Vtiger CRM is a multiuser web-based Customer Relationship Management tool. Vtiger page at sourceforge describes it as follows:
Vtiger CRM enables sales, support, and marketing teams to organize and collaborate to measurably improve customer experiences and business outcomes. Vtiger CRM also includes email, inventory, project management, and other tools, providing a complete the business management suite.
It is possible to customize Vtiger, and that’s makes it atractive use case for Vtiger to use it as a Personal CRM, ie. for a consultant, professional or freelancer.
The figure below shows a typical Administrator’s view. Most frequently used functions are on the top menu bar, while the rest of the functions can be reached via “More” button.
Main Features are related to Sales, Marketing and Support:
- Calendar and Task Management
- Email Marketing
- Lead Management
- Opportunity Management
- Support Management
Other features:
- Project Management
- Inventory Management
- Customer Portal
- Document and File Management
- Reporting
Links
Vtiger as Personal CRM
The figure below shows a customized menu bar and custom language together with the main use cases for personal CRM.
Use cases for Personal CRM are:
- Calendar and task management
- Potentials
- ie. Your plans to potentially achieve something
- Programs
- Your execution of plans as programs rather than as projects
- HelpDesk
- Support requests to you, ideally related to Program or Service Contract
- Notes
- Provides additional collections of information
- Example:
- Market Research notes can be created for Accounts, and stored in MarketResearch folder making it easy to find notes for particular account or view all notes by looking notes in the corresponding folder.
Tips
- Language file “US_Custom” for the Personal CRM contains following changes to US language:
- Opportunity -> Potential
- Trouble Tickets -> HelpDesk
- Documents -> Notes
- Organization -> Account
- Projects -> Programs
- Language file installation: As admin, Import with Module Manager -> Custom -> Import
- Language file for user: As user, choose a new language called “US Custom”, and click home icon to see the changes
- Windows installation modifications
- bind mysql to localhost only
- In file “my.ini”, define line “bind-address = 127.0.0.1” under section “[vtigermysqld]”
- bind apache to localhost only
- In file “httpd.conf”, define line “Listen 127.0.0.1:8888”
- For any issues related to running the apache and mysql service, please see start and stop scripts, startvTiger.bat and stopvTiger.bat
- for example, in stopvTiger.bat only 1 shutdown command is needed for mysql, and running it twice might cause an error which can cause that the service is not automatically removed. One can fix this by skipping the second “mysqladmin shutdown” command just before the line “mysqld –remove vtigercrmMysql540”
- bind mysql to localhost only