CRM or customer relationship management plays an important role in the success of any business. In simple terms, the area of CRM focuses on helping an organization create and maintain long lasting relationships with its customers. In order to make it successful, you need a good CRM application. There are many commercial and open-source CRM solutions available around the globe. What we've checked out this time is a mix of various types, and for businesses of all sizes, be it large enterprises or SMBs. Most of the solutions we've checked out ca run on Windows and Linux, and are freely downloadable. We've given most of them on this month's CD as well for you to try out. Since most of these packages can work with Apache web server and MySQL database, you don't end up spending extra for those components. The only exception is Compiere, which requires Oracle. Before we look at the individual CRM packages, let's understand a little more about choosing and deploying a CRM solution.

Key Elements of CRM
You need three elements to run a CRM solution. One, a Web or application server to host your CRM solution. This could be Apache, IIS, JBoss or Tomcat. Two, you need a centralized RDBMS to store data. These days most CRM solutions support all major RDBMSs such as Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and MS SQL Server. Three, at the clients-end you need a Web browser to access and use the CRM software.

Apart from these three, you should have technical skills to implement and maintain CRM solution.

How to choose
The most important thing to remember about deploying a CRM solution is that you have to get your users to use it. You might deploy a very feature rich package, with all the bells and whistels, but at the end of the day (literally), if your sales team doesn't log in their daily sales reports, client information, etc into it, then it's a waste. The first thing therefore is to muster up support both from the users (your sales team), and the management (both top as well as sales head). Only after that should you get into studying each CRM option.

All CRM solutions these days are very modular, giving you a choice of what to install. Further still, each module has a host of features. For instance, all CRM software we tested had modules for contact management, sales-force automation, customer service, and inventory management. You need to drill down further into each module and check how well have they implemeted the features 'you' need. Next, check its integration and communication capabilities with other applications. Will its contact management module for instance, import contact information from Excel, email address books, etc? Some CRM solutions extend beyond their basic function to provide ERP, HR, document and project management, etc. Do you really need all those functions? Or will that be excess baggage?

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