Salesforce.com Part A

This is the first installment in a blog post series on Salesforce.com which is based on what I learn on the video training course by Pearson IT Certification. Salesforce.com is a customer relationship management software in cloud computing which is used by many business professionals not just salespeople. It is used primarily to keep in touch but also has things like a calendar which can be used for things like appointments or tracking projects. In your personal website on Salesforce.com on the left is the 10 most recently opened items. There is a recycle bin which functions similar to the one in Sharepoint in that you can undelete stuff or empty the recycle bin. You can configure the dashboard however you want. To configure it choose the template you want to base it on and select with a tick the components. You then click save and click home to display it. You can look at other workers calendars. In my tasks you can search for tasks using criteria in the drop down box on the right of the screen. The customize my tabs button lets you add components. You may find your browser won’t display all of them and may have to scroll through them with them with the + button. There is an app drop down menu on the right of the screen. You can get more apps with the app exchange button. You can have different components visible to different people. You can use filters to find and delete records etc. When you select criteria in the accounts drop down box you must click to make and many people are caught out by this and can’t understand why it won’t work.

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.