vtiger CRM 5.1 - Progress Update 3
October 21st, 2008 by Prasad
We have updated the vtiger CRM wip demo site today with latest 5.1 code which is under development.
The following new features have been added in this update.
1. Web Services API [Webservices.pdf]
The Web Services API provides a well-defined API for new plugins and integratiion of third-party applications. Going forward we expect this will ease development of applications/plugins around vtiger CRM and opens the door for integration with external applications as well.
Please see the documentation on Webservice API and Webservices Tutorial for more details.
2. Email Based Ticketing [EmailTicketing.pdf]
This feature lets you create Trouble Tickets from incoming emails of your inbox.
3. Eventing API [Eventing.pdf]
A new event API has been added. We have provided hooks to invoke
custom functions before and after a vtiger CRM module is saved.
4. Import Feature Enhancement [Documentation]
The Import feature has been enhanced. We’d like to thank vtiger CRM community member Elmü for this contribution.
5. Customer Portal Enhancements [Documentation]
Customer portal has been enhanced to support displaying records associated with Account and Contact as well.
6. Configure Calendar Events [CustomEvents.pdf]
Adding your own calendar events other than Call / Meeting is now possible.
Other features added in previous updates of 5.1:
* Layout Editor [Layout Editor.pdf]
* Option to Re-arrange the products in Quotes/Invoices/Sales Orders [Inventory.pdf]
* Previous and Next buttons for ease of navigation [Navigation.pdf]
* Customer portal enhancements [Portal.pdf]
* Recyclebin [ Recyclebin.pdf ]
* Role-based Custom views [ RolebasedCustomFilters.pdf ]
* Documents module [ DocumentsModule.pdf ]
* Popup Reminder for Calendar Events [popupreminder.pdf]
* Multi Currency Support [multicurrency.pdf]
* Duplicate Records Handling [DuplicatesMerging.pdf]
* User Configurable ID for SO/PO/Quotes [UserConfigurableInventoryIds.pdf]
* Custom fields in Email templates [CustomFieldsInEmailTemplates.pdf]
* Local Backup Feature [localbackup.pdf]
* ‘Assign to Group’ option during Convert Lead
* Sending mail to Vendors (Similar to Accounts/Contacts/Users)
* Mailing Quote, SO, PO PDF directly similar to Invoice PDF
* Create Product through Quick Create
* Calendar Events filter based on Users
5.1 dev build & demo:
Important Note: Following is an intermediate development build of vtiger CRM. So, please do not use it in production. We are making it available only for community feedback.
5.1 Demo : http://en.vtiger.com/wip
5.1 Customer portal Demo: http://en.vtiger.com/wip/customerportal
5.1 Source available at: http://trac.vtiger.com/svn/vtiger/vtigercrm/branches/5.1
Check out the demo now and send us your feedback.
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The Email Ticketing doc says :
But why does it convert the unread emails and not the selected ones ?
Customer Portal
Really good work !!!
One question : will it be possible to choose what is shown or not shown to the customer ?
David V.
Hi David,
Thank you. Can you please share little more details explaining us about the requirement. We would like to make a note of it for evaluation.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi David,
The email ticketing feature development is under progress, we will try to improve this feature as we go along.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Prasad,
I don’t know if there is any way to test the customer portal online right now, but in the documentation it seems that the customer has access to all the tabs.
Is there any easy way to hide a specific thing (a specific tab) from being shown to the customer.
For instance if I want my customers to be able to see the invoices but not the tickets, how do I do it ?
?
David,
We are planning to provide tab display configuration through PortalConfig.php.
This way you hide or show particulars tabs on the customer portal.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
the new portal is great really like it alot, but we need option of showning specific products to our customers i.e Accounts, as we are a small IT support company, the only products that we would want our accounts to see would be the ones we sell to them, i.e contracts, not all the products that we have purchased, i.e servers, pc systems etc.
would be a great addon to have on the products section a check box that said “show in portal” that way we could limit exatly what is visible.
love the software really looking forward to the next release
steve
Hi David, Steve,
Thanks for your valuable comments. We shall surely make a note of your suggestions and give out our best possible features.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
when accessing the Customer Portal, the faq and my ticket tabs work ok.
every other tab within the C/P produces this error
Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /home/vtiger/demo/en/wip/customerportal/include/utils/utils.php on line 68
I know what web services are but I am struggling to get an overview about the web services you have introduced. Unfortunately, your tutorial is very short and does not include any real live example. Do you have plans to extend this tutorial?
I can think of a lot of application which could be linked with vtiger by using these services but need a little more guidiance. Wouldn’t be the customer portal a good example?
Hi Prasad,
the new features really do impress me!!
The only thing I couldn’t find on the list is better B2C support. I wish we would not need a account AND a contact if we just sell to one individual person (=contact).
Perhaps you could consider that…
Bye,
Tom
This new version has some truly phenomenal advances. Such a pleasure to see progress in the right direction for an already beautiful piece of software.
If I may add my two cents in, couple of things I notice immediately is the the home page, the dashboard widgets seem to be always in a single column, that is in Firefox. You shift them over, but they do not memorize upon switching between modules.
Secondly I started playing around with the Layout editor, just a great addition and so necessary. I do not imagine its complete, but I hope that you can add the ability to rename/modify/delete blocks and be able to create custom fields on the fly
Just some thoughts.
Thank You,
Patryk
Hi Balduin,
Thanks for the inputs.
We are working on building sample application to demonstrate the power of webservices soon. Give us sometime.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi Tom,
We are discuss the approach and design to take to address this, kindly bear with us in the meantime.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi David,
You can try out the customerportal demo at http://en.vtiger.com/wip/customerportal. But for this, you need to create a contact at http://en.vtiger.com/wip and give portal access to that contact. Using that contact, you can test the customerportal online.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
Hi Steve,
Sorry for the inconvenience. Some wrong files were uploaded on the server. Customerportal should be now working fine on the demo server. Please try it out and give us your feedback.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
Hi Patryk,
Vtiger CRM is still not compatible with Firefox 3. We have noticed lots of UI breakages with Firefox 3, but haven’t still worked on them. The issue you noticed with Home page widgets coming in a single line, is also only with Firefox 3. If you try the same with older versions of Firefox or any versions of IE. We’ll try to address such issues before the 5.1.0 comes out.
About the layout editor, right now, we do not want users to mess up with Built in blocks that will need changes to Language files and it will be hard for users to port their changes from one version to other. So we do not want to give the option to rename or delete built in blocks. But we do have the option to delete the newly created blocks. We will also add the feature the rename the newly created blocks to our list and try to give it out soon.
Thanks for your valuable comments and we hope to get more such comments going forward.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
Hi All,
We have created a version called 5.1.0-wip on trac. You can now report issues on trac (http://trac.vtiger.com) that you notice on wip demo server, with following important settings:
1. Version - 5.1.0-wip
2. Milestone - 5.1.0
This will help us resolve issues you notice on wip and fix them before validation.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
IMO, the better way to generate tickets from email is through a cron job, instead of an user manually doing the job. Popular ticketing systems like Mantis and Eventum has a similar feature which depends less on the user. May be an email box can be dedicated for support requests instead of depending on a user’s email box.
Trouble tickets
As Manilal stated it would be better to have tickets generated through “support” mailboxes, so that you could setup a dedicated mailbox for a customer and they could e-mail that mailbox and the ticket would be generated for that customer.
Like
Customer1@mydomain.com
customer2@mydomain.com
Just a suggestion
Thanks
Frederik
Hi Manilal, Frederik
We are working on the improvements, this was the first implementation that was integrated to the product.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
just tested the C/P, and it works really well, loving the new features.
this is probably the most important part of the software for us, really looking forward to our customers using it
steve
Asha, Prasad,
Thank you for the links.
I’ve tested the Cusutomer Portal. Very good work !!!
It’s powerfull, easy to use, and has a nice ui design.
Here are my comments :
Summary :
1 - Search box for invoices
2 - PDF export for invoices and quotes
3 - Checkbox “Show in Portal” in Vtiger/Settings/Field access
4 - Checkbox “Can modify informations in Portal” in the Contact page
5 - Checkbox “Can be edited in Portal” in Vtiger/Settings/Field access
6 - Checkbox “Show tab in Customer Portal” in Vtiger/Settings/Module Manager (vtlib 1.3)
Details :
1 - We invoice our customers every months so after a while each customer has a lot of invoices.
Why not having an easy way (search box) to look for a specific invoice ?
I think having a Year drop menu and a Month drop menu would be perfect.
2 - We actually use Joomla and soap access to retrieve the invoices from Vtiger for easy online customer access. We will not need this anymore if the customers can export in PDF from the Portal
3 - As mentioned in a previous post having a way to select witch fields are shown to a customer is a very important feature.
4 - Would it be possible to allow the customer (checkbox in the contact page in vtiger) to change his personal information (postal adress, email, custom fields, …) ?
5 - Of course it would be perfect if we could choose (in vtiger settings) witch fields are editables by the customers.
6 - Prasad you said :
We need to be able to display informations not only from the “mains” modules but also from custom modules made with vtlib. Will this be possible ?
And now let’s dream !
Imagine a Home page in the Customer Portal just like the one in Vtiger.
The customer would see a few Home page components (customizables by the Vtiger admin).
For example Top invoices, Top tickets, Home page Dashboard, Key Metrics, …
The Dashboard and the Key Metrics would be customizable by the vtiger admin to show to the customer specific informations related to his account (for example a graphic showing that he is using 80% of his quota).
Prasad, Asha, do you think theses features would be too much to ask ?
Thank you so much for all the great work Vtiger Team is doing.
David V.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the Update
Hi David,
1. Search box for Invoice - Makes sense. We shall put it to the list.
2. Download Invoice/Quote PDF - We have already worked on it. Just could not get it for demo on right time. It should be available in next wip update.
Rest of the items, we will have to think about it and come up with a model. We shall see what better we can do about this.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
Thanks Asha.
David V.
Let me thank the VTiger team for a great piece of software.
I am having problem with the Campaigns.
I go to - Marketing -campaigns and select any campaign.
For 5.04 ( More information) and 5.1 -
Contacts- If I am selecting Todays Birthday - I am still getting all contacts.
Leads -First time when I select Hot Leads and press Load list. I am getting Hot leads. But If I select All. It shows all Leads.
But If I now select Hot Leads again, It still showing - All Leads.
This is happening at your Demo site too. Please let me know If this is happening just to me or is there a fix for this..
thank you
Kalyan
Hi Kalyan,
When you press Load list the filtered leads get associated with the Campaign.
1. When you selected ‘Hot Leads’ first only Hot Lead records got associated.
2. When you selected ‘All Leads’ all the lead records got associated.
3. When you selected ‘Hot Leads’ again there was not association as ‘All Leads’ were selected already.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
In terms of the customer portal it is really necessary that you are able to configure the content. It should be possible to enable or to disable tabs. Instead of an entry in a config file it would be better to have that as a settings option to be modified by the CRM administrator without touching any files.
Hi Balduin,
Customer portal is a plugin written for vtiger CRM and having it controlled through vtiger CRM Settings page would not be good.
We will first attempt to make it configurable and then take steps ahead.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Thank you Prasad for the reply -
So, let me understand - I ran this test in your demo system using DM Campaign to Top Customers.
(1) I go to a campaign - And associate Hot Leads the campaigns. –> I see the hot leads associated to the Campaigns. ( 1 lead ).
(2) Now I select all leads and press load list –> I see that all leads got associated. ( 5 Leads ).
(3) Now again If I select ‘Hot Leads’ and press load list again –> campaign is not associating with Hot leads.
So, Is it as per the design that once I associate a campaign with All , I cannot change it ? ( I cannot associate the campaign with another filter ).
This might confuse people as people expect filters to work at any time.
Also from the Contacts Today’s birth day filter was not working for me.
Thanks for your time
Kalyan
Please remove limitation for changing the ‘Locate Map’ popup window, it is very inconvenient to find needed address in so small window.
RECEIPT FUNCTION
Why not duplicate the invoice, quote module and modify and change into Receipt? I bet many many user need this as this is the last step to complete the sales progress, right?
Hi,
I don’t know if this is the place to mention “a mistake” I saw on vtiger test site 5.1.
If is not the place, please just tell me where I should post future issue.
(Also I think will be grater and easier for people who test new releases to have a button inside Vtiger test site to submit issues - maybe directly with a screen capture?!)
So, when I was in Calendar area, on a week view, when I tried to add an event by clicking on the “+” sign inside a week day, in the opened window to define the event the default date is always on the first day of the week (and not the date of day I clicked)!
e.g. if I click to add an event on 28 october, in the event definition window the default date is 26 october (first day from week)!
Is this normal?!
Thank you!
@Cristian
Vtiger bug tracker is here:
http://trac.vtiger.com
quick question:
In “Trouble Ticket”, why I can’t see the “Comments” in the “Edit” mode?
I am only able to view the comments in the “View” mode.
regards,
–wei
How about feature to create Tickets from emails automaticaly ala support@yourdomain.com all mails get created in the tickets, i found loads of requests for that feature from forums.
Hi kinnaz,
We are working on extending the email ticketing feature. Will keep you posted on it, kindly bear with us.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
How’s the progress at the moment, i would even be willing to contribute to code if you guys get some beta release to svn. Thou my main question at the moment is aprox how long till something shows up then i can decide, should i start to figure out somekind of solution myself or wait for your proggress.
Hi kinnaz,
Nice to know that you are willing to contribute for Vtiger development.
We are progressing pretty well and we have been constantly updating the community about the progress. You can watch our blogs and forums to know the progress.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
I suggest using an app like “jing” to do your screen shots. They’ll look much better!
Hi Rob,
Thank you for the reference, we will look at it.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
I remember having seen an issue in the trac stating v5.1 as target for PostgreSQL support. How about this?
Hi gerdb,
PostgreSQL support for vtiger CRM 5.1 is a work item that is in the plan but not yet prioritized.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi! i’m really happy with the progress shown towards 5.1
So if it’s possible to solve this issues before release:
1.- If i create an event longer that 1 hour, the event is shown as a 1 hour length only at the weekly view. This FIX is a must it’s about 2 years old.
2.- I cannot assign tasks nor events to anyone that is at the same level as myself. Also it’s really annoying to get that amount of tasks and activities on my personal list when i’m at an upper level for a lot of people…
Also it would be great if this enhancements can be added:
1.- Webcal support, or syncml support, or some kind of option to synchronize calendar, tasks and notes with evolution, palm, thunderbird.
2.- Integration of ttimecards, project module and several other enhancement that are really popular.
Thanks a lot for your effort! we’re almost there!!!
My company has just switched over to vtiger and we think what you guys have done so far and what you are planning for the future is absolutely great.
Here are a couple things we are having problems with and possible feature requests for 5.1 or sooner.
1. Inventory counts can be inaccurate if someone accidently creates a second invoice for a Sales Order.
Example: If I create a sales order and then an invoice, then it deducts from my inventory total, (which is a great feature).
However, if someone ever deletes that invoice for whatever reason and then decides to create another invoice for that same sales order, then there is another deduction of inventory, which would throw our inventory numbers off because the customer already received this order.
Another scenario is if we ever have someone not realize that an invoice was already created for a sales order, and their customer asks them for an invoice, then they create a second invoice for the order without knowing it and it screws up inventory and accounting.
My solution and recommendation to this problem: Only allow one invoice to be created for each sales order and do not let that invoice be deleted unless the sales order is also deleted or marked “Canceled” or “Returned” or something in the Sales order Status.
If they do delete an invoice then a message should ask them if they want to add the items back into inventory or not. That way the inventory counts will stay accurate.
If someone clicks on “Create Invoice” and there is already an invoice created for that sales order, then a message should come up that says something like “An Invoice has already been created for this order. To see this invoice click here”
Or another message might be something like “An invoice has already been created for this order, would you like to create another one? If yes, then do you want to deduct from your inventory again?”
That will make accounting and inventory management be much more accurate and easy to stay on top of even if someone creates a second invoice on a sales order for whatever reason.
2. Another feature I would like, is to have the ability to Map custom fields in the Sales order to the Invoice when it is created. Just like it does when you Map custom fields in a Lead being turned into an account.
3. The third thing I would love to see with vtiger is the ability to assign reports to users or groups. That way a user can create their own custom reports and not have the reports section cluttered with everyone elses reports, especially ones we don’t want them to see.
There are several other ideas I have for vtiger, but those are some of the most critical ones I have at this point.
We would love to help out in development or in the community in any way that we can. We would be glad to help finance any programmers that are working on specific features we want to see added.
Thanks again for all that you have accomplished and we can’t wait for 5.1 to come out.
The assigned filters, document manager and API are going to be awesome in 5.1 and I would love to talk you into coming out with version 5.0.5 just so I could get those features right away, but I will understand if this is not possible.
Our company only uses PostgreSQL and would really like to use vTiger, will it make v5.1?
@Dave,
an invoice should never be deletable within a declarable time span for legal reasons or editable after generation. Time to keep data differs from country to country - it may be 10 years or more.
In correct book keeping you must generate a second bill which NULLs first one in case of an error. Having such a feature available in some easy way would be fine for sure.
Related to legals a feature like a definable export of tax related data would be fine. I.e. in Germany there is a defined XML format (DTD) to fullfill such obligations in case of electronic book keeping.
Hi Andres,Dave,
Thanks for your suggestions. We shall surely do some progress with the topics you are talking about. We’ll update the community as soon as we do some progress towards it.
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
Hi TonyB,
As we already mentioned, PostgreSQL support for vtiger CRM 5.1 is a work item that is in the plan. But it is still not prioritized.
Source have more bugs than demo version.
Hi Marko,
Would be great if you can help us in identifying the bugs you are talking about. What did you really mean by that?
Regards,
Asha
Vtiger Team
Dave,
Your suggestions are perfect but I think vTiger developers and you missed one thing. How should vtiger behave in case if we need to create several invoices for one sales order? This situation can occur if we sell products, for example, for 50% prepayment and 50% postpayment, so we need to issue 2 invoices for one sale.
The only possible solution now is to make 50% discount while signing the invoice and then sign second invoice with 50% discount, but it is definetely not correct.
Art,
Thanks for your input. I agree with you that there are times when a second invoice could be needed on a sales order.
After thinking about this, I think the best thing would be for vtiger to deduct from Inventory when a Sales order Status is marked “Approved”. This would allow you to show that the inventory is no longer available once it has been ordered by a customer.
Then make it so creating an invoice does not deduct from inventory. This would allow you to create as many invoices as you need for a sales order without affecting the inventory counts.
If the sales order status is marked “Returned” or “Cancelled” then it should give you the option to replace those products into inventory.
I think this would be the best way to handle inventory management with the system and allow freedom to manage invoicing however you would like.
Any comments or suggestions as to how to make this idea even better are welcome.
I hope the vtiger team is able to put this into 5.1 or sooner because it is a huge problem right now for anyone wanting to manage inventory quantities within vtiger.
Thanks,
Dave
Yes, Dave, you are absolutely right about inventory count order.
As for several invoices for one sales order imo the best way is to add possibility to check that this invoice in on prepayment basis, so vtiger will understand that it must be issued one more invoice for postpayment. Furthermore vtiger must understand that it is one order which has 2 (or even more) invoices. Now we need to issue not correct invoice (with kinda discount).
I think these suggestions must be included in 5.1 update because they are more bugs than improvements so need to be implemented prior to others.
Hi all
I have been testing the new Vtiger, i think its going to be fantastic, just a few things i would love to see on my wish list.
1 have the ability to add attachments to FAQ’S
2 Have a new web form for leads and contacts that has the full address in the form, i.e street, lane, city, state, post code,
i have been trying to add these into the existing web forms without any luck,
looking forward to the next release, its great software, easy for my staff to use and compared to sugarcrm its miles better.
take care
steve
Hi,
Join the discussion “vtiger CRM Deduct Product Quantity (should we do it for Invoice or Sales Order?)” on our developer lists and provide us the feedback
http://lists.vtigercrm.com/pipermail/vtigercrm-developers/2008-November/002982.html
Please register to developer mailing list before replying:
http://lists.vtigercrm.com/mailman/listinfo/vtigercrm-developers
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi All
Like sdel_nevo said, ability to add attachments to FAQ’S would be nice.
In trouble tickets it would be relly good to have a field called Scheduled Support with a date, and fields with scheduled Support time start and end, these fields make a auto calender entry for the Assined to: “user”
Thanks
Frederik
Prasad,
I was not sure how to post in the developers list, so I am posting this here and hoping you can put in the developers area for me. Thanks.
Deducting Inventory:
I think the biggest issue with the inventory is that as it stands right now, there is a potential of deducting more than you should on a sales order if you create more than one invoice for that sales order.
That is the #1 problem that gets inventory off track with vtiger right now.
No matter what you decide as to when the inventory is deducted, you have to make sure that it can only be deducted one time per sales order.
It makes more sense to me to deduct the inventory by changing a status in the sales order OR the status in the Invoice to “Delivered” because it will fit any business model.
The key is that you can’t deduct from inventory twice for the same sales order.
So if someone wants to mark an invoice as “Delivered” then it can deduct from inventory.
If that same person on another sales order marked “Delivered” in the sales order status, then it would deduct from inventory as long as the invoice for that sales order has not been marked delivered in the past.
Another Example: If a person has already marked a sales order as “Delivered” and deducted from inventory and then also marks their Invoice as “Delivered” then it should not allow them to deduct from inventory again.
To take this concept further for more types of business models, you could also have a “Reserved” setting that deducts from inventory on both the sales order page or the invoice page. However once again, if the order is marked “Reserved” and inventory is deducted, then you have to make sure that when they update to the “Delivered” status in the future, that it does not deduct more inventory for that sales order.
So I think the bottom line is this:
Give more flexibility to all business models out there by having a “Delivered” and a “Reserved” status in both the Sales order And the Invoice, but only let inventory be deducted one time per sales order in the system.
Once the inventory has been deducted from a sales order, it can not be deducted again for that sales order unless there is some kind of manual override to the system or in the case I will outline next.
Adding Inventory:
As far as adding to inventory goes, I think you can take the same concept by allowing the sales order and invoice to have the status settings of “Returned” and “Canceled”. When one of those is selected in either area, then it will add the inventory back into the system. However, make sure that once the inventory has been added to the system for a sales order, that it can not be added again if one of the settings is changed to the another.
You could make it so someone changes a status to “Reserved” and inventory is deducted and then if the customer cancels you mark the status as “Canceled” and inventory is added back into the system, then if the customer changes their mind again and decides to purchase the order you can mark it as “Reserved” or “Delivered” and have the system deduct from inventory.
The key again here is that once inventory is deducted for a sales order, it must be added back into the system before it can be deducted again.
An order history log could also be a nice thing to keep track of all this and make it nice for the user to view any modifications to the order by date.
Hope this helps.
Dave
Hi Dave,
Thanks for sharing your viewpoint.
To post to our developer list, just subscribe at:
http://lists.vtigercrm.com/mailman/listinfo/vtigercrm-developers
Any reply to the discussion.
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi prasad and Dave
i also subscribed to the developers list, but for some reason i can’t add my two cents there so i am posting here sorry if thats wrong
not all businesses use Sales Orders, we only use Invoices for example, i can see daves point in deducting from the inventory when the status is set to “Delivered” but for small companies this may not be the best way, what happens when the invoice status is set to “Paid”? for companies that do not send out products but instead sell them On-site, the delivered status is never used, why not have a setting in the inventory notifications section of the admin area that allows you to select when the deduction should happen
it may be harder to code, but this way everyone wins, for this application to really succeed it has to be usable by all types of business.
i would love the deduction to happen on invoices when the status is set to “Paid” but, we as a business are probably a tiny percentage of the total number of users who use the invoices section this way, such is the buty of this software, it can be used in so many different ways there is no correct way of doing anything, giving the user the option I think is the best way forward
steve
Hi Steve,
Will let our admin track not being able to post on developer list. Thanks for your feedback.
Coming up with a better solution for the issue is keep us busy now. At the same time, we are excited with the amount of response on the developer post
Keep us posted
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hey Guys,
Great to see so much progress in 5.1, its simply impossible to wait for the final release. I read all the comments above, so time for me to chip in my few cents:
1. Customer Portal - The enhancements are great but will create lot of confusion at the Customer end, if we don’t have a very good control on who can see what. There are lot of good suggestion [i feel its must to configure it through vtiger as we may want to configure differently for different customers and its way too inconvenient using config file].
Secondly why I said confusion for customers, consider the case where we have lot of contacts for one account and all are having different roles [in there company], how can we show the invoices to someone who is just a small guy [maybe a developer like me :-)], I hope you got the idea… Need to have some kind of roles for the contacts [attached with who can see what]. Maybe even an Admin for each Account, managed by the Customers themselves.
2. Inventory Move - In standard erp systems [I know vtiger is not erp :-)] this is done by a Delivery Order and not by Invoice, for obvious reasons. I feel its no harm if we add few more things in this whole module to complete the loops:
Sales Order - A Section on Delivery [Multiple records for partial deliveries], which will be attached to inventory move.
Invoice - A Section on Payment, payment mode, date, etc [Multiple records for partial payments]
Receipt - Should be attached to the Payment Section Above.
3. Reporting Module - A Lot is going on [in 5.1], why not improve the Reporting module, its way too rigid for doing anything more than just a filtered list of records.
4. Multiple Organisations - Ultimate dream could be a multi tenant architect, but till then, why not extend the Organisation section to have multiple branches/locations, to at least have the segmented reports for different branches.
5. Sub Admin - We don’t want to give admin user account to our customers for the reason that they might break the system, so would like to have sth like a Sub Admin users, whose permissions can be controlled by Admin user.
[Note: We did sth like this customisation, where by we even control the number of users that this sub admin can create. Though controlling permissions, right now are hard coded. We are in the process of offering vtiger as SAAS [www.second-crm.com] and need lot of things, which we might work upon [in coming weeks] and the will offer to vtiger if they are interested to include in the core. Some of them are:
i) Sub Admin Feature [fully done]
ii) Web Based Instance Setup for allowing potential customers to create trial accounts. Right now we have to do this manually and its not a great idea from marketing point of view.]
6. Partner Portal - Just like Customer Portal, why not have a Partner’s [or Resellers] Portal, whereby our Partner, can login and use the entire features of vtiger [with a filter that they can work on only leads, etc created by them and not by other partners]. We as the Main company can view all of the data for all partners. We can have reports to compare the progress of one partners viz a viz other partners or can calculate the commission on sales, or whatever is the parameter. etc etc. This single feature could take vtiger to next level.
I love your work and hope to give back once our second-crm is on track to start making money.
Thanx & Regards,
Deep
Deep,
Thank you for your suggestions.
About point 6 (Partner portal) it seems that we can already do this by creating a vtiger user with limited access on the system. If not, could you please give more details ?
David V.
I can give you an example: currently I can have only my customers sign on to the system, and place their purchase orders to us. the way it is setup is that they can only set up and review their own purchase order. However, there is no easy way to let my suppliers to view the purchase orders which are placed to them.
It is a many to many relationship, and if I want to do that using the group set-up, and if I have 4 customers, and 4 suppliers, then I have to set-up 16 groups in order to do that accordingly.
Regards,
–Wei
Why don’t you allow to remove some modules and submodules (e.g. Accounts, Calendar) from dashboard using administrative panel? Many of them duplicate each other without any obvious reason.
Hi Prasad
The changes from 5.04 version are real impressive. Thanks for good job.
Please attendee that Vtiger “search function” doesn’t find Folder names. If this new functionality (instead of Notes) is proposition for a DMS (Document Management System) it must be possibility to create subfolders too. Isn’t?
Great work vTiger team, even with the create TT from email. Can you enhance the module to include UPDATING existing trouble tickets by email please, that is, when an email is sent with TT number it gets updated to CRM and customer portal automatically?
Hi
I wanted to suggest something about duplicates merging that seems pretty important to me :
I haven’t found how to merge some records picked in a list.
For example, you have two accounts named “big company” & “very big company”.
You know those are supposed to be a unique account and you want to merge them, but no way :
the detection tool doesn’t find them as duplicates
What about having a “merge selected items” button, on top of the lists ?
I’ve written some basic PHP scripts to detect duplicates in vtiger 5.0.4, and this was one type of duplicate my script would detect.
The script would detect any account name which appears within another account name, so “big company” would be detected and show up on a table matched against “very big company”.
The problem I’ve found with this is where you have companies with very short names, like “Change”.
My script would always show Change as a possible duplicate of another company with this string in it, even if it was a part of another word, like “Exchange” or “Changeworks”, so the script would return a number of false positives.
I’m sure there’s an easy way around this (Like trim() the whitespace from both, then add a single space at the start and end of both account names, and then run the duplicate detection queries), but I never quite got round to that
garry >
I’m glad things have been done on this point !
what about having the possibility to select manualy some items, and press a “merge selected” button… without any auto-detection process ?
Is the web service API documentation complete?
CYBERAUTHORIZE provides a payment module for vTiger that allows merchants to accept and process all major credit cards and electronic checks. We would like to get started on our next release (e.g. vTiger 5.1 support, recurring payments, customer vault integration, etc) but I want to ensure the API is not going to change significantly.
Hi All,
We revamped the Email Ticketing and now have MailScanner in vtiger CRM 5.1 through which you can configure rules and take action like create ticket, add to contact/account.
For more details look at the this post:
http://www.vtiger.com/blogs/2008/11/17/660/
Regards,
Prasad
vtiger Team
Hi rbracken,
The documentation is complete, We will continue to expand it.
Though the API is going evolve through the development phase, that is until the release of 5.1. yet there shouldn’t any major changes to the API.