A customer of mine have been testing a trial of MS CRM 4.0 that I installed for them, but they concluded that it might be a bit heavy for them. I promised them to look into other CRM applications that use SQL Server as the backend and preferably has an Outlook plugin so you can do "CRM Stuff" directly from Outlook.
If anyone knows about alternatives, I would appreciate it if you leave a link here!
I know its been a while, but I wanted to point you towards OpenCRM - sorry I hate to do this unashamed promotion, but as a Dynamics CRM alternative, with lots of Salesforce an Microsoft CRM customers it might be worth a look.
The web site is http://opencrm.co.uk.
I hope that helps and feel free to drop me a line if you need anything that we can assist with.
Graham Graham Anderson
I don't have personal experience with these but a couple of popular ones are Sugar CRM and Vtiger CRM.
I highly recommend http://www.Worketc.com/online_CRM. I have been running a small sales company and I needed an application that meets all my needs without exhausting my budget. So I tried Worketc and it worked pretty well as I never had to get any other software do my accounting chores, or track my sales or even interact with my clients. As I said, it’s an all-in-one. I thought it would be a great service to struggling managers like me to share something so impressive as this software.
This is one market that Microsoft has got well covered. There is no other competitor application with the Outlook Integration and SQL back-end that they offer. The only other alternative is Goldmine by Frontpage but this doesn't have the same Outlook integration.
The Microsoft Dynamics range really fills a specialized market and are very well placed.
I would highly recommend taking a look at Salesforce.com It has integration with Outlook (and other Office apps), but does not require a "heavy" infrastructure on the back-end. It works great for a mobile sales team, since it requires no connection back to your offices either.
If you are worried about security of a web service like this, take note that Salesforce is SAS70 Type II certified, and their customers include Merrill Lynch, ADP and Cisco.
We personally use an internally hosted version of sugarCRM, we are utilizing MySQL, but it will work with SQL as well. It also has an Outlook and Word plugin available, and about a third of the cost of salesforce.com
I would look at SugarCRM as their Windows installer can use SQL Server as the backend straight out of the box. Scroll down the link provided and look under Windows Installers. If you start on www.sugarcrm.com you'll find the windows installer for the free version hard to find!
Another alternative which is not free but uses an MS SQL backend is Sage Act. This is a bit more Sales focused (rather than MS CRM which is pretty even between sales and marketing) but last time I used it they deliberately locked you out of the SQL Server by using a random GUID as a password (I know this as we used a memory profiler to get at it!).
