As a tech guy, I have to admit that I love gadgets and I love cool new things.  I think where we are in today’s society is quite incredible when you look at the devices and communication tools that we have compared to 10, 20 or even 30 years ago.  It is simple incredible.

I was at Chinook Centre here in Calgary (our largest mall) and it was my first time walking through the new section of the mall that just opened months ago.  As I was walking down the mall I looked to my right to see the fancy new Apple store.  It was about 3PM in the afternoon on a Monday and I could not believe it.

The place was jam packed.

Not just a little bit, but it was full of people.  There were more people in the Apple store than there were walking throughout the mall.  I simply couldn’t believe it and I was almost scared to walk in that would lead to me being captured into the cult of Apple.

Apple sure has an amazing thing going for it.  The technology is simply easy to use and easy to understand.  That is significant when delivering value to customers that are looking to have an edge over the competition.  I spend a lot of time with customers every day learning about their habits, likes and dislikes when it comes to technology.  A lot of our competition out there sure spends a lot of time preaching their way of thinking and trying to change people’s habits where they really should be understanding and educating customers to ways that suit their way of doing things.

A thing I always tell people when I’m consulting is that it is extremely important to not allow technology to dictate your business processes.  Your business processes should dictate how technology works.  What I love about Apple is that it is so simply that you can actually implement your business process into the technology by utilizing hundreds of thousands of Apps, building your own App or simply adopting one of the really easy tools found on the iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Apple certainly gets it and I understand why people are going to these products.  In the end, I took two steps into Apple and walked out.  But, I know the time is coming that I will likely walk in there and absorb what I’ve been missing out on.

So we had to start this whole review thing off with my favourite area of topic: open source.  Get this…an open source product such as vTiger (www.vtiger.com) actually has their own application before the other well known open source (or commercial source) player Sugar CRM.  Again, when I mean application I mean Application app (see my previous post from last week).  I will qualify my statement that Sugar does have a web app that works great too but we’re not on that for this topic.

Let’s get into vTiger.

Features:

• Calls
• Meetings
• Tasks
• Contacts
• RSS Feeds

This particular version of the vTiger iPhone App was built by Martin Henke (www.martin-henke.com) who is the programmer behind this App.  Much like many components of any open source project, Martin took it upon himself to build a vTiger App and charged a modest $0.99 cents for his app.

Review

I have to admit it was a bit confusing after installing the App the first time.  After downloading it directly onto my iPhone I went into the vTiger icon to see that I wasn’t prompted to start loading my data from vTiger in right away.  So after fumbling around I found that you need to go into your Settings > vTiger configuration area prior to using it fully.

Warning: In order to get vTiger iPhone to work with your installation you need to install some files into your PHP vTiger Installation.  Instructions are here.

The App itself, as with Highrise, is very limited in what you can do with it.  Your basically stuck with Contacts and Calendar management.  It’s definitely a nice addition but even at $0.99 cents I have a hard time justifying the purchase since all it’s really done is replace my existing Contact and Calendar on my iPhone.

I’m still looking for that elusive Deals/Opportunities component.  I really think that a tool that provides sales details will become the ultimate iPhone/iPad application without a doubt.

The contacts component is easy to use since it is exactly like the iPhone Contact tool.  The calendar functionality also features both events and to-do’s.  These are both as easy as can be and feature all of the options you’d expect from inside vTiger.

My final thoughts on vTiger for iPhone is that it is simply a very basic contact management tool.  It is easily duplicating effort with your contacts/calendar items but the beauty of it is that it utilizes the web services provided by vTiger CRM so if you want to keep your contact data in sync with your hosted version of vTiger then you’re good to go.

Tomorrow we will be looking at Tactile CRM.