GOC

Vtiger has announced the availability of vtiger CRM 5.0.4, a new release of its fully open source CRM suite with what company officials describe as "a number of improvements and feature enhancements."

 

Vtiger CRM 5.0.4 "addresses critical security issues, and a number of other issues reported by the vtiger community," according to vtiger officials.  

 

Enhancements include upgraded UTF-8 support for foreign languages, SSL support for e-mail access, ability to export selective records, and ability to send marketing e-mails with rich text. The new version also sports a new default theme selected by the vtiger community.

 

The CRM product integrates such CRM functions as Sales Force Automation, Customer Support & Service, Marketing Automation, and Inventory Management. It provides Security Management, Calendaring, and E-mail integration with Outlook and Gmail.

 

Sreenivas Kanumuru, VP of Business Development at vtiger, said more than 900 change requests submitted by the community have been addressed in the 5.0.4 version.

 

The vtiger partner network signed up 15 new partners in various countries during the last quarter. Vtiger partners can use the newly-introduced 2nd Level support to support its client's vtiger CRM installations.

 

In addition to the core vtiger CRM open source software, a large selection of plug-ins and extensions are available on vtiger forge. These plug-ins include Outlook, Asterisk (News - Alert) and Web Forms.

 

A little over a year ago vtiger was announcing the release of vtiger CRM 5.0. The vtiger business model is designed for small and medium businesses looking for an alternate to more expensive CRM products.

 

Company officials claimed vtiger has been downloaded "close to 500,000 times already" near the end of 2006, and say it "ranks among top 5 most downloaded financial apps in sourceforge.net."

 

Vtiger CRM is built over LAMP/WAMP stack and other third-party open source packages. The software can be installed in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 and different types of Unix/Linux-based distributions, such as RedHat 7.2/8.0/9.0, Debian 3.0, SuSe 9.0, Fedora Core 3.0, Mandrake 10.0, and FreeBSD.

 

Features of vtiger CRM include an Ajax-based user interface redesigned by implementing the best breed of Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, Tag clouds, and mashups with other Web services

 

"Vtiger CRM has passed through more than 10 development cycles to ensure that the product is enterprise-ready and usable," said Shankar R.N.S, Product Manager at vtiger.