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We Will Create Your Very Own Domain Name - http://PowerNamer.com

One of Marratech’s main strengths is the whiteboard. It’s clean, easy to use, and works fine, even when one of the participants is coming in over a telephone modem from Abu Dhabi that won’t even support voice, let alone video! When you use Marratech on the type of network it’s designed for (i.e. at least ADSL), it’s a world-beating product.

I’m really pleased about this news - now there’s an even better chance that Marratech will continue to develop and grow, even it changes its name.

I’m scratching my head. this is really a low-tec comapny, I’ev looked at them before…

maybe they ahve some kind of IP?

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If you think salesforce is “fantastic”, then you can’t be using it on a daily basis and probably don’t have very much experience using a CRM. I HAVE used SF extensively and in fact, I was the SF administrator plus the heaviest user in the last company.
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I am a SF administrator and one of the heaviest users in the company. You can laugh all you like, but you’re the one who’s spend your precious time over the weekend copy pasting from your company’s marketing literature onto blog forums

I also seem to remember that when we chose SF 3 years ago, Sugar wasn’t ready, we weren’t missing anything. Still you go ahead getting pissed with the minutiae - everything you brought up doesn’t bother us enough.

Thanks for your entertaining and informative reply, now go have a beer.

http://di.se/Index/Nyheter/200.....?src=xlink

A bargain I think

If you think salesforce is “fantastic”, then you can’t be using it on a daily basis and probably don’t have very much experience using a CRM. I HAVE used SF extensively and in fact, I was the SF administrator plus the heaviest user in the last company I was at. I also used it a few years ago and all of the problems I reported at that time still weren’t fixed when I came back to it last time. I’ve also tested Sugar, so I have a basis of comparison. Have you? I don’t think so. So the real question is: Are you a shill for SF?

Superficially, SF looks nice. And compared to outdated junk CRM’s like Goldmine and ACT, it is much better. However, the UI is awful, inconsistent and not user friendly. Parts of SF seem to have been written by different groups and don’t sort the same, behave the same or have the same config abilities.

Here’s a list of “some” problems. If you are a heavy user, then you’ll recognize these. If not, then again, you really can’t be using SF very heavily. If you’re like most, then your system is probably not configured effectively and you likely don’t work very efficiently.

- SF does most everything in a single browser window, so you lose your place often. The way to make SF behave better is to use 2 open browser windows and drag links between them. For instance, keep your activities list in one window and drag an account name to the other window. That way you don’t have to keep on going back and forth to rebuild the activity window. This speeds up your work. They should use more pop-up windows and and add AJAX support.

- But If you have multiple SF windows open, SF doesn’t understand this and times EACH AND EVERY open SF window as a separate process, rather than recognizing that each window is part of the same parent process. So if you are active in one SF window and the
other SF windows are in the background, you will issue timeout popups for those background windows. Annoying.

- So you like dashboards? Me too. BUT you can’t export a dashboard. All you can do is take a screenshot.

- Have you noticed that dashboards don’t refresh automatically? Have you ever shown someone a dashboard, discussing the details and then realized you were looking at old data because you forgot to click the “refresh now” button. This is the SF explanation:

“The Dashboard queue is designed to smooth the load on our servers. If a dashboard is refreshed, up to 20 reports have to be refreshed to build the dashboard. To process 20 reports from one user in the same millisecond would be too much load on the system, so we use a queue to smooth out the number of items that can be processed at the same time. Today, that limit on the number of items is 10. The busiest times are mid-morning and mid-afternoon EST.

The Dashboard queue is shared across all users, just as the rest of the system is shared across all users. Dashboard jobs are added today in the order they arrive. At busy times, your requests may be queued behind others.”

- Have you tried to modify the Contact display section under Accounts? Did you notice that the NAME field HAS to go first and this can’t be changed? Did you discover that there is a maximum of 10 fields that you can include in this display? Have you noticed that these fields all have minimum lengths and you can’t shrink them to the size YOU want?

- Have you discovered that SF doesn’t support “time zones” for contacts (useful in sales when you have a large territory crossing time zones)? I built an artificial construct for this. Boggles my mind that no one in SF development thought of this functionality in the 6-7 years they have been in business.

- How about graphs in reports? You can export a report to Excel BUT any graphs shown with the report are not exported,/recreated in Excel. So you have to go do this manually.

- Ever run a report and run into the artificial 2000 record limit? SF truncates the on-screen report after that. If you want the all the data, you have to export to Excel to get it. SF WILL NOT display additional data itself. Why not give the user control over this number? Because SF is afraid of swamping their servers!

- SF allows a user to save a report with the exact same name as an existing report. This practice makes it impossible to identify which report came first or might be a new version of an old report. SF does not ask the user if they want to replace the existing report.

- SF only supports 2 column pages.

- If you click the back button in SF, you are always returned to the top of the page, not where you were on the page previously.

- In field customization, when any one entry value in a picklist field is modified, SF marks ALL picklist values as having been modified. This is a serious problem as you lose all accountability as to when a value was modified and by whom.

- In field customization again, I wanted to get a list of all active SF users in a drop down. Not possible.

- - On Home Page (inside Activities to do) - The person’s name displays as “last, first”. Similar problem on ACCOUNT Page that contains more than 6 contacts. When you view the contacts as part of the whole account page, names appear as “First, Last”. But if you click the “View More” link, the name display changes to “Last, First”!

- SF doesn’t show a modification trail on an account level (something like they do in Opportunities). So there is no way to effectively track changes to account ownership nor WHAT was changed on an account level at any time in the past. This is a serious security hole.

- SF only supports flat text in activity comments, not rich text. This is very restrictive and doesn’t allow you to highlight information.

- There isn’t any built-in spell checker for use in logging activities. So you’ll often run into difficult to read activity histories because people don’t know how to spell.

- Go to a note in Notes & Attachments. When you EDIT the note, you’ll see spacing tabs. When you VIEW the note, you won’t.

In administration reports looking at a users logon report, you can see the logon times but you can’t see or get the logoff times.

- When using VIEW ALL button to look at history, I often needed to clean something up in one of the displayed entries (eliminate blank lines due to faulty SF conversion of HTML to text email, fix spelling, etc.). But there is no link back to a specific entry in SF. You have to try and guess where in the View All chain you are, close the view, then go search for what I think is the right entry in the history to change.

- Ever transfer an account to someone else? Did you notice that the owner filed in the contact records is not updated with the new owner? If you move accounts around frequently or have a lot of turn-over, you’ll have contacts owned by people who are no longer at the company.

- Security levels and access in SF is one big mish-mash. It’s virtually impossible to build an understandable security schema in SF.

- Working with support is a trial. If you send an email, they almost always truncate what you wrote and just add their reply. This causes loss of thread continuity. If you open a case, they sometimes reply to the case (but you don’t get an auto notice that they have replied) or they will reply via email and not update the case.

- Turn-around time for basic support is 2 business days (and sometimes they actually reply in that time frame). This is too long a time in any case. You’re already paying them for the product on a per user/year basis. And most of the time, their replies are useless anyway (”if you’d like to add this ‘deficiency” to our wish list, go here” crap). Want “Premium Support”? That starts at $8,000/year additional.

- Last I checked, SF had 3 levels of service. The “limited “free” version for up to 5 users, the PRO version for $750/user/year and the Enterprise version for $1500/user/year. The PRO version doesn’t include certain functionality, like marketing. You have to buy the Enterprise version for that. With SugarCRM, you pay about ~$450/user/year for the whole kit and caboodle, about 1/3 the cost of SF. It’s a no-brainer. So by definition, those who have chosen SF, like yourself, must clearly be lacking a brain. Or maybe your company just has money to throw away?

It’s curious to see all these companies doing the same application, using the same technology. It will be interesting to see if it can be done without the plugins that all these companies are using. “WebEx for the Web” would be quite a thing to see.

Salesforce is fantastic, we have one of the biggest Salesforce integrations at our company and use everything from Reports and Dashboards to run our business and heavy web service integration plumbed in to all aspects of the company’s IT.

Either come out as an astroturfing SugarCRM marketing bod or explain why you think you have more of a clue about CRM?

This acquisition seems more likely to be a part of “Enterprise”. We’ll see if there’s some add supported free version…

Try our product. It is free for web meetings.

I know you don’t like to forward mails. I am really sorry to bother you. If you have a heart and like to help a family, please forward this mail. Every time you forward this it will add 5 cents per email ID to AOL and they will deposit it into my bank account. Which will help me save my husband

If this thing does what its supposed to do it could be quite useful.

Google Acquires Marratech; Gets Into WebEx Territory posted at IndianPad.com…

As to Google buying Salesforce.com, puh-leeze. Salesforce also sucks big time. The only people who thing salesforce is any good are clueless executives and bystanders who don’t really use a CRM on a daily basis. And what passes for support on salesforce.com is near the bottom of the barrel. A much better choice for a browser based CRM is sugarcrm.com, which is free open source or 1/3 the cost of salesforce for a hosted model.

http://www.suggestusability.com