[Hidden-tech] hosted service for Contacts Management

[Jonathan Dill]

Thanks to everyone for the interest and input, it has given me some 
things to mull over.  I posted a follow-up on the forums:

http://members.hidden-tech.net/mvnforum/viewthread?thread=43&lastpage=yes

Sugarcrm looks promising, but I am approaching this from two different 
directions.  Practically speaking, yes this should be something that I 
use and find useful, and that is how it will probably start out.  
However, I am also considering a bigger picture if there is a market out 
there and what type of business model would work to take advantage of it.

I think the concept in the most general terms is to provide a way for 
small businesses to get the benefits of Open Source without having to 
have a Linux guru on staff or pay consultants on an hourly basis to 
support it, and provide that as an alternative to expensive, proprietary 
solutions that never quite work the way that you want them to.  The 
things that I am seeing people do with ACT! seem to involve an awful lot 
of chewing gum and bailing wire and expensive consultants and it still 
doesn't work quite right.

I think there are quite a few companies out there already doing that in 
a sense, whether it is blog hosting, or web hosting, or search engines, 
you just don't know that Linux and apache and other Open Source products 
are there in the background doing the work.  CRM is one area where I 
haven't seen a lot of that type of development already, but maybe I just 
haven't been looking in the right places yet, and that is what I am 
trying to find out at this point.

Jonathan