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CiviCRM Notes
- CiviCRM is growing and is improving with each release
- For organizations with less than 25,000 contacts, CiviCRM is an great fit. As the number of contacts in the database increases, you start running into problems. When you have more than 100,000 contacts, it makes sense to look into other systems. Example: issues with Oregon Democratic Party site
- Unless you are an experienced system administrator, it does not make sense to try to install CiviMail yourself. However, you can join the SMTP co-op (http://www.uas.coop/)
- CiviCRM now works well with Views 2. CiviCRM objects can be exposed in Views. This adds a ton of potential querying and reporting functionality
- CiviCRM works the best with no customization. As you add customization such as special templates for particular events, the cost of using CiviCRM increases dramatically
- CiviCRM is a very young product (2.5 years) compared with Drupal (8 years) and Salesforce (10 years)
- CiviCRM can make your database drag. If your site is running slowly, look into adding MySQL indexes
-- better to keep ccrm in its own database rather than sharing a db with drupal - CiviCRM has created a community advisory group, which is in encouraging sign
- The most discussed alternative to CiviCRM is Salesforce. There are a few people working on a Salesforce-Drupal bridge module.
-- sales force is designed for business, offered basically for free to qualified non profits
-- http://www.zenofnptech.org/2009/03/salesforce-and-civicrm.html
Challenges Many of Us Have Experienced
- The number of activity records generated by the system, although this has improved in recent versions
- Upgrading from 1.x to 2.x
- Scaling lots of custom fields, although this has improved in recent versions as well
- Reporting: building complex queries and creating custom reports via the 'Custom Search' feature requires knowledge of SQL & PHP.
- Making small templating changes
can be very difficultrequires knowledge of smarty templating system; CiviCRM does not use Drupal theme layer within its pages. - It can be confusing to report CiviCRM bugs. Many of us haven't had time to test each bug on the demo site. Also, the Jira bug reporting tool can be confusing to work with. We often find it easier to report a bug in the forums than via the bug tracking tool
- The Drupal and CiviCRM communities have very different philosophies. While Drupal is endlessly customizable, the opposite can be true for CiviCRM. This can be difficult to communicate to customers although there are a number of strategies we can take.