Thanks to the community votes in our community contest, Zurmo was selected to be packaged as part of the BitNami Library. You can now download free, ready to run native installers for Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Windows Azure & Amazon EC2 cloud images.
Ray Stoeckicht, Co-Founder of Zurmo, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.
1. What is the goal of the Zurmo application?
To build the best open source CRM application in the world by focusing on engineering, quality of the technical infrastructure, and creating innovative feature arcs that will motivate users to use the system.
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| Zurmo dashboard |
In this link you can find a list with the base features.
Some unique differentiators include:
- Gamification (increases user adoption)
- Social Conversations (keeps users engaged in the system)
- Full Testing Infrastructure (more stable and easier to handle upgrades, maintenance, and support)
- Fresh User Interface (increases user adoption)
- Built on a PHP Framework and other Development Platforms (most current technology)
3. Which projects or organizations are using it currently? What kind of projects do they use it for?
Zurmo can be used by anyone from a 1-person freelancer to a 100 user sales organization. As we build the feature set (http://zurmo.org/roadmap), it will become more and more geared towards larger, complex use cases, with many moving parts. The more integrations, high volumes of data, and customizations, the better Zurmo is positioned to handle the use case. We aspire to be the first open source CRM that can scale to the enterprise. Currently, we have a customer that uses Zurmo as the core system for centralizing millions of data points and running the company's entire operations. We also have a rugby team in the UK that uses Zurmo for activity management and sales force automation.
4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Zurmo?
The main benefit of having Bitnami packages available is that it makes it easy to try out Zurmo and get it up and running without having to worry about the system setup. The ease of installation is something that will benefit any user that wants to get started, and it will also allow existing users to pull down the latest version in order to test new features. We are extremely excited to be a part of the extensive BitNami library.
We are glad Zurmo is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!