CRM

Finally talked with someone from AAAS tech. services about how they could help us implement a CRM system. Really I don't think they'll be of much help. I suspect the systems they would recommend to satisfy all our needs would be beyond our resources … they mainly seem to think in terms of commercial software.

I looked around for some open source options. While there are dozens of so-called CRM systems out there, most of them aren't worth the time to investigate further (underdeveloped, unsupported, too specific, and little development activity). I did manage to find a few that are worth investigating more, and I'm sure one of those can probably meet enough of our needs to be useful. Unfortunately, there's no real definition of what software like this should be and so the features available vary greatly from package to package. The benefit of open source is that I should be able to add the functionality that missing, I just hope that one of the projects on my list has a modular kind of setup. In the end I still think I could do better by creating the system from scratch … not to mention I think I'd enjoy the challenge.

I've also been waffling on the feature set requirements. I've thought about it some more and feel that a completely integrated system may be beyond our reach and more than we need. My current thinking is that we would do just as well two different systems providing contact management and list management services. It would be nice if they integrated, but I honestly don't think we'd get much use out of such a system in the long run.