vtiger

[ameagher]

Hi everybody,

I've been following the forums here, and I know some people have a tendency towards being obnoxious when posting :(

Anyway, I understand that the whole vtiger team and community have put tremendous effort into developing and testing the system. However, it seems that there are still problems in areas of the system that should be bug free!

This implies to me that either there is a problem in how the testing is done, or in the bugfixing approach being taken. Unfortunately, I have to agree that there are problems with the 504 version of the system, and looking back through the forums, there does seem to be a history of such problems in earlier releases!

Now, I've mentioned before that I've used oss systems for a long time, and that I accept that there are no guarantees with such systems. Even so, for a system to be successful, it must be usable by the majority of end users who download and install it. This means the basics must be there - no data loss, and basic functions working as expected!

I was waiting to use vtiger right up until the 504RC1 release, and gave a jump for joy when it came out! However, after testing it, I realised it was not ready for deployment in a live work environment, and as I suspected correctly, would not be for a while!! I ended up using another system for that particular project.

During my evaluation phase I examined a very large number of open source crm/erp type systems. Most do have some problems, usually I found that the main problem was actually usability, an area where vtiger does tend to have advantages, however, most were on the whole fairly stable, and the basics did tend to work out of the box, even if they took a while to figure out!

I understand that on the developer end, people have to be paid, and that there are overheads with running a business. If I was sure that vtiger was stable and that I could use it for deployment without having constant headaches, I would be happy to donate to vtiger for every deployment I make. But I am not happy to do this while the system is not stable, as when I deploy it and there are problems it is not good for my client relationships, and everytime there is a problem I have to find a fix, which I don't want to be doing constantly, and which I may not actually be able to do, if in fact the development team themselves cannot!!

I would like to be able to deploy vtiger, customise where necessary, have initial data entered, train and hand over, then just provide ongoing update support! I suspect many of the forum members would like to operate like this. And I suspect, if they could that they would be happy to donate back to be able to do so with peace of mind.

The business software environment you are competing in is really hotting up the last few years and there are a lot of really fine competing products. The system needs to stabilise or you will lose out to other oss erp/crm systems. It would be a shame if this were to happen, as I feel you are nearly there! But as the saying goes ... nearly never won the race!

Wondering if you're placing yourselves for a buyout in the future ;)

Anyway, nice to see you expanding. Keep your heads up!

Anthony

[prasad.a]

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for sharing your observations.

It would be nice if you can give us some more details on what area of vtiger is unstable. Such pointers is what we are looking from our community to make sure the product can be improved to its next level.

Hope you are willing to share such details with us.

Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team