CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I work for a small research center at large university (with very decentralized IT). I manage our Drupal 6 website, but we outsource development to an external vendor. We need to set up a contact database for our center as quickly and cheaply as possible, and I've been comparing Filemaker and CiviCRM. Filemaker because we have a couple copies already and have used it a bit; CiviCRM because we're already using Drupal, a colleague recommends it, and because there doesn't seem to be anything else open source that's as robust.

Our basic needs/specs are:

--Something that is fast and cheap to set up/build -- I need to get something in place this summer, and we don't really have the budget for outside consultation or development
--Types of info to be stored: detailed contact info; affiliations with our center -- multiple per person with start and end dates; for instance, someone may get a Master's degree from us, then a PhD, then come back as a post-doctoral fellow, and then be hired as a professor. We want to be able to easily see a person's current and past affiliations with us.
--2500 contacts now; will add ~100/year
--Logging/version control -- who made what change when
--For now, no business logic (no tracking of processes like applications), no website integration
--Access by 8 center staff and 2-3 student workers
--Nice to have: customizable permissions; bulk email function
 
I'm leaning heavily towards CiviCRM for the following reasons:

--It has ~80% of the functionality we need already built in off-the-shelf. In Filemaker we'd be building most if not all of the tables and layouts from scratch.
--It's "free" (apart from paying our web vendor to install it and to make security patches 2-3 times a year).
--I personally have more experience with Drupal and MySQL than I do with Filemaker.
--It looks like the import process will be easier -- more import tools built in (we'll be importing from CSV files).

The main downsides to CiviCRM for us, as I see them, are:

--More security considerations, since the database will live on our web server rather than our internal shared drive.
--Cost and time for ongoing maintenance/patches and upgrade to next major version when we upgrade to Drupal 7.
--A bit less flexibility in customizing fields and screens.

What I'm looking for is a reality check, or someone to play devil's advocate. If there's anyone here with experience with both Filemaker and CiviCRM, do you think there are any other major considerations I'm missing that might sway us towards Filemaker instead (or strengthen the case for Civi)?

Thanks!

Thanks lobo!

I hadn't thought of a separate install using Drupal 7. I don't know if our IT people will let us run Drupal off our shared drive, but it's worth looking into!

One other consideration is that we may want to integrate with our website in the future (display profiles for our students and faculty, collect contact data from alumni). How reasonable would it be to migrate backwards from Drupal 7-Civi to Drupal 6-Civi if we had to? I'm not sure we'd really do this, but I should take it into account.