CRM options?

apena7

I have a friend who owns a small business and is using Business Contact Manager for Outlook to manage his accounts and contacts. He has five employees and will probably have four others by the end of the year. Currently, each employee has their own Business Contact Manager database, which only contains their accounts, and they are supposed to keep it current and backed up (HUGE RISK!). What the owner wants to do is have one central database, either hosted from his house or from an online service, where each employee can update the database and pull relevant data (not the entire database, only the accounts they manage) to their Outlook profiles and smartphones.

He asked me if I know of any good CRM solutions for small businesses. I've been researching in house solutions like Microsoft Dynamics and SugarCRM, and online services such as HyperOffice.com, SalesForce.com, and ZoHo CRM. Has anyone used any of these services or products? If so, which do you prefer?

I've been reading online reviews, but I thought I would ask here and get some firsthand accounts.

forkvoid

SugarCRM is good.

Grynder

SugarCRM
vTiger - needs some fine tuning (pdf customization of invoices etc is limited out of the box, only has IMAP support)

I have heard good things about Salesforce but have no personal experience.
Stay away from MicrosoftCRM, absolute disaster.

Daniel333

Used Saleslogix for years now, and I have liked it. But it's end point cost is a bit high. And the planning and design stage of deployment are a bit heavy.

Used Surgar CRM in a lab and thought it was worth the effort, you sure can't beat the price.

eMeS

We use SalesForce.com (Sales Cloud).

It does what we need...at the moment I can't think of even any requirements that I want that it doesn't cover...

They have certs too:

Get Cloud Certified. Become Indispensable. - salesforce.com

MS

apena7

Thanks for the suggestions!

I think I'll look deeper into SalesForce's Sales Cloud Contact Manager deal. At only $5 a month, per user, it won't break the small business bank and is scalable. I'll give their 7-day trial a whirl...

Honestly, I would like to get the experience configuring SugarCRM, but I can see diminishing returns since I would be the only one supporting a dedicated server, making sure the web host provider doesn't crap out, and providing training material for the other employees. I also don't want to put their business (or myself) in a situation where their data might become inaccessible (or lost) due to someone tripping over a LAN cable, the server getting struck by lightning, or the office becoming infested with gremlins -- there's no way I would be able to drop whatever I'm doing at my job and drive down to resolve the issue quickly.

Now comes the fun part of organizing multiple BCM databases for possible migration.