x2engine: A Good Lead Management Tool

Readers would have kindly (or otherwise) taken note that my views of the CRM products are narrow, immature, and hurried at best. I want to create more disruption by yet another tool/product, and pray I will not meet anyone really angry on the way to office.

This time, I will reverse the order - just for the fun of it.

Summary

     + A good CRM product with lot of potential
     + Nicely done integrated interface, with lesser prompts to navigate throughout
     + Integrated collaboration features including message board, chat, forums
     + Easy drag & drop development, ala Sugar CRM and the likes
     + Open source [BSD license]
     + iPad ready :) - well, this from the marketing material. Can't test this unless some kind soul sponsors an iPad for me
     ++ Support for INR. Truly, I was left flabbergasted

     - Limited feature set - targeted at lead management. Can only guess that the core industry support will find its way if the product survives for a few years
     - UI needs some getting used to (notice the bottom-most links for History, Actions etc), and I was far from delighted to scroll up and down when I click something

     - Some of the features appeared buggy on my computer, nothing that dedicated support or my own tinkering couldn't solve (no harm in boasting about that anyway)

Since it is open source, and the development team kindly provides a demo version and a trial version to find out more, the following is of real interest only to lazy people.

Now for some details.

Technology, Installation and Works

x2engine uses PHP, works on a standard LAMP/WAMP stack. XAMPP is a good place to start if you are completely new, or if you don't want to invest lot of time in tweaking tens of configuration files.The installation itself is a breeze, a trusty old install.php takes care of everything, provided you already have a DB user and schema created. I was not too impressed with click-click installs until I came across another CRM product with a really complex list of instructions to setup (another story for another day). The product uses Yii PHP framework for what it's worth, and clearly I am not spending enough time to understand PHP frameworks a bit more.

Features

Clearly, the company does not intend to throw all features under the sun in this product - their words, not mine. The core functionality is around lead management, and it sticks to the core.  The features don't get in the way, and enable users to concentrate on their business. However, this may also imply extensive customization even if you are a mid-segment business with slightly complex processes. The little things in the application are surely the highlights:

• Having an integrated screen where you can subscribe to a contact, lead (Chatter!), or chat with your fellow reps (new Chatter!)
• Promote a contact and make her watchable at the click of a button
• Search encompassing all entities
• Ability to see others activities so that you are well prepared to blame them at any time

Usability 

x2engine is easy-to-use, does not require complex navigation through every link to gain access to data, and tries to do a lot of things in one screen. If you are left wondering - yes, all these are really good things for the users (those are the pesky people who use the application).

In-place edits is the most I missed, the UI is old school for most part though some of the actions like emailing, and display of allowed state transitions are intuitive.

Performance of the application has been indicated as a plus point in the marking materials, but I did not see any reason to get excited. On my machine (which is antique btw), the performance was comparable to Sugar CRM. Demo version was a real improvement, I have to find out where the configuration was not ideal (clearly, throwing more hardware at it is not the solution :).

Configuration

The product allows power users or developers to configure everything of interest through drag & drop functionality.

 

The drag and drop of fields is impressive, and you are not expected to stick to ONE layout. The customization options are fairly limited. Other than adding fields and UI elements, you could define state models, basic assignment rules and do some Google integration.

That's about it for now folks. I am sure you are enthused about this a bit - so check out more at http://www.x2engine.com/live-demo-server/, or download and do your own setup.