
Fat Free CRM - Ruby On Rails-based open source CRM - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.fatfreecrm.com/
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Readmore
I've been looking at this software for a week or so. It has great potential
but it's not ready to deploy just yet. I've already found about a half dozen
bugs and crashes with the demo data that ships with the source.

However, once the bugs are ironed out this is going to be great.

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davidw
Did you report the bugs?

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Readmore
No, I'm a bad Hacker :(

I'll jump in there again and file a bug report.

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gojomo
The phrase "Fat Free CRM" might work as a tagline -- if they wanted to
emphasize a small core feature-set and interface -- but has problems as a
product name.

It's very informal and its connotations are 'lean' or 'extreme dieting' or
'asceticism', rather than 'powerful' or 'moneymaking' or 'comprehensive'.

It's hard to imagine it in everyday workplace usage -- "did you enter that
lead into fat free?" -- and it could even make overweight staff uncomfortable.

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bmelton
I completely agree. I thought it suspiciously akin to a play against "Sugar
CRM", which is a much better name "Hey, did you enter that into Sugar?" If
they're playing off a competitor's name, then someone should have coached them
about how that practice usually leads to crappy names.

That said, it's open source, and might actually give someone the opportunity
to perform an experiment I've been toying around with for years: Basically you
release an open source product, fork it immediately and change nothing but the
name, and see which version performs the best. Think of it like split-testing,
but for the entire product.

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mid
That's an interesting perspective. There's some personal history of why I
called it Fat Free CRM, but your point is well taken.

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bmelton
If I incorrectly assumed that you were just trying to differentiate from
'Sugar', then I apologize. It just seemed coincidental given the relatively
few players in web-based CRM products (that I know of at least.)

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izak30
This is really pretty great. Spent a few minutes adding contacts and tasks,
and it went pretty well. Readmore is right about some of the demo data bugs,
but I haven't ran into anything when i started from scratch.

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SwellJoe
Anyone have any thoughts on how this compares to SugarCRM and vTiger?
SalesForce.com? Comparing screenshots, it _looks_ a lot like SalesForce.com,
but I haven't used either, so I dunno.

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jamongkad
Don't know about the other two but vTiger is the crappiest, buggiest piece of
shit I ever had the misfortune of handling. It's full of legacy crap from a
bygone era when the original developers wrote it first in procedural PHP. Then
the subsequent version in a horrible mix of OOP.

The software API's are horrendous and extremely hard to work with. The entire
architecture is screwed up and very hard to grok at. IMHO it is best to keep
away from this project.

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tonystubblebine
I use highrise and for me, the email history is really the killer feature.
Does anyone else know any other CRM systems that are so email centric?

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technoweenie
It shouldn't be too tough to integrate email into fatfree (or any other app)
using astrotrain: <http://github.com/entp/astrotrain/tree/master>. It turns
any received email into an HTTP web hook call for your web app. It processes
all of our Lighthouse/Tender Support email from a single instance.

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andrew_k
Doesn't support Postgres?

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MartinMond
I took a really short look at the source and it seems like the only MySQL
specific feature is UUID generation (which can be ported to PostgreSQL in no
time)

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mid
That's true. I believe you can use Fat Free CRM with Postgres without UUIDs,
just like SQLite backend that is supported.

I'll take a closer look at supporting Postgress sometime soon. Among other
things I'd really like people to be able to deploy to Heroku easily.

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Soleone
Yes, deploying FatFree CRM on Heroku would be incredibly important for me!

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charlesju
Just as a general entrepreneur question. If I were to use this source code,
create a website that hosts fatfreecrm for other people and charge them money,
would that be considered a violation of GNU?

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olefoo
Not at all. Now you would have to provide a link on your website that would
allow someone to download the code _with your changes and additions_ since
this project uses the AGPL (also known as Affero GPL
<http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html> )

