This CRM application looks like a winner

It appears that these CRM tools are large when all I am looking for is a direct mail (not email) marketing management tool.
Any ideas on that? I searched sourceforge and freshmeat and no one seems to have it.
Looking for somehting I can mold into the functionality.

What sort of functionality are you looking for? I think most people manage direct mail marketing with some sort of database, and doing mail merging into a word processing program. Used to be Access and Word. Now you can do it with MySQL and OpenOffice.

Cheers,
John

Also look into vTiger

http://vtiger.com/products/crm/features.html

The opensource thing I'm really looking for is a helpdesk tool, one that preferably has a faq piece as well. I've used rightnow web before, but that costs quite a bit of money, and only supports IE on windows.

These CRM tools have a helpdesk/ticket tab, but it's extremely minimal. If anyone has any suggestions, shout it out!

If you are looking for helpdesk that is a bit more flexible than the ones provided in some of the CRM's another GPL option is eGroupware. This is a PHP based system with modules for several functions including helpdesk and project tracking (the simple side of the spectrum and the complex side of the spectrum). It looks to be trying to grow into a CRM as well, but provides it definitely provides an interesting bag of functions at varying levels of development.

see http://www.egroupware.org

For a helpdesk application that incudes FAQ handling take a look at RT (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/).

For a CRM system, take a look at XRMS. Unfortunatly the SourceForge page doesn't do it justice, but it isn't too hard for a reasonably experienced Linux person to install. It is very powerful - has workflow, help desk, sales analysis, pipeline analysis, and a plugin architecture for expansion. Being heavily developed and with excellent mailing list support from the developers.

Keith

for open source helpdsk software, look at this killer:
http://otrs.org/

Well... the open source world has a new product each day. But, why use a free app? I think that solutions like microsoft crm, goldmine or siebel are expensive, but STABLE. :)

Martin
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Why use an expensive app, when there's a free app to meet your needs? Not only do you have to pay (over and over again with each upgrade) for the proprietary applications to use them, you have to pay more as your company grows and you add users, and yet again when you upgrade.

And worse, you're stuck with your purchase--you become locked into the vendor you choose, and cannot choose a competitor if your needs change and the product no longer fits. I have a client stuck with Goldmine right now, having to pay all sorts of extra money to add users to the system. It doesn't integrate well with standard IMAP servers. You can't easily export the data. I can't support her all that well with it.

With open source software like SugarCRM, you get more for less, and you can find other vendors to support you if you're not happy with your current vendor. And because all the data is in an open database, you can easily export it to move to another system if you decide it's not for you.

If you're a big company, stable is probably good, and you probably have deep enough pockets to pay for stability. Few small companies are so locked into their business processes to need that stable a system--and fewer still can afford to pay for it.

--John