together and get the configuration down. As usual, more features increase the complexity, and thus the learning curve in setup.

I ended up opting for SigmaPro as our requirements exceed the features of Tribal Hut. I did have to spend 20 hours or so basically just flailing while learning the system, and I'm a software engineer with 30+ years experience and have implemented several web sites using various CMS. As with most DNN modules, the documentation is skinny, and since the Onyak Tech package includes so many features, it takes some experimentation to figure out what all the configuration options do. Fortunately, Onyak Tech has EXCELLENT technical support that gets back ALL THE TIME in a very timely manner with spot-on advice.

While I don't have tech support experience with TribalHut, I can say that they did get back to me quite quickly on my one question, and I've learned that getting responses from DNN module vendors is a very iffy proposition. Half the vendors in my survey didn't even respond to an initial sales inquiry.

As I said, I think DNN CRM boils very quickly down to a choice between TribalHut and SigmaPro. Both are very inexpensive to purchase. They really are two different leagues of product, with a clear decision path: If TribalHut meets your needs, and as it is so simple you can establish that quite quickly with their live demonstration site, you can just purchase TribalHut, get 'er installed in a few minutes, and get on to other business. One the other hand, if you need custom forms, extended project configurability with templating for different kinds of projects, or any of the other modules that Onyak Tech offers in their "whole suite" package, you simply can't go wrong with SigmaPro. Just expect to spend some time figuring it out, and make sure to "Ask Chris Onyak" -- he gets back to you with 24 hours religiously, and he is clearly very experienced in getting people bootstrapped with his products.

I can't say enough about how quick and spot-on Chris Onyak has been in helping me get going with a non-trivial help desk and project tracking system.

We're in the process of rolling out a DNN Pro site. I'm really pleased with the results so far.

I'm looking for an integrated CRM solution. Ideally, we need to combine customer name & email info from four main sources:

• On-line sales (when a customer buys something)
• Support requests (when a customer has a question or problem)
• product registration (when the customer registers his/her product)
• when a customer downloads freebies.

I'm favouring the Smith Shopping Cart. If I go with Onyatech for Customer Support, how would I combine the customer data from both data bases? I expect this would require some custom development.

As for Customer Registration, I expect that I can add those myself to the data base with SQL statements?

What do the experts think?

Hi, sprezatura:

I won't claim to be an expert here, because I simply don't have any experience deploying Smith Shopping Cart. However, the information on their website makes it very clear that it works with the DNN user database, so you should be all set there. As long as all of the key user information is stored in the standard user tables, you should be able to integrate the core customer information with just about any third party module easily.

The combination of Smith Shopping Cart and the OnyakTech suite will certainly handle your online sales, support, and freebie download requirements. The one question I have is whether those two alone would include what you want for product registration in any kind of "drop in" manner. I have worked with the H20 Forms module in the Onyak Tech suite and it provides a simple means of creating custom forms for user input that may satisfy your product registration requirements. However, if you are looking for things like warranty / support expiry and customer notifications based on that, I think you will need something more involved and purpose built.

I recommend that you contact Chris Onyak with some details on what you are looking for in terms of product registration. I have found him to be quite responsive and helpful. It also occurs to me that product registration is a natural fit with shopping cart software, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to see what the folks at Smith have to recommend.

As to your last point -- customer registration -- that one is certainly going to be well covered by a drop-in solution. If the built in (and extensible) DNN registration plus what Smith Shopping Cart adds to that is insufficient, there are a zillion third party registration modules out there supporting an incredible array of user/customer attributes and various contact features. It is one of the most heavily covered areas in DNN. With these CMS, a customer is basically just a type of user, and user registration is a strong point built into every CMS I've worked with. My bet is that Smith Shopping Cart plus what is built into DNN will handle your needs quite well.

One bit of advice I have if you are new to setting up e-commerce sites as well as DNN, is that the shopping cart software and configuration is everything. Get it in early, get it configured first thing, and start running test sales to a PayPal sandbox account or something similar even before you have the entire catalog setup. Get crazy about backing up your database.

Add product category, backup database, test shop, restore database. Repeat.

Seemingly minor issues can end up taking way too much effort to resolve. For me, shipping quotes and local tax calculations have ended up taking far longer to get right than the entire rest of the e-store repeatedly. I happen to work in a metro area with local tax zones that don't follow 5 digit ZIP boundaries; hopefully you won't face that problem. Depending on your product mix, however, working out all the shipping variations properly can consume weeks.

Hi Chris -

Thanks for the reply. I am also a veteran of IT (45 years). I chuckled at the vendors who didn't answer your inquiries. All that expense to set up shop, and they can't respond to a customer. Like Woody Allen said, 80% of success is just showing up.

My eCommerce needs are simple. I only have two dozen products, some download, some CD. I'm presently using Mal's eCommerce from the U.K., with Authorize.net as the gateway. I'm drooling at the prospect of automatically adding customers names to my DB. I have 60,000 names I would need to pre-load in the data base.

I would like to discuss some of the details of the integrated data base with someone knowledgeable. For example, I want to make the password process very unobtrusive.

If I understand correctly, the DNN Customer Data Base is one big pot where all applications can store their data? That would be cool.

Any changes to TribalHut CRM since this post? Almost 18 months later.

According to store.dotnetnuke.com, the module was updated last in February 2011.

I have heard good things about the modue, but have never used it.

Hello Roger,

I'm the developer of TribalHut CRM. We have had 12 incremental releases since we first launched the product. Not really sure why the store shows the last update being 02/2011.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us through our support page http://tribalhut.com/support.aspx.

Cheers!
Mitch

Thanks for the update, Mitch.