[WebPub] Recommendations for CRM / email archiving & tracking systems

[Tony Smith-Grieco]

Hi WebPubbers,
Pleased to meet you all (virtually) -- this is my first post to the 
list, although I have been following it for a few months.

I was curious if any of you have knowledge / experience with CRM 
(customer relationship management) systems for small research groups / 
organizations.  In this case, our sponsors are our "customers".  I'm 
looking for something that can help us manage and track our 
communications with our large number of government and industry 
sponsors.  At a minimum it would need to have good email archiving and 
search capabilities, and make it easy to view the record of all our 
communications with a particular company or agency.  It should also be 
good at tracking documents and attachments (e.g. reports to sponsors).  
Some basic project management / scheduling features might also be helpful.

I think we'd want it to integrate with Kerberos authentication, so 
probably it would need to be hosted locally.

Most of all, it should be fairly simple to get running and to use.. I 
don't want the CRM system to become a huge project in itself!  I'm 
imagining a system where you could just forward an email thread to a 
special address and it would automagically show up in the system.  This 
should all be invisible to our sponsors -- we don't want them seeing 
automated messages from a request tracking system.  And if multiple 
people forward the same message to the system, it should be able to 
recognize it as a duplicate and not post it 5 times!

Any ideas / suggestions?
thanks,
--Tony

-- 
Tony Smith-Grieco
Assistant to the Co-Director for Project Management
Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave., Building E19-411
Cambridge, MA 02139