CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Simple question, I guess.  Those pros who're reading: are you using Civi for your own business-related CRM needs?

I'm thinking Civi isn't really designed for such use, at least many of its strengths would not really come into play in that setting.  But I'm curious how many of those who are making a living devloping for Civi are also active users on a day-to-day basis. 

- TM

i use civicrm and a fair amount of custom code (civischool module) to run a large part of the online part at my kids school (online form entry and update, extended care registration and billing, parent teacher conferences)

lobo

Hi,

We are, mostly as an address book, mailing and event registrations, but have started a couple of tests to extend:

1) using cases to track projects.
2) using the mailprocessor to track issues/requests. Using it to bcc it on some mails I send, and saving important ones on an imap folder that is synced with civi
3) developed a timetracking addon, but abandoned it (too cumbersome to use)

I've been trying various issue trackers/pm, everything sucks, and in the grand tradition of OSS, I'm tempted to re-invent the wheel and use cases and activities for that.

They are some missing bits:
1) The mail processor should be smarter, eg only accept emails from contacts tagged "contacts with support contract"
2) A client view with a recap of the activities (what's done, still to do). We are developing a drupal modules that should make it dead simple and allows to generates excel/word reports too (and yes, drupal views or civi reports could be used)
3) A more "todo" interface, where you can easily change the status of each activity (ajaxifying an existing activity list)

We were using for profits CRM before, the task/project management I miss weren't there either, and I don't think that'd be stretching CiviCase and Activities too much to use them for that purpose.

If enough interest, we could work together and adding a civiTODO. Don't think we are far away, but solving our own problems are unfortunately lower priority than solving the pb of the clients


X+

We did some trials similar to Xavier, but it has a different audience and so some things weren't quite right. It's a bit like the difference between a van and a truck. Both do similar jobs but sometimes a van is better and sometimes a truck.

Nice to hear that, thanks for sharing!

Hey guys come on and eat your own dogfood... it's tasty!

We use Civi to track sales leads, send newsletters and keep track of who's using what so we can do targeted mailouts for upgrade alerts, server maintenance, promote training etc. - we also have freelancers and other partners' details. We're not doing our own events yet as we use civicrm.org for these to get a wider audience.  Civi hangs off our Drupal intranet which we use for (og-based) project tracking with todos collecting time under milestones, plus notes on projects for future ref and a general KB. (There's just no way you can do that kind of stuff sensibly in Civi.) Civi details feed in via views. We can then tie holidays, meetings and other shared calendar stuff into a views calendar via Google.

How can you live without all this goodness?

DaveM

Hi Xavier

we couldn't work out how to get A's AppleMail calendar, B's Outlook, C's IceDove etc. all to feed into our Drupal. All kinds of auth pain, path nonsense and general non-cooperation, but Google makes this easy (actually not sure for IceDove but we don't really care about his calendar anyway So we can all get our calendars (or the bits we want to share) into Google and then Google just gives you an ical feed that you can display in a view.

DaveM

No but that's easy anyway: you can just do it with a view of type CiviCRM Activities.

I was talking about getting dates that are in people's calendars. So yesterday I had a meeting arranged with someone who's not in our Civi and probably shouldn't be unless they turn into a prospect. I need to record the fact that I'm in London in the morning so others in the office can register this and I add the meeting to my iCal and it's then shared rather than create a record in Civi and set up an activity with that contact.

But hey maybe we should have something do it the other way round so I can add the meeting in my iCal and feed it into Civi with a new contact... Could possibly do that if you invited the contact to the meeting which generates an email and invited Civi too so it would pick up the email activity....

DaveM