Hi Guys,
First of all I will start by admitting up until about 5 hours ago I had no idea what OpenGoo was / is. I went in search of something like Google Docs that I could install on my own server and host it myself, I have no issue with Google Docs and really like what Google has done with this however for privacy reasons of some of our data and members I wanted this hosted on my own box.
In short we are a website who caters for a niche sport in Australia, we have grown over the years but we still all have day jobs and the website is yet to turn a profit so what we choose we are in favour of not so much "open source" but rather "free." I'm neither a zealot for open source or propietary. As there is only 5 of us and I manage a few commercial level (190+ users) of SugarCRM I really didn't want to use that for us as it has features that will take you longer to learn than it will to read the bible cover to cover.
So here we are a few hours later on OpenGoo.
So far i'm very happy, a few "quirks" to work through (Such as only being able to assign tasks to a Company or Individual, not a "Group") however I have found ways to work with these things. Overall it is a fantastic effort what you have done in building this.
Couple of suggestions (I don't know if you want these as whitepapers, posted in your bugtracker as a "Feature Request") which aren't anything "Formal" just a couple of "Ideas" to float between yourselves for the future...
Spreadsheets
This was the original reason as well we choose OpenGoo, however found they had been disabled. I re-enabled them, none of us use IE however still it didn't play nice in Firefox 3.5 OSX. A bit of a shame, I think this is something that will be incredibly useful and the only thing that still has us using google docs.
Contacts
When you view contacts in a workspace it would be good to be able to customise which columns display in which workspace. Some workspaces certain contact info is more useful in a column than other information. You can make your contacts displayed this way more relevant to the workspace.
Custom Fields Display Column
When creating a contact there is custom fields, it would be a nifty feature to be able to display this field in a column in contacts view. Often in CRMs we like to sort sometimes by custom columns that we can quickly take a browse over.
Add task / milestone to Group
The ability to assign more than one individual to a task is important. For example we have a "Web Development" group that can share development tasks. And we have a "Event" group that manages and organises Events. Both work for the same "Company" so there's no way to assign a Task to be shared by 5 people that belong to a Group. It's either assign to the whole company or throw the responsibility all on to one individual in OpenGoo. The "Groups" diversity should be leveraged more in this software, at the moment it sits there but practically useless and under-used.
For now we have gotten around this by creating what should be a "Group" in to a "Company." This will screw up our reporting in the long run but works for the short period.
Email Workspaces
The ability to assign an email address to a workspace, so anyone that has priveledges to that workspace can read the emails to that address. For example you may have an "Advertising" department, and the email is "Advertising@yourwebsite.com." The ability to assign that email address to the "Advertising" workspace, then any individuals with access to that workspace can send and receive from that one address. This allows more than one person to handle emails to a department, without the need of the initial recipient classifying the email or assigning it to a workspace as you do now.
Well that's my initial feedback based on a few hours of setting up and entering the data. Hopefully you don't take offense to this feedback (some developers are quite touchy), read it, think about it, throw it out the window if you wish
It's simply feedback from my point of view using the software, who knows perhaps the rest of the community thinks the complete opposite to the way I do
I am off to sleep, all the best and i'll check the forum periodically. Hopefully down the track once we are familiar with the system we can contribute something back.
