I originally started using Open Source SugarCrm software (version 3) as the CRM system to manage all the customer details for Portali.
A number of years ago a couple of Indian based developers forked the SugarCRM open source code and created a new version called vTiger. (there was some controversy between SugarCRM and vTiger as the latter claims the former sees them as a competitive threat and even threatened legal action)
SugarCRM provides a professional (licensed) version as well as the open source version and charges for addin-ons such as outlook integration. So when I was due to upgrade to SugarCRM 4 I moved to vTiger 4 instead as they provided free outlook integration.
I have been using vTiger for a couple of years and needed to move to vTiger 5, but instead I have ended up going back to use SugarCRM (version 4.5).
Here is why:
vTiger Pros
As I mentioend vTiger always had more free functionality, including:
- Outlook Integration
- Thunderbird Integration
- Invoicing
vTiger Cons
Unfortunatley one module that vTiger never included was a projects module. SugarCRM has a simple projects which always met my needs. I got around the lack of projects functionality in vTiger by using DotProject which was pretty good and met my needs, but it was alays a pain to use two systems, maintainig two sets of customer records etc.
The outlook and thunderbird modules didn’t work very well in vTiger 4. So I ended up not using it anyway which negated the man reason I moved to vTiger.
SugarCRM Cons
The latest 4.5 version of Sugar CRM requires PHP 5 and infact the installer won’t let you continue with the install on a lower version. My hosting company Webfarm provide PHP 4 as a default and all the other products I use such as Zencart are only certified on PHP 4, so SugarCRM was still really out of the picture.
So an upgrade to vTiger 5 it was.
Upgrade woes
After reading the vTiger forums it seemed that upgrading by installing over the top of version 4 was fraught with problems, so I thought I would do a fresh install of vTiger 5 and migrate my content.
All went well until I tried to add a new user record in the new verision which didn’t seem to do much, i.e. didn;t create a new record. Editing the admin user also seemed to delete a lot of the admin users details which resulted in not being able to login and a reinstall.
Trolling the vTiger forums it seemed to be either a problem with Firefox or a problem with PHP 4 and the recomended fix was, you guessed it, upgrade to PHP 5!
The return to Sugar
Well if I was going to have the hassle of moving to PHP 5 (by the way Webfarm can upgrade individual domains/.sites to PHP 5, so none of my other sites were affected, way cool!) I might as well go back to SugarCRm.
Which I did.
Migratng content wasn’t too bad as I just used the standard export to csv in vToger and the import wizard in SugarCrm and Graeme’s your uncle (or mine anyway).
