[RTC List] [linux] Customer relationship management Suggestions

[William Van Hefner]

I deeply respect Patrick's opinions, based upon his displayed knowledge
here, butmy own experiences with SugarCRM have all been without problems.
I've even had the app hosted on a server off-site and ran is almost
exclusively via the web for about a year. Obviously, having a locally
stored database will make it run much faster though. It is stupidly simple
to set up. Just do a base install of Ubuntu Server, or some server that is
Apache based. Fill in the questions it asks via web setup, and you're
done. It is obviously a highly complex database driven system. But then
again, so is WordPress, and I don't have any performance issues running
that on the same server.

In light of recent advances, I would recommend at least a dual core CPU,
SATA 3.0 drives and at least 4 GB of RAM. A great motherboard is something
I would hold out for as well. I use an ASROCK 770 Extreme3 mobo with a
quad core AMD CPU. Runs like a champ, using less than 90 watts of power
total. It can expand to 6 core CPUs and "unlock" 6 core CPUs (labeled as 
core CPUs) that only have four CPUs enabled via factory defaults. Same
deal for "unlocking" hidden, additional L3 cache. It has built in SATA
RAID with six drive ports. Personally, I prefer solid state or Raptor hard
drives. You can definitely run cheaper drives on it though. I would only
opt for SSD or the Raptor route if you need a small amount of storage
capacity (under 300 GB).

I think you'll find that with more current hardware and a specialist who
knows how to tweak MySQL, Apache2 and Linux will result in a system that
will provide incredibly swift database lookups, along with a
full-featured, if not initially complex, very expandable and well
supported CRM. Just my two cents. Some relevant links are below:

Product page for 770EXTREME3 mobo:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=770%20Extreme3
SugarCRM open source edition:
http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/community/sugarcrm-community.html
Where I buy almost all my hardware: http://www.newegg.com
Does remote hosting of SugarCRM (and other) apps with free trials:
http://www.zoho.com/crm/zohocrm-pricing.html


-- 
William Van Hefner
President

Vantek Communications, Inc.
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com