[dameon51]

Hey everyone. I'm a programmer for a small dev company, that is growing rapidly. Our IT infrastructure is not so great.
What we need is a shared calendar, shared contacts, task list, preferably tied in with a CRM.

We have a mix of PC's and Macs. We'd prefer free\open source, but if we need to pay, we need to pay.

I really like MS products for this sort of thing, but because our budget and mix of PC's and Macs, MS products may not be the best solution. Maybe something in the cloud?

Thoughts, ideas?

[SurfingShark]

What are your servers like? MS Sharepoint is a great product and will handle all you need.

[DaneAU]

Perhaps have a look at Novel Groupwise

http://www.novell.co...ucts/groupwise/

There are also clients for mac, win, linux and mobile

[hookiethe1]

You might be better off contracting someone to take care of it for you, there are thousands of companies out there that specialize in doing just that. There will be some up front expense of course, but once you have your infrastructure in place maintenance won't cost much, and in the long run it's more economical to have IT people do the IT stuff than waste developer's time with it, every hour you spend screwing with servers and infrastructure software is an hour that you're not producing any saleable product.

[Curtis Rutland]

Quote

We'd prefer free\open source, but if we need to pay, we need to pay.

I really like MS products for this sort of thing

I prefer Microsoft products as well, but when you're talking about stuff like this, those two statements are mutually exclusive.

You might consider Google Apps. It could handle your email, calendar, documents, and I believe they have a CRM app on there now. Ok, I just went and checked, they do have several. I haven't used any, so I can't say which is good, but you should try it out.

It can also provide a chat solution. I didn't think this was important until my company installed MS Communicator. We are significantly more productive now.

If you have a small enough company, it's actually free.

[Craig328]

Maybe I'm a little simple (or a lot) but Google offers all those kinda things. They have a calendar which can be shared, there's a Google app for shared contacts and Gmail comes with a task feature which, I believe, can be shared.


Edit:

Curtis Rutland, on 27 May 2011 - 11:27 AM, said:

You might consider Google Apps. It could handle your email, calendar, documents, and I believe they have a CRM app on there now. Ok, I just went and checked, they do have several. I haven't used any, so I can't say which is good, but you should try it out.

...sometimes reading the whole thread before responding could make you look like less of a dumbass than I just demonstrated. Who knew?

This post has been edited by Craig328: 27 May 2011 - 09:33 AM

[modi123_1]

How about something line openCRX? A few years ago it was a contender solution, but the buy in folk were concerned about this rouge "open source" world.

http://www.opencrx.org/tour.htm

This post has been edited by modi123_1: 27 May 2011 - 09:45 AM

[Gorian]

Google apps is a good choice, though expensive if you have more than 10 people (used to be 50 )

I use Office Communicator and work, being able to IM is incredibly useful. Especially when you work with people in different parts of the world