Opentaps 2

opentaps CRM2 has been completely re-designed is a CRM system that helps your team work more effectively using your current tools, without installing or learning new software. You can access it from the web, from Gmail, and even embed it into your existing order management or business application system. It lets everybody in your organization work together by sharing their emails, discussions, and activities while using their favorite tools to get their jobs done.

opentaps CRM2 is available for a limited time as a free trial, so sign up today at https://crm2.opentaps.com/signup

How Does it Look?

The web user interface of opentaps CRM2 has been completely redesigned:

Take a Tour of CRM2 and see how it could get everyone at your business to work together.

Product Vision

To be the simplest yet most useful tool for managing your business relationships.

... and this is how we plan on doing it:

1. We'll capture your interactions where and when they happen. You and your team's communications, including emails, texts (SMS), and tweets, come directly into the system. Online forms and social discussions? They also come right in.
2. We also want to know your team's internal discussions, as they work on projects together.
3. We'll bring it all into the cloud, and
4. Intelligently tag them to your business data, such as orders, invoices, quotes, projects -- whatever it is that your business works around.

Features

• Maintain address book of your Contacts
• Keep an unlimited number of addresses, phone numbers, emails, twitter accounts, and other forms of contact for your address book.
• Create notes around any discussion topic, including orders, contacts, invoices, payments, etc.
• Collaborate with your users using familiar @names notation
• Synchronize with multiple Gmail accounts of everybody in your organization
• Monitor tweets for all your contacts with twitter integration
• See who your contacts talk with and what they like to talk about
• Login using Google Apps (Gmail) or Twitter account
• See your contact's activities stream in Gmail, alongside their emails
• Contact and sign up forms for Wordpress blogs
• Create groups and track their activities, including emails, notes, and tweets
• Create tasks, assign them, and track their scheduled date/time and completion
• Dashboard of activities, discussions, and tasks in your organization

New features are being developed as you read this. Drop us a note if you have any suggestions! Just go to our forum or tweet us at @opentaps.

Conquering Email

Email is the water of your business: You can't live without it, but you could just as easily drown in it. The volume of emails at your business probably exceeds that of phone calls, texts, and social tweets and likes combined. Email is where it all happens -- customers ask for quotes, employees discuss problems, and accounting gets you paid. Many employees spend their whole day in front of a screen, reading and writing emails.

But what are they reading and writing? Are customer problems being resolved? Who is making the decisions? How should problems be solved?

If you're lucky, you're searching back and forth in your inbox to find the answers. If you're like the rest of us, you simply can't find it -- the answer is lost in all the different mailboxes of all the different people. Emails go unanswered when employees go on leave or quit. Customers get upset until they leave or quit.

Talking to Each Other

How do your people really work together? Probably by email, chat, or text.

Do you know how they're making business decisions every day? Probably not, unless you offer them a convenient way to connect and communicate about the problems at work. That's why you're scratching your head when you see an order, quote, or project and say "Who decided to do that?"

Giving Customers Real Service

Do your customers hate calling you as much as you hate calling your insurance company?

Let's see...

1. Do your customers get a different person each time they call?
2. Do your reps have no idea what the same customer called about the last time?
3. Do they have no access to emails she's sent in, or forms she's filled out online?
4. If she's already started working with one rep to solve a problem, will your other reps tell her they have no idea who that rep is, or what he's discussed with her, or be able to follow up on what the first rep started?
5. Is your customer told a different "company policy" each time she calls?

If the answer to any of the above is "yes," then your customers probably hate calling you. Just like you hate calling your insurance company.

Pricing

Right now, opentaps CRM2 is still free under an advertisement-supported beta release program.

We can't promise how much longer it will be, so why not [sign up for a free trial http://crm2.opentaps.com/signup] while it's still available?

How to Get It

First, sign up for an account. You'll need a Gmail (Google Apps) account to sign in to CRM2.

If you're just using it with your Gmail account, that's all you have to do.

If you want to use it with your existing opentaps 1.x system, follow the instructions on Set up CRM2.

Where to Get Help

Use our forum if you have any questions about using CRM2, or just want to give us your suggestions. Or just want to say something nice :)

User's Manual

Collaboration

When the user enters a note with one or more '@<userid>', this means that he is trying to communicate with that person. For example, this message

@sichen The customer just called about this invoice.

on the page of invoice 10001 means that this is a message for the user sichen.

An email would be sent to the contact corresponding to that user. If the user replies to the email, then the reply is added as an additional note to the same attributes (ie, order, invoice, payment, or party). The email could also embed a link to take the user to chat on the page of the order/invoice/payment/party. In the body of the email, `-----` is a separator. Content below the separator in the response will not be recorded in the note. If you want to have a signature block in your email, put the separator above your signature line.

There is also a line of the @names that will be sent copies of the email. You can add or remove the forwarding list here.

The person who writes the note or the reply will not be sent an email.

At the bottom is a line with the UUID of the attributes. This is used to identify reply emails with the attributes of the message (ie, order/invoice/payment/party).

Contacts

Contacts are people in the system. A Contact has first name, last name, and company name. It could have as many addresses, phone numbers, emails as you'd like, identified by purposes. The purposes are for your own benefit and have no special meaning for the system. Each contact is identified by a unique ID.

Users

A Contact could also have as many user logins as needed. We currently support authentication with both Google Apps (Gmail) and twitter logins. You can also import your old opentaps 1.x series with type "INTERNAL", but we currently don't support logging in with opentaps 1.x usernames and passwords.

The User is not associated with a domain but rather with a Contact. The security permissions of a User are mapped to a particular domain, so it is possible theoretically for your User to have access to several domains.

However, the user interface is currently implemented so that

1. A User is set up along with a Contact, and the screens for managing the User manages the Contact details as well.
2. The User is particular to your domain, set up by the domain's administrative user.

Contact Groups

You can also create a group of your contacts:

and then track all their activities, including emails, notes, and tweets:

opentaps CRM2 will analyze their activities together and show you what they're all talking about, and with whom:

Tasks

For any contact, contact group, or any order, invoice, or payment, you can create tasks as well as notes:

Once you've created your task, you can see it in the Tasks tab:

Tasks can have notes and tasks of their own, like this:

The dashboard in the web interface shows you all the activities and a summary of the different tasks:

Twitter Integration

With the new Twitter integration, you can monitor your contacts' tweets:

You can also see what they like talking about, and who they like talking with:

Gmail User Interface

The new Gmail user interface lets you see your contact's activities, includes other notes, discussions, and tweets, from Gmail, as you are emailing them:

For Developers

Sign up for a free trial and learn how to Administer CRM2

Learn how to Set up CRM2 with your legacy opentaps 1.x system and with wordpress.

For developers, please see the CRM-2 API documentation.

Embedded User Interface

CRM2 comes with a set of widgets which could be plugged right into your opentaps 1.x series, so that your users can use it on their pages for contacts, orders, invoices, and payments without going to a different application. This allows them to discuss issues, see history of notes and discussions, and even find relevant emails while they're processing orders/invoices/payments. These widgets can also be extended to other parts of the system and to other legacy ERP or CRM systems.

See Tour of CRM2 for how it works and Set up CRM2 for instructions on configuring it to work with your legacy opentaps 1.x system.