Rails Community,
We came upon rails about a year ago in our quest for a simple, easy to
use, open source CRM solution to help manage our core business. We
decided to go down our own path after carefully evaluating SugarCRM,
vTiger and a few other open source CRM platforms. The result is similar
to what you will see if you go to the following link:
While this is no competition for SugarCRM, vTiger or any other major CRM
product out there today we certainly hope that one day it will be. The
version you will see on the demo is specialized for the automobile
transportation business. However, we believe that there are a lot of
companies out there that need a very basic CRM system and get
overwhelmed by current offerings.
We will open source a generic version of this product as soon as a few
more capabilities are added. These are identified on our forum under
“Feature Requests.” We would appreciate any help anyone can provide
(forum URL can be found on demo).
If nothing else, please check out the demo. It doesn’t have much data
in it right now, so create some records, navigate through the system and
let us know what you think. If you break it - tell me how so I can fix
it! We have had a pretty “nice” set of users on this to date so some
testing from super intelligent linux guru’s is probably a good idea!
Yikes…please don’t destroy it! As mentioned previously, it isn’t going
to win any awards for “Product of the Year”, but hopefully we can get
enough contributors and enhancements to it so that it can be useful for
a good number of small to medium businesses that don’t need all the
bells and whistles.
We borrowed a lot of functionality from the open source community and
want to thank them very much for providing excellent tools to make this
all possible. We took the look and feel directly from vTiger (Open
Source PHP CRM App) but everything else is ruby/rails.
Even if you aren’t interested in a CRM solution, you can check out this
demo to see how other plugins/helpers work. For example, we use the
following:
**pdf/writer - To see pdf’s within the demo, go to Orders | Order Forms
| Create Order Forms
**LoginEngine - The very first thing you will see (hopefully)
**enumerations mixin - All list of values/drop down lists in select
boxes.
**ym4r - Not visible on the demo yet - need gmaps API key.
**acts_as_versioned - Yes, be careful what you type and delete! 
Only key areas are versioned.
**datebox_engine - Calendar support across all date fields.
**sort_helper - Click on any column heading to sort the data thanks to
sort_helper
**backgrounDrb - disabled for the demo
A lot of people have questions about ActionMailer as well - and we use
it in several places within the application. Please note: All email
and fax functionality has been removed to protect the innocent! We
import leads via a script/runner routine that you also won’t see (it’s a
pain creating leads manually). The only tab that isn’t functional is
the Home tab (go figure). All others work - some of them take special
criteria so if they appear broken they aren’t.
We also use AJAX in a few places (try to fax an order and you will see a
very simple ajax call). More AJAX support is coming.
Thanks again to everyone who answered my posts on this forum - from the
time I got started until recently.
Regards,
Michael
