Pushing emails from managers to team members?

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Hi,

From a sales force standpoint, does Zimbra offer any sort of manual review/push of emails from a central account to networked users?

I don't see a lot of "collaboration" tools from the demos. Perhaps I am overlooking something.

In a heavy email/sales/support environment, the need to be able to assign emails and track/record actions taken by the assignee is important. As well as the ability to add internal messaging.

A client of mine is using Talisma currently for managing emails. It's good, but not great. They are looking for alternatives. I am not sure if Zimbra is, in fact, capable of emulating (or improving upon) that type of system. What about task assignment and basic project management? Is there any in Zimbra? Is there any auto-responder/KB functionality?

While I am asking, what about CRM? Is there integration with Sugar, or anything else?

Thanks for the pointers.

Regards,

Pete

[jholder]

From a sales force standpoint, does Zimbra offer any sort of manual review/push of emails from a central account to networked users?

Have you seen the salesforce zimlet?

In a heavy email/sales/support environment, the need to be able to assign emails and track/record actions taken by the assignee is important.

Currently, there is no way to track e-mails.

As well as the ability to add internal messaging.

We actually have an IM client in alpha. We plan on integrating it in the future.

What about task assignment and basic project management?

We plan on integrating this in 5.0

Is there any in Zimbra? Is there any auto-responder/KB functionality?

I think you're looking for more of a crm solution.

[quote]While I am asking, what about CRM? Is there integration with Sugar, or anything else?[/quote[
There's the salesforce zimlet, and there's been talk in the forums about integrating other crms, but nothing has appeared.

-john

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When I say "sales force" I do not mean "salesforce.com" I mean from an actual sales department.

"Internal Messaging" is not "Instant Messaging." I mean the ability to comment and add notes to an email that is routed to someone else. In a threaded way that is also trackable, but not seen by the email sender (the person outside the organization).

Well, technically, it's all "CRM" in the business world, isn't it? The emails you get, in businesses, are mostly from customers (unless you don't do much business, that is, then you are just talking amongst yourselves). And how you manage your relationship with customers, is generally via email client.

If you have never seen what Talisma can do, you should take a look. There are some very cool functions, that I bet a lot of Zimbra users would find appealing (or more non-users would use Zimbra instead of something else). It's first and foremost an email management tool. I would label it "CRM" though many (most) wouldn't. But that's semantics. It doesn't let you set appointments or see sales results. So it's not a "sales force" specific CRM tool. But it allows you manage customer touches and build/manage relationships via messages. Which is critical for any SMB that is mostly ecommerce/inside sales driven.

Talisma lets a business that gets hundreds of legitimate emails a day keep tabs on what's going on. Because users need to log into the system, and then if they have sufficient rights, pull emails to their "workspace" from certain internal "inboxes (both driven by the email address itself, and by pushing from other managers/agents). If you have higher rights you can push emails from the various inboxes to specific agents to answer, and add an internal note to it to give the agent an idea how to respond. There is also automated routing via rules, based on message content.

This is what I would call "collaboration" since it involves sharing and teamwork.

How does Zimbra allow colleagues to work together (collaborate) on a message (presales/billing/postsales/support, etc) from a customer/client/prospect? What does "collaboration" mean in Zimba's mind?

I don't mean to belabor the point. Just trying to understand.

If Zimbra doesn't do what I am looking for, either at the moment, or ever, is the next step custom development? Because there are lots of things that Zimbra looks to do very well, that Talisma does not, such as the whole "3rd party data integration" thing. Another is to allow/encourage custom expansion. Perhaps my "routing and message management" nirvana could be achieved via a zimlet? Or are all of the internals of Zimbra hardwired, so's not to make that a reasonable leap?

Because in the end, I need some way to mix data from a ProvideX/MAS 200 back-end into the messaging (for order status, tracking numbers, invoicing, sales, etc) to have just a single work environment. It's for a 25-employee ecommerce company. Too successful for it's staff size, it needs better tools to manage the every day messaging of hundreds of orders/calls/emails per day.

Thanks for your replies.

Pete