Sugar CRM

The book I read to research this post was Sugar CRM For Dummies which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

Sugar CRM is a customer relationship management piece of software that has a community edition that is free and open source as well as paid versions which professional and enterprise. This book does a good job of telling you what the differences are between them. Roughly 85% of the code in all 3 is identical and for most businesses the community edition is adequate. In the paid versions there is an offline client but you will need hosting for all 3 which can be self hosted, or hosted on one of Sugar CRM's servers which are competitively priced.  It works with various flavours of windows or linux and you need a database which can be the open source, mySQL also you need Apache or IIS. The paid versions integrate with Microsoft Office and in particular Outlook. You can use OpenOffice with it though to save money. A good feature in the paid versions is the manager can send messages to all his team in one go. All 3 versions contain modules like calendar, notes & also let you communicate with customers. There is also rival software by other companies like salesforce.com & Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 which generally you have to pay for. Also because sugar CRM is open source many people have written add ons to enhance the functionality of it and these are normally free. I enjoyed reading this book although to get the most out of Sugar CRM you may have to do additional reading it still provides a good introduction.