The power of really good software

I am doing some research into SugarCRM and I am absolutely amazed how simple it is to install, configure and use. SugarCRM is an open source CRM package and according to their website:

SugarCRM is rethinking how technology can help companies manage customer relationships. Sugar, the market leading commercial open source CRM application, delivers a feature-rich set of business processes that enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales performance, improve customer satisfaction and provide executive insight into business performance. Supported by deep collaboration and administration capabilities that adapt to how your company operates, Sugar is delighting customers of all sizes across a broad range of industries.

The need that we are looking for SugarCRM (or any other similar application) to fulfill is to track interactions with a set of people. This is obviously a very small subset of what SugarCRM can do. As a result, the goal of my initial evaluation was to see how easy it would be to get a simplified version of the application in front of key stakeholders and get some feedback on whether we thought it was worth proceeding. In less than 1 hour, I was able to download the entire application stack (Apache, MySQL and the SugarCRM application) and get the application up and running locally on my workstation. Of the hour I spent, these simple steps took about 10 minutes, of which approximately 5 minutes of that was spent waiting for the software to download. In the remaining 50 minutes I was able to login, get a pretty good feel for how the application functions and actually configure the screens and tabs users see and add and remove fields on screens. None of my time was spent reading documentation or user manuals. Instead I was immediately adding value: making changes, testing them out and then making some more changes. Configuration changes are simple drag and drop exercises and saving and deploying changes is as simple as pressing the "Save and Deploy" button. Understanding how to use the application was just as easy and within minutes I was adding data and navigating around the application with ease. All in all, the experience was an absolute pleasure and I believe that after that 1 hour of work I have a good enough sample that I can share with stakeholders to figure out how to proceed. What a great example of software done right!! And the best part....it's FREE!