

Ask HN: What CRM/PM/DM/TT application do you use? - blender

We are a small (&#60; 10 ppl) startup that is pretty evenly balanced between technical folk and business folk. We have been searching in vain for an all-in-one CRM/PM/DM/TT application to satisfy our needs. Our needs are not that demanding - basically this is what we want:<p>CRM: lightweight contact manager, Companies/Contacts, has an Internal/Employees distinction from Companies/Contacts and an ACL/permissions model.<p>PM: A simple Company -&#62; Project -&#62; Task structure. Gannt charts, timesheets, etc. are overkill. Simple Milestones suffice.<p>DM: Should have ability to create folders, checkin/checkout and create a workflow/approval based on a document.<p>TT: Ability to create tickets/tasks via an email queue/gateway. Ideally supports more than one so could create one for post-sales (support@) and one for pre-sales (info@). Auto-reply, Standard Responses nice to have. Ability to respond to email/customer within application.<p>Other: Calendar, preferably SaaS (with SSL and unified login) and ~ $10/user/month.<p>We have looked at dozens of candidates (too many to list) and they all have certain strengths and weaknesses but none have satisfied them all for us.<p>IMO, the best one so far is the open source dotProject but its email queue/gateway is pretty weak. (I know its open source and we could improve it but we don't want to go that route.)<p>Would love to hear what you are using to satisfy similar requirements or if you just gave up and used multiple applications (which we're trying to avoid).<p>Cheers
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Travis
You may have already considered it, but I believe that the zoho suite will
take care of a lot of your requirements. They have different components, so
you may have to pick and choose what you want your employees to use, but
(based on the quality of their docs system), I'd imagine their overall quality
is quite high.

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blender
Yah, we looked at it a long time ago. Didn't like the disparate applications
aspect to it. And for us the Company -> Project -> Task structure in a PM
module is highly desirable.

Thanks for your suggestion.

Cheers

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blender
Since I didn't get many replies I would suggest that an opportunity exists for
someone out there to build this and disrupt the market :-)

The hard part will be differentiating yourself in a very noisy market - but
products that deliver value always find a way.

Cheers

