what are your thoughts, I’m looking at building a simple CRM package which can also handle Project Management & then a client facing front end once the back end is all tidy.

I’m familiar with wordpress, I understand that they are both pretty similar platforms, is Joomla secure?

Anyone with much experience?

Why build your own – look at Sugar CRM.

because £600 per year is over budget?

I’ve done a bit with Joomla in the past but it’s more CMS than CRM. If you are going to use itc heck there’s extensions available for what you want to do before getting too far into it.

SugarCRM does have a free opensource version but it’s fairly limited in what it can do.

A few extensions about. Reviews are usually fairly accurate…

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/clients-a-communities/crm

Joomla is secure enough in its current version if you follow their security guidelines post install. Entirely unsuitable for CRM IMHO

I use it for a site I manage. I found it to have a steep learning curve, but for free I’m pretty impressed with what it can do.

Other than a little playing around with WordPress, it’s fair to say that I’ve little-to-no experience of other CRM/CMS utilities though.

As for security, I imagine it’s as secure as any other open source app out there (read that to mean what you will 🙂 ). There are reasonably regularly updates, so I imagine any serious issues would be addressed fairly promptly.

Joomla is a CMS, I’d imagine a world of coding ahead of you to hack a CRM system out of it. Those extensions look like hooks into other CRM systems? I’ve only ever used Joomla to prettify monitoring solutions that use pug ugly web frontends (i.e. a perl script I’ve hacked together).

How about the open source CRM solutions available? vTiger or opencrx for example.
As for open source security, it varies very widely from almost none with no holes fixed, to obsessive, continually watched and rapidly fixed. There isn’t a single “secure as any other open source app out there”

Colin

praying for your success here 😉

yep looks like even for a basic CRM (details, call history, mailouts) its not the right platform, shame really there’s definitely a gap in the market there.

my thoughts were to build up a back end enabling the above, then allowing new customers to register and then have the contact from then on recorded, that way the client could also see the level of response they receive and those stats could be displayed in realtime on the front page.

The open source version of sugar crm is very capable and free.

As for open source security, it varies very widely from almost none with no holes fixed, to obsessive, continually watched and rapidly fixed. There isn’t a single “secure as any other open source app out there”

Hence “read that to mean what you will”

as secure as any other open source app out there

I read that to mean that you thought it was all the same – which it certainly isn’t.
YMMV

As for open source security, it varies very widely from almost none with no holes fixed, to obsessive, continually watched and rapidly fixed. There isn’t a single “secure as any other open source app out there

Of course, the ultimate limit of that spectrum is “no holes fixed because they weren’t there in the first place”, the most obvious example of that class being qmail, which has a standing offer of $500 for the first person to find a security hole in it, still unclaimed after 13 years.

Joomla is written in PHP, and PHP apps seem to be more prone to security flaws. I’ve always put this down to a combination of the langauge’s design, and the type of developer that it attracts.

Does anybody still use qmail? (yes I know they do…) Do you still have to compile it to install?
PHP has certainly had its vulnerabilities, but its a lot better now, I’m told. Facebook’s build on it, although I don’t know how much of a recommendation that is.

you might want to have a look at http://www.brightpearl.co.uk – I’m not sure if it does all you want but it must come close. Theres a free trial, and then the cost is monthly and depends on which features you need – could be £20/month – could be much more! But IIRC the founders are mountainbikers so that should at least help!