Vtiger CRM 5.0 : one big step up from 4.x ! Pretty nice & worth integrating ?

I have kept my eyes on opensource CRM web applications for 2 years now. SugarCRM is the most famous of them all, but the Vtiger fork has done a pretty good job of contesting its leadership the past year.

Version 5.0, which has been released on september 14th, seems to bring a lot of good stuff to the table : AJAX UI, Tag clouds and connection with other Web services (google maps for example), but also customization utilities including "multiple custom objects, pick-list editor, multi-select value drop down lists, drag & drop Home page layout, global-level Page view customization, date & time formats, currency conversions etc.,".

On the downside, I would have liked a better modularity and lighter UI (dumb down the UI for those who don’t need all features, maybe even an installer allowing to choose which features to install). Also, many external dependencies, Adodb, PEAR and Smarty for templating

Still, one of the best opensource CRM around, though I’d like to know of any "lighter" application more 37signal-ish...

Anyway, the demo looks pretty nice.

For those who don’t know Vtiger, it has some pretty nice extension :

• Outlook Plugin
• Office Plugin (one of the reason for some to switch : SugarCRM has a commercial extension for this)
• Thunderbird Extension
• Customer Portal
• Web Forms
• Firefox Toolbar

I once did a mobilization of Vtiger and it went pretty smooth.. It was mainly because there was great logging feature in Vtiger. Each of the SQL queries it performes can be found on the logs.. so if you need to do a feature to add an account to Vtiger, just needed to do it in Vtiger first and then check the SQL query from the logs and do the same query in your application.. pretty fast todo and that way it doesn’t mess up the DB structure.. but I don’t know if there are better ways to do it in Vtiger now, eg. web services support. That would be optimal. I see that there is couple other plugins available so maybe there has been improvement on that..

vTiger blows SugarCRM away in my optionion. While it could be lighter, it is head and shoulders above SugarCRM as far as ease of use. The new 5.0 is having issues across the board with installations and MySQL but hopefully they will fix the problems soon.

I am not sure what type of integration could be done though or what type would be needed.

What I meant by integration is not at the application level but "just" synchronizing user’s table to allow single authentification (like for the SMF Module)

It just means make it easier to have a continuum between a MODx powered website and a Vtiger powered CRM, from the client perspective.

Any news on this.... I would be very interested in this as well...
I am looking for a method of integrating my dealer (wholesale) management (vtiger) with my site (modX) and a new retail shopping cart (to be determined)
All I have found so far that can deal with this is Joomla based solutions (crm,Webshop,Cms, and even POS)
For the integration between the CRM and Cms, it would be great to be able to define pages that CRM clients can have editing access to...
Eg. I would like to have me resellers listed on my modx site, and have a subpage about them that they can maintain.

Maybe I am dreaming.. has anyone else been thinking this way? have any solution?