Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
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Zoho CRM Plus
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Zoho Corporation offers Zoho CRM Plus, a customer experience management platform that features a virtual AI assistant, process automation and business rules engine, and customer behavior analytics.
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
Starting with campaigns, once we send the campaign out, prospects who open it are moved into the sales funnel; the sales team then calls or emails the prospect. Our VOIP works in conjunction with Zoho CRM Plus, so phone calls are logged into the contact. And generates another call, letter, or appointment with the client on the Zoho calendar. Emails are sent through Gmail since Zoho CRM Plus does not work with Gmail. The client's email must be copied and pasted into Gmail. (responses are tracked in the Zoho CRM Plus). Once the sales team meets with the client and starts the process, it turns into an "opportunity" where all stages in the sale are tracked. We mail merge the contact info to the correct letter template, then download it into "Word," where the letter is proofed and corrected as necessary (Zoho merge does not allow you to work in "Word" 2019). When finalized, it is then uploaded back into Zoho CRM Plus under the Opportunity. The sale then continues through the process, and once signed off on, all the details of the job are logged into the Zoho CRM Plus. When the job is completed and closed out, Zoho CRM Plus automatically sends the client a thank you email. The client will then can biannual automatic emails reminding them to set up their bi-annual inspection.
Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
Zoho CRM Plus is very good at automating many functional areas of our company including: sales, marketing, operations, and engineering. It is functionally rich, and matches the functionality we used to have with Salesforce.com, but at a much more reasonable cost.
Zoho CRM Plus is easily "configured" to match our business processes. The ability to configure the user interface is very good, and the "BluePrint", custom functions, and reporting allow us to automate our unique operational needs.
The buying process for Zoho CRM is extremely friendly. You can switch between software types from basic CRM to Zoho CRM +. You also can pay monthly, or annually, and don't have to purchase months before your renewal dates and get pestered by sales people.
Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
Managing attachments. Limited space for each user and you can’t easily delete attachments in bulk so if you reach your limit it becomes expensive to buy more space or labor-intensive to find and delete attachments manually.
You can’t filter accounts by their related module fields. For example, in list view, filter all accounts with more than one contact.
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
I personally started off as a CRM novice. But in a matter of 2 months, I was writing my own custom workflows, playing with modules and fields, and training my sales and operations teams to manage leads and accounts. Simply put, the system is intuitive after a brief introduction. The level of customization is staggering until you change your mindset. Zoho CRM Plus excels where you're able to attack your goals as problems already solved in the platform — you just need to locate the feature to make what you want to happen... happen! I equate it to the Adobe Creative Suite. You don't pick the fun filter before you lay out what exactly you want to draw. With that mindset intact, you can dial in the system to meet your and your team's needs based on your proposed SOLUTIONS, not just leaning heavily into a single feature to "force" some ROI.
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
Every account representative I have worked with has been extremely helpful and nice. You can tell the account reps and support staff truly care about the product and want to provide you with the resources that you need. The response time is also fast for support inquiries and that has been a massive help for us.
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
I utilize HubSpot to gather data based on IP addresses from customers who visit our website. I do not use Zoho CRM for forms since the customization is clunky to design. HubSpot collects account data from the form and that helps me evaluate to sales potential of that account. Then I use Zapier to Zap the info into Zoho. Zoho CRM then is used to reach back out to the customer and begin tracking interactions
I would recommend that module wise update feature be opened up, for free to an additional 50-75% of paid users. These users can be restricted to work on a single module to update information only where they do not cross over multiple modules
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
I already discussed this prior with the Enterprise Support. But them aside, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Zoho is committed to connecting their userbase together. Within a month or two of using the product, we were told about Zoho User Groups. We had one right in my backyard (Chicago). I was able to both attend a meeting (pre-covid), and then stay in touch in an integrated Cliq channel. I always have power-users at my fingertips to ask quick questions. That Zoho makes it a point to keep these connections, and empower them... makes my life easier when inevitable "wants" pop up.
Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.
The ROI is significantly positive due to the comprehensive set of modules available.
Positive: My clients have better Dashboard data developed through Zoho Analytics than they do even though they use Salesforce. Also, Zoho CRM Plus can integrate with Salesforce or other system either through their own integrations or from Zapier.
Campaigns allows me to target specific prospects via HTML emails, and complete tracking. This is a complement to the more shotgun approach of social media,
