Salesforce courts the great un-CRMed with 'Essentials'

Oh yes, please, let's just forget about privacy laws

It may be worth examining what the GDPR will do to outfits like Salesforce and, more importantly, to the European companies making the mistake of using them. Could get rather interesting.

(ditto for Microsoft's efforts to take some of that market, btw).

On- ramp?

Really? Is "on-ramping" a thing?

About twenty years back I used to occasionally on-ramp my car before slithering underneath to access various oily and muddy components. The oil and mud then formed a fun shower that spread over my clothes, body and hair. Great. Thought I'd seen the end of on-ramping to be honest but now you're introducing it as a computery thing.

Not sure.

Barebones CRM?

SaaS CRM when you get everything you need ends up usually as very expensive. The challenge is that the CRM semantics needed by SMB are often just as rich as those of bigger firms.

Compare to accounting. Exactly what features of accounting are unneccessary for SMB accounting? Sure there are a few, say Treasury-related, but SMB accounting works better with full features.

Same with CRM. The "basics" or "essentials" model is not long-term viable and will only work as short-term education. SMB is better served by stepping up on taking responsibility on an essential infrastructure. There's no free lunch. And big CRM interests are not really aligned with yours.

I'm about to test another platform

I've tried SuiteCRM at an ISP who hosts on BSD and it sucked badly, so to rule out any issues with the OS I've just got myself a Linux vhost and I'm going to try again. I hope I get this to work as test, because that will free budget to do it for real, and then all these outfits can kiss our collective behind*.

* _{We can't host it at SuiteCRM itself due to some excessive nervousness in our legal team re. Brexit (we're not in the UK), so we'll have to do it ourselves. Sigh.}