openCRX
The Professional Enterprise Class Open Source CRM Solution
The answer is yes. openCRX has always been published with an OSI certified BSD-style license. We have nothing to hide and none of our code is proprietary.
By the way, you should not understimate the importance of your question. Numerous CRM applications claim to be Open Source when in fact they are not. Read Will The Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up? on the OSI Blog for additional information.
^It is the hope of the openCRX team that lots of bright people are going to join the effort to make openCRX the tool of choice for limitless relationship management. If you can contribute or want to co-operate or have a look at the information on our community page . Any kind of support is appreciated.
If you want to make a donation to support the development of openCRX, you can do so through PayPal:
^It is our goal to establish openCRX as the reference service for customer relationship management (CRM). Starting with openCRX v2.0 we've also begun to move into the realm of Groupware and we intend to position openCRX as an Open Source Groupware server.
^The core team consists of three people which is mainly responsible for managing the project (setting up the roadmap, coordinate contributors, quality assurance, publish software releases, and much more). In addition to the core team there are many contributors who provide ideas, code and documentation. Many of our contributors work at openCRX partners or are employed by companies relying on openCRX or they are involved in openCRX projects. Furthermore, there are many translators (see list of available locales here) and community members providing important input to keep openCRX moving. Several companies (from very small to very large) provide important resources (ideas, people, funding).
^There is a lot of material available at OMG's MDA site. If you just want to get a quick overview, try An introduction to Model Driven Architecture by Allan Brown and Jim Conallen or see what Wikipedia has to say.
In addition, you might want to have a look at some of the documents published by the openCRX/openMDX team.
^openCRX distributions are availble from Sourceforge. The openCRX SDK including source code is available from the GIT repository.
^The openCRX API (also known as Javadoc) is available here.
^If you just want to browse the UML Models, you can do so here.
^Please also note that your preferred client might still work with openCRX, even if it is not listed below:
Configuration hints are available in the openCRX Admin Guide. The Wizard "Connection Helper" provides all the necessary information to connect.
Additional information about CardDAV is available from Wikipedia.
^Please note that your preferred client might still work with openCRX, even if it is not listed below.
Configuration hints are available in the openCRX Admin Guide. The Wizard "Connection Helper" provides all the necessary information to connect.
If you're using Microsoft Outlook you best forget about CalDAV even though Microsfot joined CalConnect on 15 August 2007 and MS Outlook 2010 apparently can connect to CalDAV Providers in read-only mode. MS Outlook is a client for MS Exchange and it's basically useless if you want to connect to anything else but an MS Exchange server as MS Outlook simply does not support any of the many standard protocols (like CardDAV or CalDAV, for example). If you're into tinkering with VBA code, you might try our Outlook ICS Adapter, but it's really just a start...
Additional information about CalDAV is available from https://www.caldav.org/ or read what Wikipedia is saying about CalDAV.
^Please note that your preferred client might still work with openCRX, even if it is not listed below.
Configuration hints are available in the openCRX Admin Guide. The Wizard "Connection Helper" provides all the necessary information to connect.
Additional information about FreeBusy is available from Wikipedia.
^Please note that your preferred client might still work with openCRX, even if it is not listed below.
Configuration hints are available in the openCRX Admin Guide. The Wizard "Connection Helper" provides all the necessary information to connect.
Additional information about iCalendar is available from Wikipedia.
^We have tested Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, and Evolution. We would assume, however, that virtually any IMAP client will work just fine as long as the client really talks IMAP. Give it a try.
Configuration hints are available in the openCRX Admin Guide.
Additional information about IMAP is available from Wikipedia.
^We have tested the following clients, but there are certainly many more that will work:
The Wizard "Connection Helper" provides all the necessary information to connect.
Additional information about WebDAV is available from Wikipedia.
^This is mostly an issue on Linux-based systems. Open a shell and type
ulimit -a
to verify your open file limit. If it is set to 1024 you might want to increase it to 2048 (or even 4096). On CentOS, for example, you can set this limit in the /etc/security/limits.conf file. See here or here for information on other Linux distributions, Solaris, and OS X.
^It is always a good idea to read the README because it typically contains important information.
^The "can"-part of the question is easy to answer: openCRX v2.9.2 has been tested with
 |
HSQLDB (v2.0 or newer) [not recommended for production use] |
|
MySQL (v5.0 or newer) [not recommended for production use, unless you are very good at tuning] |
|
PostgreSQL (v8.3 or newer, best performance with v9.3 or newer) |
|
MS SQL (MS SQL 2000, MS SQL 2005, MS SQL 2008) |
|
Oracle (v9 or newer) |
|
DB2 (v9.5 or newer) |
 |
MaxDB (formerly SAP DB) [not supported anymore] |
|
Firebird [not supported] |
The "should"-part of the question is more difficult to answer without knowing more about your requirements and constraints. While the table below may be somewhat helpful in your decision making process, the answer to your question boils down to getting clarity on the following 3 issues:
If you have no constraints we would recommend PostgreSQL v9 (or newer), v9.3 for best performance.
A note on free DBs: due to the pressure from Open Source DBs various vendors of commercial DBs started offering free versions of their commercial products. Before you jump to any conclusions, however, it is worthwhile reading the small print of those offers. It pays off to understand the limitations/conditions/licenses in order to avoid an unwanted lock-in (example: any free offer with a limit on the size of the database is going to hurt you sooner or later as using/working with openCRX is equivalent to adding data - 4GB may sound like a lot today but once you've added 100'000 accounts and 200'000 sales orders you will probably be past that limit...).
| DB Overview | HSQLDB* | MySQL* | PostgreSQL | MS SQL 2000 | MS SQL 2005/2008 | Oracle | IBM DB2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| free / commercial | free | free | free | commercial | commercial | commercial | commercial |
| Express / free (with limitations) |
--- | Express Edition | Express Edition | DB2 Express-C | |||
| #concurrent users the DB can handle reasonably well |
up to 20 | up to 20 | virtually unlimited (with clustering) |
up to 20 | up to 80 | virtually unlimited (with clustering) |
virtually unlimited (with clustering) |
| #accounts (data size) the DB can handle reasonably well |
up to 10000 | up to 500 accounts |
virtually unlimited | up to 100,000 accounts |
up to 500,000 accounts |
virtually unlimited | virtually unlimited |
| supported platforms | - Linux - Unix - MacOS - Windows |
- Linux - Unix - MacOS - Windows |
- Linux - Unix - MacOS - Windows |
- Windows | - Windows | - Linux - Unix - MacOS - Windows |
- Linux - Unix - MacOS - Windows |
| hints, known limitations, etc. |
- no cursor | - no cursor | - use version 8.3.5 or newer - version 9 adds another boost - best performance with v9.3+ |
- sometimes volatile/ erratic response times |
- sometimes volatile/ erratic response times |
- cannot search in string attributes longer than 255 chars - openCRX does not yet support the 64bit versions |
* Please note that we do not recommend HSQLDB or MySQL for production use. The lack of cursor-support leads to lots of table scans resulting in low performance for large data sets. MySQL v5.x might solve some of these problems. If you are a very experienced MySQL DBA you might be able to tune your instance so that it performs.
Please note that the "limitations" listed in the above table are not hard numbers, but they are based on our experience and on the assumption that users expect decent response times.
openCRX includes all the required configuration/deployment files for HSQLDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, DB2, and Oracle.
^Instructions for migrating from HSQLDB to another DMBS are available at in the Database migration guide.
^Have a look at the openCRX UML Model or the openCRX Javadoc.
If you are looking for the schema files (*.xsd) to verify data files or REST requests, you will find the schema files in opencrx-kernel.jar (e.g. located in {TOMCAT_INSTALL_DIR}apps\opencrx-core-CRX\APP-INF\lib).
^We test openCRX with both the Sun Java VM and OpenJDK.
^If you have a recent standards-compliant browser you should be fine. We develop and test with the following browsers on Windows XP:
If you get the impression that the rendering of pages is broken you might want to upgrade your browser. If you detect problems in our HTML code or in our Javascripts we would certainly appreciate it if you could post your insights to the bug forum.
^The openCRX Language Localization Guide explains in detail how you can add new languages to openCRX or even make your own openCRX language pack. From a technical point of view, adding languages is a trivial issue; the big task is translating all the code tables, labels and tool tips.
The following languages are currently available or being worked on:
| locale | language | locale included and activated in core distribution |
translation is "up to date" |
locale/translation provided by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| en_US | English | yes see demo server |
yes | CRIXP Corp. |
| cs_CZ | Czech | yes see demo server |
openCRX v1.8.1 | we are looking for a translator (up to v1.8 David Klíma and David Zejda) |
| de_CH | German | yes see demo server |
yes | CRIXP Corp. |
| es_CO | Spanish | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.0 | Jorge Escallón (Avatar Harden Ltda) |
| es_MX | Spanish | yes see demo server |
openCRX v1.9.1 | we are looking for a translator (up to v1.8 Humberto Hernandez from ITBrain) |
| fr_FR | French | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.5.3 | Yoann Regardin (France Telecom) (v1.8.1 Jean-Paul Genty, earlier versions Bruno Dumant) |
| it_IT | Italian | yes see demo server |
yes | Pietro Mathieu (albedo) |
| ja_JP | Japanese | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.4.1 | Yoshiyuki Nakamura |
| pl_PL | Polish | yes see demo server |
openCRX v1.9.1 | we are looking for a translator (up to v1.9 Jarek Solowski and Adam Sobkowicz) |
| pt_BR | Portuguese | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.5.3 | Claudio Cardozo, Revalino Sandoval |
| ro_RO | Romanian | yes | yes | Radu Silaghi |
| ru_RU | Russian | yes see demo server |
yes | anonymous translator (up to v1.9 Bulat Nig, up to v1.5.0 Andrey Bogatyrev) |
| sk_SK | Slovak | yes see demo server |
yes | Marián Sura (Butteland) |
| sv_SE | Swedish | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.5.3 | Patrik Bergström (Monator Technologies) (up to v1.8 Erik Andersson from Monator Technologies) |
| tr_TR | Turkish | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.0 | |
| zh_CN | Chinese (Simplified) | yes see demo server |
yes | Michael Chan (up to v1.4.0 Thomas Guo) |
| fa_IR | Farsi (Iran) | yes see demo server |
openCRX v1.8.1 | Hamed Shayan (ASHNA Samane) (v1.8.1 Afsaneh Ghoddousi and Mayam Rangbast, up to v1.3.0 Farhad Abtahi) |
| nl_NL | Dutch | yes see demo server |
openCRX v2.0 | Mr. Exvee (up to v1.5.0 M. van Drunen and J. Baten) |
| ??? | feel like contributing? | |||
If a login page supports locale xx_YY you can request the login page in that locale xx_YY by appending the string "?locale=xx_YY" to the default login URL.
Example: the URL https://demo.opencrx.org/opencrx-core-CRX/Login.jsp?locale=de_CH directly loads the German login page.