Zurmo Open Source CRM / Zurmo Open Source CRM Blog: Recent posts

Zurmo 3.1.3 release is available!  Here is a summary of what you can expect in this release.

New features

Combined Tasks Kanban - We are happy to announce the first iteration of this much requested feature that allows you now to visualize all your tasks on a single unified Kanban board.

Click the All Tasks button from the My Tasks portlet on the homepage to get a full listing of tasks and now you will see the option to switch the view from the default grid view to a Kanban.... read more

We're excited to announce the release of Zurmo 3.1.1! This release brings some exciting new features, improvements to some existing features and some crucial bug fixes. See below for details!

New features

Markdown - Markdown is an easy-to-use syntax which helps you to style your writing in Zurmo, so that you can jazz up your comments with the use of italics and bold, lists, images and more.... read more

We are excited to announce the release of Zurmo 3.1.0!

New Features

• Campaign Retarget - Now you can build a new list comprising of all individuals that viewed or clicked your campaign and send them a follow up message.
• Feed Comments - Feed Comments are a great way to begin a dialogue about a particular record as well as allow Users to Mention other CRM.me Users who may need to be involved on that feed.
• Mention Feature - Mention another CRM.me user in a Comment, Task, Social post, Conversation or Mission and engage users to discuss on a particular item.... read more

The next new feature that we’ll throw under the spotlight is the simple, yet wonderful, Feed Comments portlet.

The Feed Comments portlet helps get everyone involved. It allows you to add comments to an Account, Lead, Contact or Opportunity and see this conveniently from your dashboard.

Feed comments are a great way to begin a dialogue about a particular record, and to drag in all the other team members you require by simply mentioning their @name.... read more

We here at Zurmo strongly recommend you check out the Game On: Gamified CRM Systems article in Winning Edge, a magazine published by the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management in the UK.

The article is written by gamification expert Pete Jenkins from Gamification +. Pete works with us as a CRM.me reseller in the UK and more details about Pete and his work on gamification can be found at petejenkins.com.... read more

Great new features and improvements are coming with CRM.me 3.1.0, scheduled for release at the end of December! Let’s take a look at the new and improved Comments feed…

The Social CRM has always been a great way for co-workers to share useful information without the clutter of emails. Now, with new release of CRM.me that has become even easier and more intuitive.

When adding a comment to a Conversation you can tag other members of your team. Simply type '@' and as you begin to type your colleague’s name CRM.me will throw up suggestions of the person you want to tag into the conversation, providing of course they have permission to view/edit the record in question.... read more

Great new features and improvements are coming with Zurmo 3.1.0, scheduled for release at the end of December! Let’s take a look at the new and improved Conversations…

The Social CRM has always been a great way for co-workers to share useful information without the clutter of emails. Now, with new release of CRM.me that has become even easier and more intuitive.

When adding a comment to a Conversation you can tag other members of your team. Simply type '@' and as you begin to type your colleague’s name CRM.me will throw up suggestions of the person you want to tag into the conversation, providing of course they have permission to view/edit the record in question.... read more

We are excited to announce the release of Zurmo 3.0.5!

New Features

• Favorites Available in Reports Module - You can now Star/Favorite reports. This functionality previously existed in Leads, Contacts and Accounts modules and is now available in the Reports module.
• Favorite Reports Portlet - You can show your favorited Reports on your dashboard by adding the Favorite Reports porlet. In order for a favorited report to appear it must be owned by the User as well as favorited.
• View Reports by Logged in User - New option for Owner filter in Reports. You can select a specific Owner or set to Logged in User which will show only items owned by the logged in user.... read more

Your feature requests and the reports of problems that you encounter with Zurmo help us to move forward together. We're pleased to announce that the latest release of Zurmo 3.0.4, addressing many such requests and issues, is now available.

Version 3.0.4 has a handful of nifty new features including:

• Add a related record to My Open Tasks portlet
• Create Opportunity during lead conversion
• Contact fields pre-populated with values from related Account... read more

Because you asked so nicely…

My open tasks new feature now contains two brand new and shiny columns which allow you to add information to link tasks to Accounts, Contacts, Projects and Opportunities.

These two little columns ‘Activity Items’ and ‘Project’ may seem small but they are both a Mary-Poppins-handbag sort of fount of useful information.

Under the Activity Items you can add in details of the account, contact and opportunity. But there’s more!!! Each of these handy little snippets of information is actually a link to the records themselves. So, for example if you were to click on the opportunity listed under ‘activity items’ in the open task portlet you would be taken directly to the record of the opportunity in question.... read more

All Zurmo users have the ability to create multiple dashboards to be switched between. This is a fantastic tool which allows users to switch their emphasis. For example, one organization or user may have a corporate dashboard, a dashboard for sales, billing and other departments. Multiple dashboards allow the organisation, or user, to change their hat and switch focus from one department to another. Super users - permitted by their super status - have the awe-inspiring power to push dashboards to other users, ensuring that team members or departments are all reading off the same page.... read more

Choose how you would like to be notified by Zurmo and never miss any crucial details with helpful notifications to let you know when important actions are taken. Take control over a variety of options to decide when and where you would like to be informed of what's happening in your CRM!

To customize what you receive from Zurmo head over to, and click on, your user profile in the top right hand corner of the page. Then, click on the Configuration tab and 'Notifications.'... read more

Here are a couple of the great new features in Zurmo 3.0 to help make sure that your campaigns are as effective as possible.

Pause/Unpause campaigns

This handy new feature allows you to pause your campaigns when you want to put a hold on blasting out emails. Whenever you’re ready to reinstate the campaign you can easily kick it back into action.

"How is it done??" we hear you cry…

Head to the Campaigns section of the Marketing module and you’ll see the status of all of your active and completed campaigns.... read more

Some of you who follow Zurmo closely will have seen that the Zurmo 3.0 code has been available to download for some time already.  This week we are officially announcing that release here on Zurmo.org.

The 3.0 release offers a ton of bug fixes across all areas of the Zurmo platform but if you are hungry for new features as well then we also have some improvements to water your mouth.

• New Pause/Unpause campaign feature
• Send test emails from an Email Template or Campaign screens
• Integration with SendGrid's Email Delivery service
• More granular user notification management
• Option to Send Campaigns using user defined SMTP details
• Inactivity warning for the user interface... read more

Without the right conditions a little acorn will never grow into a mighty oak tree. So how can we ensure that we're providing our little acorn with the everything that it needs?

Well at Zurmo we don't deal with acorns, but we do deal with people and there's a similar issue. How do we ensure that our leads are getting the TLC that they need to develop into opportunities? That's an easier question to answer. Make them super stars.... read more

Today we announce some very exciting news.  We have been acquired by Gravity4, the world’s first High-Frequency Marketing OS.

Over the last four years, Zurmo has become the leading gamified CRM platform. Through this acquisition, not only do we complete Gravity4’s Enterprise App Center, but we are able to leverage the power of deliver.me and reach.me to enhance Zurmo’s current email and social capabilities, respectively. We are excited about the future and bringing Zurmo to the next level.... read more

I love using Zurmo, but as my girlfriend regularly reminds me, no matter how much you love something (or someone) there are always small adjustments that could make it better!

Speaking with members of the community and based on my own experiences using the CRM I added some small feature requests to the project today which I am sure some of you may be pleased to see.... read more

Many companies are looking to add gamification to their repertoire of business strategies. The younger workforce is entering and have a much different mentality than their father's workplace generation. Gamification is an element our fathers would not understand or be motivated by. What if you want to add gamification to the customer experience. There are so many ways to do it. What is the best way? This infographic from Technology Advice helps you navigate the gamification software space:... read more

Thursday, December 4, 2014, 12:30 PM

Meet members of the Zurmo Founding Team at the Zurmo 2014 Europe Party in Basel, Switzerland. The event will be a casual meet and greet for software developers, translators, potential partners, early Zurmo adopters, and others passionate about Open Source CRM. All are welcome, but please RSVP for this event and stay tuned in case the venue changes.
... read more

A CRM is only as good as the quality of the data in it. If your data is outdated or there are duplicates in the system, it’s hard to get your team to use it. But having the most updated information in your CRM, as well as in-depth details on each contact can help you prioritize your prospects and close more deals.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. That’s exactly what the integration of Zurmo and TowerData does.... read more

Advanced search is an important function that can be done via API. To review, there are three types of searches supported (you can see them also in the API specification. Example - Accounts: http://zurmo.org/wiki/rest-api-specification-accounts). We will explain more about the three search methods that our API supports:

1. Basic search – This allows you to search a model (such as Accounts) by its basic field. For example, with Accounts we can search by Owner, Name, Type and a few other variables, but this is very basic since we can only search by fields that belong to Accounts that are an exact match. The search must match all fields (using AND operator)... read more

The release offers solid enhancements that help administrators, round out image management, and increase performance. Here is what you will find in 2.8:

• Allow for super users to login as any other user
• New Image element including better image upload and gallery
• Performance improvements for campaign processing... read more

In the upcoming 2.8 release, we made significant performance improvements for campaign processing. We worked on 2 areas:

1. Campaign Item Generation
2. Campaign Message Queuing

In both cases we refactored a great deal of PHP logic to SQL Stored Procedures and functions to increase performance. For Campaign Item Generation,  it previously took 75 seconds to process 500 items. With the new improvements, it now only takes 0.0063 seconds. We went from 6 items per second to now 80,000 items per second. That is a major turbo boost.... read more

Zurmo 2.8 will include a number of enhancements. Special attention has been given to how image elements are uploaded and how they are viewed via an image gallery. These improvements will increase the ease of inserting images when building a template. There are two ways of uploading files to Zurmo.

1. Upload from your computer

When importing from your computer, you can upload multiple files, making it easier to upload a number of images at once. They become instantly available for use in the template. Just click on the "insert image" and you are done.
... read more

If your CRM is functioning properly, your users are creating notes, calls, meetings, and tasks. But that is not all. A well implemented CRM also allows your users to track emails. Within Zurmo, there are a variety of ways to track emails such as sending directly from the CRM (either a 1-off email or a mass email campaign) or archiving emails through Outlook or Gmail (for our Pro customers).

In either case, you will want to report on this important metric. Reports can be done such as how many emails are sent per user per week or how many emails are sent to each Customer per month. Zurmo now has the ability to report on emails.... read more