vtiger

[jspencer]

Our sales force just started using vtiger 4.2.4 and are simply using it as a replacement for Act. This means they are creating accounts to represent companies we do business with (I have turned off most of the fields such as address for accounts). They then create customers linked to these accounts and keep track of all the real data about a customer/account here. They also record all communication to these customers in the forms of calls, meetings, and emails. Calls and meetings are handled great as events. Once they are complete and status is changed to "held" they are moved to the "history" area. This functions great and as wanted.

The focus of this question/request is the email part of things. They are using Outlook 2003 as their email client, so we don't want/need to reinvent the wheel and enable webmail in vtiger. All that we want in the CRM is a record that the salesman had sent/received an email. My thinking (workflow) is that email "activities" should be treated the same as a call or meeting. The problem is that an event does not allow you to add an additional "email" type in addition to a "call" or "meeting".

I did try to use the email tab, but that works a little differently than the events (module). It seems the vtiger email module is more a replacement for Outlook. What we want is a way to record that an email happened, even if it just requires us to copy/paste the email body into a manually created email "event". The issue I ran into with using the email module is that emails are separate from calls. In my thinking they are technically the same thing, email is just a text form of a voice "call".

How has everyone else approached this (primarily conceptual) issue? I can probably force it to work using the email module, or perhaps just tell everyone to log a "call" as held and note that it was an email in the subject or description, but training our sales staff to think in this manner could be a real challenge...

[Guest]

Why are you not uding the Outlook Plugin? It does excactly what you have in mind.

[jspencer]

For further clarification (I just got email notice somebody replied but I don't see the reply yet??), I have looked at the Outlook plugin (but haven't tested it with v4.2.4 yet) and we may impliment it eventually, but the real question is about how the email module works and what its purpose it. Our need is to have a journaling module that simply takes an email out of the mailbox and puts it in the CRM as a log that it happened. I don't want the user to have webmail or the ability to use vtiger as an email client. The only email I ever want vtiger to send are event and task reminders to the internal sales staff (which I have already customized nicely).

The problem is that the existing email module appears to me to have a lot more functionality than I want, ie replies, direct emailing (including templates) via vtiger, etc. I don't want any of that to tempt the users (plus a lot of it is broken). For example, I spent hours trying to get the webmail "add to vtiger" option working, and it still doesn't work. I don't have time to mess with it anymore.

Ideally it would be great if the outlook plugin (or even webmail "add to vtiger") would work in the way that emails would be fully brought over to vtiger (including attachments or even the ability to selectively bring in attachments). But the real need is to just have a journal log that an email was sent or replied to, without the attachment or even email formatting (just the subject, date sent/replied, and email body). It should just work exactly like a call but be an "email" - getting it from outlook to here is secondary.

So if someone tells me the email module is meant for this and NOT as an email client, I'll go through and customize it and remove those extra buttons and stuff. But based on my tests so far, the existing module isn't quite what I need (and would think may others would need too).