David,
We have seen your posts on the SugarCRM forum and we hope that you will be equally active on ours. There is no doubt in our minds that passionate customers, such as you, drive features and ensure quality. Although you are a SugarCRM customer today, we hope to convert you to a SplendidCRM customer.
We have made a conscious effort to follow the UI, the schema and the feature set of SugarCRM. The primary reason for doing this is to eliminate the need for a design team and for a documentation team. Wherever possible, we try to architect and implement features using current standards and best practices. For example, where as SugarCRM edits its HTML files in order to customize there layout, we drive our layout from the database. The big advantage to being data-driven is that we will be able to create a fat-client with much less effort. We can also run database validation scripts to ensure that referenced fields do indeed exist.
We are still playing catch-up to SugarCRM. Hot on our list is an Import feature that will support importing native Excel files and XML files. High on our list is team management. We are also trying to find the time to move to .NET 2.0 style web applications with full support for MasterPages. AJAX is also on our list.
There are three reasons to move to SplendidCRM:
1) our choice of .NET is a much better than PHP,
2) our code is much cleaner, and
3) our code is much faster.
Here are some reasons to move away from SugarCRM:
1) they don’t understand that a GUID is a standard and that you should never place text, like “will_id” or “sally_id”, in a GUID field,
2) they apparently do not understand XML, otherwise they would not store a PHP text array in the user preferences field,
3) they edit the HTML files as part of their layout management,
4) they just recently learned how to use Unicode,
Enough said,
Paul Rony
SplendidCRM Software, Inc.
We appreciate this kind of feedback. Our goal is to become a serious competitor to the larger CRMs, but we have significantly less resources, so we must choose our features carefully.
Our short-term goal is to follow SugarCRM. We do this to minimize or even eliminate the need for designers and documenters. Although it may seem short-sighted to follow SugarCRM so closely, we have been able to accomplish nearly as much as the SugarCRM team with one-tenth the manpower and one-hundredth the financial resources.
Before we can venture into new territory, we still need to implement some core features, such as import and team management. Most important of all, we need to make sure that we keep the bugs under control. Rushing to add features will not server anybody if the product becomes unstable.
