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For those small businesses which need a complete, fully maintained and supported CRM solution, open source CRM solutions may not be the way to go at least for the moment. However solutions such as Open Office are increasing in market share as they prove them selves to be a reliable alternative.

People are attracted to all kinds of open source products because by and large they are free. However, small business must consider any hidden costs before taking this CRM option. If you already have the infrastructure and expertise to implement, support and maintain an open office CRM solution this can make a great deal of sense especially if you then wish to customize it. Proprietary CRM software can be difficult and expensive to customize and using the vendor’s in-house support team could be very expensive.

On the other hand your choice of open source solutions at the point of writing this is still limited and you would need a skilled IT team to manage the implementation and ongoing support as support is not readily available and whatever support there is can be expensive.