Role of CRM and LSMB, was Re: RoadMap Question

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

I guess the question is:

What role do we want to have CRM fill in LSMB.  I think that a CRM solution closely tied to financial packages would be quite nice, but I don't think we need to do this for 1.3.

Personally I would like to see LSMB modularized eventually in the following way:

Financial:  GL, Customer/Vendor/Employee tracking (required for proper AP/AR handling), AR, AP.  Financial Statements, etc.
Inventory:  Invoices, goods/service definitions, inventory cost definitions, warehouses, etc.
POS (POS invoices and hardware support)
CRM (task tracking, scheduling,* SFA, etc)
MRP (TODO)
HR and Payroll (Competency management, payroll, etc)
etc.....

At the moment, we only do the first three.  The rest is a lot of work and I would hope that we would see people in the community deciding to take a leadership role in 

Also, I think it is reasonable to ship a package which includes more than one module.  I.e. "out of the box, we do all of the following" but allow many of the  modules to be skipped over in the installation.

* Note that the scheduling role is a little different than a groupware system.  The goal is to schedule contacts with customers to follow up on things, not to schedule company resources.  However, the ability to interoperate with groupware systems is something that we should probably work towards.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers