In most of the small and medium businesses, E-mail and CRM applications are stacked incrementally in an IT infrastructure over a period of time. Initially e-mail service plays a vital role in communicating with customers. Once the business expands to a stage where it is very difficult to manage customers with the existing e-mail service, companies look for more sophisticated customer relationship management solutions. By that time, usage of e-mail service would have become popular and users as well as IT managers would feel reluctant to give up the existing e-mail service for different reasons. At the same time, they would like to use the CRM systems to increase the productivity.
In a broad perspective, Customer Relationship Management solutions (installed as well as hosted) and e-mail services complement to each other. Most of the surveys reveal that the Microsoft® Outlook® e-mail service is the one of the top most available e-mail clients in the market.
Many CRM vendors claim that they are providing Microsoft® Outlook® integration with their CRM solution but customers have to bear the additional charges. Most of the open source CRM projects are not exceptional to this trend. They provide CRM software as free and open source but when it comes to Microsoft® Outlook® integration, it is closed source. Realizing this fact, vtiger CRM team released vtiger Outlook Plug-in for Microsoft® Outlook® users as an Open Source Project in SourceForge.net.
The vtiger Outlook Pug-in for Microsoft® Outlook® is a fully functional, enterprise grade business productivity enhancement utility and it is evolving rapidly based on open source community feedback.