Outlook plugin and some other remarks
My own company and some subsidiaries from our mother company are using Salesforce. Due to several reasons we are looking for another solution, price is one of the main reasons. We checked many CRM's and found Zoho, although we see it is still in a developing phase, as a very good alternative.
We tested it rather thoroughly and although there are some hiccups and bugs, we think the support and speed of positive changes, gives us a very good feeling of doing a transition. We think functionality in the CRM itself is already OK, though we would love to see some alterations and added functionality, the Outlook plug-in is our main �concern�. We think that we, as other switchers, can not work without a good Outlook plug-in and would suggest Zoho to invest the resources into this development.
The Salesforce plug-in and even in an alternative system as SugarCRM is much more mature and think you can only get switchers when this is solved.
Although I have problems installing the plug-in on my own machine, hope to get a solution for that, I was able to use it on another PC and worked with it for a few minutes and have some remarks / requests.
I do not understand the choice of adding e-mail as cases, although this could be an alternative option, we would love to have all e-mail added as e-mail and also based on date/time.
When I try to add an e-mail based on the name it can not find the contact, so seems not to check directly on e-mail address? Would be nice to check on both.
Now it is only possible to add one mail at a time, in SugarCRM for instance you can add many at once. Especially for people switching this could be handy as they want to add all older ones too.
Next step could be to be able to add not only to a contact but to all possibilities as accounts, cases, projects (future?), contracts (future?), etc.
I did not check the contacts sync yet, so will not write about that one.
But being able to synch Calendar data is also high on our list, although it is only interesting when we could have a shared Calendar or work with other person�s Calendar as well, as you can in Outlook.
I know synching is very tricky as we have seen in Salesforce and several times we get data double or more in Outlook so alternative ways could be even more interesting, as I already suggested with drag/drop. Maybe that is possible in Ajax?
I have many more requests and issues but also would like to know what others think � and maybe Zoho could give some insight in their roadmap?
My conclusion; Zoho is a very good alternative, not completely there yet, but I see huge possibilities for switchers if some core functionality as with the Outlook plug-in is updated / solved. Connection to, or incorporating Zoho Virtual Office would (and other Zoho products) would make it a killer service.
Just my 2cts for now
Hans