BANGALORE, INDIA: CRM solutions help businesses streamline their customer management processes. However, choosing and deploying the right CRM solution for your needs is not an easy task. There are many proprietary and Open Source CRM solutions to choose from. SugarCRM is an Open Source CRM solution that is easy to deploy and is flexible enough to adapt to any business environment.

Unlike other Open Source solutions that need to be deployed on the Linux platform, SugarCRM can be deployed on Windows platform also. In this article we demonstrate how you can deploy SugarCRM on Windows or use its alternate virtual appliance version.

SugarCRM is built on PHP and can support MySQL as well as Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle database users would require a separate connector which is also available from SugarCRM developer community. And the web server component can be deployed on Apache or IIS. The alternate to all this is a preconfigured SugarCRM appliance that includes the SugarCRM application pre-installed with PHP, MySQL, sendmail and httpd on a Linux base. This appliance can be installed virtually on VMware.

When the web server is running, point the browser to address http://localhost/sugarcrm and the SugarCRM web installation wizard's welcome screen is displayed.