Homepage and download location

Homepage: http://www.opencrx.org/
Download: http://www.opencrx.org/downloads.htm

Description of solution

openCRX is a component-based CRM system that provides functionality for sales force automation (SFA), customer service, project and activity management, products and services, and others. This platform-independent and scalable J2EE application excels through its choices of a mature and professional system design, built on the open source MDA platform openMDX. openCRX is primarily targeting the enterprise customer segment. openCRX is actively being developed – the current roadmap is always available from http://www.opencrx.org/project.htm#roadmap

openCRX is distributed under the terms of an OSI-certified open source license, BSD style.

Related Solutions

• Application server: any J2EE-compliant server, notably BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss
• Relational Database Management: notably Oracle, DB/2, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, MaxDB, MySQL
• Open source Model-Driven Architecture Platform: openMDX
• Business Intelligence: BIRT (planned tight integration)

Development tools

• Eclipse, IBM Rational Software Modeler, openMDX

Adherence to integration standards

• J2EE RMI, CORBA, JMS, JCA
• SOAP (planned)
• OMG's MDA, MOF, JMI (OpenMDX)
• Planned adapters for mySAP CRM, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Abacus
• Planned integration with MS Exchange, MS ActiveDirectory, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Asterisk, MS Office, Open Office

Project team background, adoption and endorsements

openCRX is developed by a community primarily made up of CRIXP Corp., openCRX partners, and various customers/users. CRIXP Corp. and openCRX partners provide professional services worldwide and raise the necessary funding for functional extensions that are requested by the user community (customers).

Project motivation and qualitative analysis

openCRX aims to establish a core reference model for relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) with a professional enterprise-class open source CRM solution. Furthermore, openCRX is advertised as a strong showcase application for openMDX - the MDA implementation framework on which it is built - see “The architecture of choice for a changing world for more information. This provides a strong basis for the development team to shift their attention to modeling the actual CRM processes and interfaces, and let good design prevail. On the downside however, one must admit that the generic user interface is not as intuitive and as attractive as some of its open source competitors. As a matter of fact, there is no openCRX-specific user interface; the GUI is provided by openMDX, and it is fully generic and model-driven, i.e. there is no manual programming involved because the GUI is automatically generated. An AJAX GUI is on the roapmap.