My understanding of the importance of 5.0.3
January 15th, 2007 by Richie
This post is to state my understanding of the importance of the 5.0.3 release.
This is a period where vtiger cannot afford to introduce any new issues or create a newer user experience. By doing so, vtiger runs the risk of turning away or further delay the adoption of vtiger.
Right now, vtiger does not want any revolutions in it but evolutions (correct me if I am wrong on this), it needs percentage-improvements. vtiger needs to provide a seamless experience now, a continuous flow. Though I believe that the product can be made more usable/useful; much more ‘Whole/Complete’, but this is not the right time to introduce those features. vtiger must make you win your customers and not introduce new features/learning curves for them in this release. It is important that vtiger becomes a standard rather than ‘the-state-of-the-art’ now. All the not-to-do list, will be taken up in the next major release say 5.1.
To do these evolutions, I need your help. We will be putting forth an updated status plan of the 5.0.3 release and I want you all to please put in your views on it. This will help us to get a consolidated and funneled view of the release.
So, what we are doing is to have the product tested and re-tested till we ie you and the vtiger team are satisfied with the product and ONLY then give it out for deployment.
- Download it, install it and forget it!
- Upgrade it and forget it!
should be the motto for 5.0.3 and I know it is not that difficult to achieve. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip, yeah, I know that. But then, the foreknowledge helps me to prepare harder too right?
I am a techie and my immediate itch is to have some newer feature into the product which I think will make life better. Believe me, I am controlling that itch and let me tell you(Frank, I know you are reading this) it is damn difficult to do it!
I do not claim to be perfect but I am willing to learn and you have to help me do it.
Let us know what you feel and how we should proceed from here. I will be posting the updated status plan shortly.
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Please fight your desire to improve the product by new features! Please put all your efforts on bug fixing of the existing product. This morning I have read some comments at the German user forum (in German) on which users ask exactly the same. I know there is the temptation to make the product better by improving at least the UI but in my opinion that should be postponed. Here is why:
- there are lot of open issues (bugs) at the existing release, just see the bug list. Some of them are there since v4.2 (e.g. calendar entries that cover multiple days); bugs are poison for the business community; a company can not affort to deploy a buggy product (e.g. because all the employees who are searching for reasons not to use a CRM) especially if there are alternatives
- users got used to the current UI; that is especially important for users that do not have a technical background; such users hate changes no matter how good the improvements are
- new features will introduce new bugs (almost certain)
I know there is no such thing called “bugfree software” but we should try to get close to it. Only than vtiger CRM will be successful.
One additional comment. I saw that at the bug tracker a lot of bugs have moved to v5.1.0. while there is also a version v5.0.4.
So far my understandig was that 5.1.0 is a feature release. Wouldn’t it be better to separate bug fix and feature releases? I would not mind to see a v5.0.5 if neccessary.
My $.2. I’m a little frustrated, partly because vtiger has great potential, but it’s still being developed as a tech product for techies… I used to be a techie too, but nowadays I *need* to spend my time doing other stuff - managing teams and projects, and looking for the business side of things. Perhaps because of this I get even more frustrated - because I feel that I know what’s wrong, but I can’t do nothing about it.
Vtiger has got so much *right* that it’s a shame that it has so many details to fix. The model is right, is sound. But the documentation is terrible (being open source should be no excuse). Questions stand unanswered on the forums for days, weeks, and some questions stays unanswered forever. Today I had an issue with encoding and the Outlook plugin. There were a couple threads… but in none of the threads the problem was really solved.
If you want vtiger to be *the* top CRM, then spend some time to plan it a little bit better, to focus your activity, and to communicate better with the community. Just a little bit. You’re very close to getting it right, and I trust you guys to do it!
I agree to the idea of simplicity of instalation, upgrade and migration processes. I strongly belive no new tools are needed for now. The main problem for me is that vtiger 5 is an excelent tool for new users, who doesn’t have some of the previous version of vtiger. I personally have a lot of trouble with migration process, and there is NO IMPROVEMENT in 5.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2 AT ALL! So where should i find motivation for migration and supporting vtiger5?
yes pls. do focus on stability.
until a stable v5 is released, will continue to run v4.2.3 (10 users) as disruptions will be very unpopular amongst users. Dying to have some of the new features but will not be using email on vtiger in the foreseeable future.
Hi Balduin!
Yes, there are some issues in the bugtracker’s categorization of issues. We are working on it.
We have earmarked a set of critical and blocker issues that we will fix for the 5.0.3 issues and then we will have the product released.
This is as of now the final list of issues that we will be addressing. I believe that by fixing these issues, we will be able to achieve the desired level of stability in the release.
Richie
Hi Carlos!
I do understand your situation as I am in a similar boat ;-)!
Jokes apart, yes, there are certain areas that need addressing.
The forum queries not being done is more by design than by oversight as it is very difficult to address all the queries.
We are giving priority to the paid customers’ queries.
Let me know how you think we can get our act together even with the above Konstant.
Hi Grendel!
I am pained to hear that you find there is no improvement in the migration procedures. We had put in considerable effort.
It seems that our effort were not properly focused leading to the result that you have.
Let me assure you that the first and most important priority is the migration for us as we understand the pain in moving to a newer version.
I will have Mickie interact with you on this front. You can send him a mail at mickie at vtiger dot com too with your views on the migration.
We are committed to commoditizing the crm-experience so we are very concerned about the migration effort/experience.
Richie
Hi Allan!
I will not argue with you on y you have not moved to the 5.x series as you sure have some reasons on that.
Regardless, I do consider your input and will see to it that you DO use the email with vtiger ;-). Come on, we put in so much effort on it! :-)!
Richie,
I’m glad to hear that you feel my pain. Now that we know we’re aiming at the same direction, lets exchange a few ideas.
One of the things that SugarCRM guys got right is their marketing - their message. I dont know if their community is responsive, or if the forum works; but I can go there and I’ll read a definitive message about the importance of open source in their strategy. The open source version is where the community contribute, it’s the one where a lot of eyeballs are fixed. And there’s no best way of catching a lot of bugs than to have a lot of people hunting them.
That said, I’m a bit disappointed to know that you are prioritizing the bugs from your paid customers. Even if I understand you, there are a couple points here… first, even being true, it should not be said in a public forum, because it in a way “diminishes” the importance of the open source version users. So, we all know it, you will prioritize your paid customers, but DONT LET ME KNOW. And that leads me to the second point.
One thing is for you to allocate your best resources to attend your paid customers. Another completely different thing is to leave your “open source” customers in the dark, with no response. I sincerely believe that no question should be unanswered, even if the answer is “I cant solve it for you right now”. Leaving a customer with no answer is an invitation for him to leave your company and do business elsewhere.
Picture yourself in such a situation: you enter a restaurant for the first time. You open the menu, but it’s written in a foreign language, so you dont know what to ask for. You call the waiter, but he’s busy attending someone else - who’s already eating, or who’s a long term customer. What do you do? Do you wait or do you go elsewhere? It’s what happening right now, and it should not happen - never.
Hello Carlos!
Point is taken.
Let me put forth my philosophy. Kindly do pardon my youthful ignorance.
For SugarCRM, Open Source is an addendum and not THE point.
Open Source is a marketing slogan and not THE slogan.
For vtiger, Open Source is THE SLOGAN.
We do not have any other version to which we will cater to.
Kindly note you are assuming that we are prioritizing the bugs reported by the paid customers. That is a fact but please knote that a bug is prioritized based on the impact of the bug and also on who reports it. More often than not, it is the enormity of impact of the bug which takes a
precedence. So, I guess that clears the air.
I second with your restaurant example. Had I been the client (and I have visited Europe recently
), I would have felt most offended and left.
Kindly do see things from my perspective as mentioned above. I hope you will get the proper perspective.
I will not give anyone a service which I would not like to get myself. So, please be assured.
Having said that, I do agree that there are lacunaes in our service.
Let me also state that at present, it will be somewhat the same state too as I am not inclined to staffing the team yet. I feel that most of the queries that are left floating around are repeated and we are working on making our common wiki uptodate so that we stop running in circles and the info is found easily for everyone.
I require the community’s help in achieving the same please.
Hello Everyone,
I’m glad to read that more focus will be placed on stability. I think this is very important considering that people would be using vTiger for their company’s finances. I also like to add that the developers have done a great job of not only developing the features but also just on the overall look and feel. It’s obvious from reading posts on the forum that a lot of work has gone into the email function. This is what I would like to comment on. I feel the email has only half functionality. Why? Well, I can look up a contact and see what emails I have sent but I have to go to the email client and look through all emails received from contacts to see what I have received from them. This is one of the things I like about SugarCRM. If I look up a contact, I can see what I have received and sent to that person. I believe this is how it should work, otherwise, it’s not really that much different than using an email client that has a good search/filter function such as Thunderbird. Now, if I’m missing something here (or something isn’t working the way you meant it), please let me know. Also, I believe the emails to contacts should have the option (an option because I realize not everyone is using vTiger for B2B) to attach emails to accounts rather than contacts. Othewise, what happens when a contact leaves a company or a position and now you are dealing with a different contact at the same company? That information of past communication is lost.
Also, as I had mentioned on the forum before, something like “Lead Source” should be attached to the accounts for companies doing B2B. After all, for companies doing B2B, the client/customer is the company (account) not the person (contact).
I understand that not everyone is doing B2B but considering that you have both “Accounts” and “Contacts” sections, I’m assuming you want to support both. I feel it’s not just about fixing the bugs, but also fixing little things like these that just make sense. I’m a techie too so I understand about wanting new features. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s not just what it can do but how it does it. In other words, sitting down and actually using the application as the user would. I know it’s difficult for a marketing person to sit down and imagine how a sales person would use the application. I believe more usage information should be gathered from people to better understand each position.
I have clients from many different, unrelated industries and they share some of my views for a CRM so I don’t think this is just something “I” believe.
By the way, yes I know that I can add Lead Source to Accounts using custom fields but that’s not the point. Besides, the custom fields is also another issue. Briefly, I would prefer custom fields to integrate into the existing fields like they do on SugarCRM or XRMS. Yes this is just my opinion, but I feel this way because adding a custom field can disrupt the natural flow. For example, a custom field such as lead source should be in the same general area as the other company information, not somewhere below it with other unrelated custom fields. It’s not very intuitive if your eye has to bounce up and down on the page to view information that should be together.
I hope I have not offended anyone mainly with the email comments because I know the developers have been working very hard on it. Again, my concern is that you are spending a lot of time and effort on something that doesn’t give very much benefit over a decent email client.
Other than that, I strongly believe vTiger is one of the best CRM applications out there. You have nailed it when it comes to the overall feel. When you see it, you just want to use it. I don’t believe you need to add more functions. Everything is there. Maybe the only thing would be to include the patches to integrate with webERP that someone has been working on for those who want “more”. The webERP developers have already done their part by adding a configurable option to integrate with vTiger.
I hope my comments would be considered and have not offended anyone. I also hope they were of some help.