EspoCRM is an open source web application, which enables users to view, enter and analyze their organization’s relationships with customers and as well as with partners. It’s fast and highly configurable and presents users with a web-based CRM platform that simplifies and streamlines the analysis of their consumers’ actions and behavior. This allows them to make or improve their products and services to meet specific needs and demands.
Niles Partners, one of the leading IT solutions providers is configuring EspoCRM, a web based CRM which is embedded with Ubuntu along with ready-to-launch Machine image on Azure cloud that contains Apache, MySQL, Linux, PHP (LAMP).
What constitutes EspoCRM and makes it the right CRM Tool?
The software comes equipped with an intuitive and navigable interface, turning every integration into a seamless process and helping users discover more prospects as well as evaluate their companies, projects, and people. With EspoCRM on Azure cloud, companies and organizations can see unmistakably into their consumers and derive highly actionable insights. This provides them with precious data that help them enhance products and services, build and maintain fruitful relationships, boost their revenues and drive business growth.
EspoCRM software is an ideal CRM tool for players in the e-commerce, wholesale and retail trade, education, banking and finance, travel and tourism, customer service, manufacturing, healthcare, and real estate. With great functionalities like interactive graphs and diagrams, EspoCRM is really easy to use and understand. It is also a great tool for email integration as well as for opportunity, appointment and contact management.
Why choose EspoCRM software?
It will take a few minutes for your VM to be deployed. When the deployment is finished, move on to the next section.
Connect to virtual machine
Create an SSH connection with the VM.
bashCopy
ssh azureuser@10.111.12.123
Usage/Deployment Instructions
Step 1: Access EspoCRM in Azure Marketplace and click on get it now button.
Click on continue and then click on create,
Step 2: Now to create a virtual machine, enter or select appropriate values for zone, machine type, resource group and so on as per your choice.
click on Review+create , then on Create;
Once your Deployment is complete,
To access the application:
Step 1: Use the browser to access the application at http://<instance ip address> Replace instance ip address with the actual IP address of the running instance,
Your installation dialogue will appear.
Click on start installation.
Click on next.
Step 2: Now Enter the following Database details or you can create your own database:
Database Name: espocrm
Database Host: localhost
Database User: root
Database Password: Niles@123
Click on next,
Check system requirement,
Click on Install.
Step 3: Fill in the administrator settings as per your requirement,
Click on next,
Fill in system settings, and click on next
Setup STMP settings,
Fill in your details and click on login,
Your dashboard appears,
Enjoy your application
It doesn’t really matter what web framework to choose for developing a CRM system: ASP.NET, Spring, AngularJS, Express, Symfony, Django or Ruby on Rails. All of them have enough capabilities to make your solution work stable, process data quickly and provide scalability opportunity if necessary.
If you would like your CRM application to display geographical data and maps, we recommend you to go with Djangoframework. It hosts GeoDjango module that connects to PostGIS, which is PostgreSQL’s spatial objects module. Moreover, GDALfor spatial data and PIL for images are rich enough to cover all the needs of geo data displaying.
Since JavaScript is becoming more powerful, we highly recommend to consider using MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) stack for programming a CRM app. By using Angular’s Twitter bootstrap plugin, you can create good-looking UI. Node with its multiple modules can manage server part at every step from authentication up to encryption.
The most popular modules are Sales, Marketing, and Service, however, these can be modified or go under other names, for example: Client Management, Order Management, Invoice Management, Events and Tasks Management, System Dashboard, etc.
On-premise CRM is run on computers within the premises of an organization. In this case all the data and information is stored inside the premises of the company, too.
Cloud-based CRM software implies that the software and all relevant data, is accessible through the Internet and is displayed in a web browser. According to Gartner, by 2018, large organizations in mature markets will shorten the CRM replacement cycle by two years by moving to Software-as-a-Service model.
Nowadays, everything is going into a cloud, and we would recommend not to stand against this. Heroku and Amazon Web Services are proving to have really good system administration and hosting capabilities. Heroku is a bit pricey, but once you subscribe, you can forget about server maintenance at all. Amazon AWS, namely S3 service, will ensure that all your data can be accessible worldwide and with download lightning speed, no matter how many people are calling your CRM server at the same time.
Not every company needs to have both applications. However, the combination allows large companies to mix the vital data from each system and get a comprehensive business outlook.
Normally, analytics section in CRM is represented by reports and dashboards helping you to collect and visualise your customer data, engagement levels, sales reps productivity, won/lost opportunities ratio, to name a few. Integration with external analytical services such as Google Analytics, or Talend is also available.
To keep your data safe and sound just follow these basics:
Let the specialist conduct security health check before CRM deployment to find vulnerabilities and prevent possible hacker attacks.
Define access levels within your organization: set up the basic access to all the records for everyone in the system and impose restrictions on access to specific records, functionality, and workflows depending on the roles and human resource hierarchy.
Keep track of user logins based on IP, API, or browser.
Set up password defaults to make CRM users create a complex password and change it every 3-6 months.
Regularly audit the system against the security regulations.
Depending on the type of CRM, there are several options available: Custom modules (sections) and fields. You can create a new section in CRM or remove default unnecessary ones and pick the fields to feature the module. Custom fields. You can create fields of any type (textbox, email, checkbox…) Custom UI/UX design. You can add or reorder the sections and fields on each layout, set up the navigation, add quicklinks. Custom workflow. You can map your processes across the CRM ecosystem, set alerts, data compliance checks, verifications, etc.
Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com’s robust infrastructure.
When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.
Secondly, many hosting services don’t provide full control over the compute resources being provided. Using Amazon EC2, developers can choose not only to initiate or shut down instances at any time, they can completely customize the configuration of their instances to suit their needs – and change it at any time. Most hosting services cater more towards groups of users with similar system requirements, and so offer limited ability to change these.
Finally, with Amazon EC2 developers enjoy the benefit of paying only for their actual resource consumption – and at very low rates. Most hosting services require users to pay a fixed, up-front fee irrespective of their actual computing power used, and so users risk overbuying resources to compensate for the inability to quickly scale up resources within a short time frame.
No. You do not need an Elastic IP address for all your instances. By default, every instance comes with a private IP address and an internet routable public IP address. The private address is associated exclusively with the instance and is only returned to Amazon EC2 when the instance is stopped or terminated. The public address is associated exclusively with the instance until it is stopped, terminated or replaced with an Elastic IP address. These IP addresses should be adequate for many applications where you do not need a long lived internet routable end point. Compute clusters, web crawling, and backend services are all examples of applications that typically do not require Elastic IP addresses.
You have complete control over the visibility of your systems. The Amazon EC2 security systems allow you to place your running instances into arbitrary groups of your choice. Using the web services interface, you can then specify which groups may communicate with which other groups, and also which IP subnets on the Internet may talk to which groups. This allows you to control access to your instances in our highly dynamic environment. Of course, you should also secure your instance as you would any other server.