"Riva turns GroupWise into a unified email and CRM client," said Jacques Sauvé, president of Adaris Technologies. "Our sales staff and project managers can now work in GroupWise and access their CRM data — running on their PC, Mac, Linux desktop, WebAccess client and BlackBerry."
Overview
Since 1995, Montreal-based Novell Gold Partner, Adaris Technologies, has recommended best-of-breed strategies and solutions to its customers for IT infrastructure, collaboration, security and virtualization.
Adaris has determined that the most critical component to the company's sales growth in Eastern Canada and expansion into Western Canada is its recently deployed unified email collaboration and CRM solution.
The Challenge
Historically, Novell GroupWise, the company's preferred email collaboration system, did not integrate well with CRM solutions.
As a result of Adaris' need for CRM integration, the company chose to deploy Microsoft Dyanamics CRM and migrate from GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange. In theory, the migration to a Microsoft integrated CRM and collaboration solution should have satisfied the company's requirements. After 6 months of fine tuning, however, the Microsoft solutions were found to be too complex, slow and difficult to use. Because CRM was so important to Adaris, they chose to deploy SageCRM. After a 12-month implementation of SageCRM, while SageCRM worked better for their needs from a CRM perspective, support for Outlook 2007 was not forthcoming and the high per-user licensing costs caused access to be limited to only a few executives.
"We spent a year and a half evaluating various CRMs and integration strategies for Microsoft Exchange," said Jacques Sauvé, president of Adaris Technologies. "We haven't seen anything that compares with the CRM integration and transparency that Omni is able to deliver for GroupWise. As a result, we migrated back to GroupWise."
The Solution
"Riva turns GroupWise into a unified email, collaboration and CRM client," continued Sauvé. "It literally has turned GroupWise into our most powerful sales tool. Our sales staff and project managers can now work in GroupWise and access their CRM data — running on their PC, Mac, Linux desktop, WebAccess client and BlackBerry."
"Riva's SmartConvert Drop Folders are incredible! You can quickly and easily archive GroupWise emails in your CRM. That alone is worth the investment. Omni takes the value proposition even farther by allowing users to automatically convert GroupWise emails into CRM opportunities or cases - without having to open the CRM interface. If the contact or account doesn't exist in the CRM, they are automatically created along with the opportunity."
"What a time-saver! We are capturing more opportunities and customer history because Riva makes it so quick and easy. We enter the data once, and it is automatically synchronized to the other system."
"Riva provides our team with the freedom and flexibility to work in the application of their choice—GroupWise, SugarCRM or both. We love having access to our CRM contacts and opportunities on our BlackBerries."
"Our next step is to deploy Riva on the same Linux server that runs SugarCRM. The combination of GroupWise, SugarCRM and Riva CRM Integration from Omni deliver a powerful bundle that I can now sell to my customers. Being able to deliver transparent, server-side CRM integration is the most exciting thing to happen to GroupWise in the past 10 years. We chose SugarCRM Community Edition because it is free. But Riva is available for other CRM platforms."
The Results
"Using Riva CRM Integration for GroupWise, the entire team is now able to access the information they need in GroupWise and our CRM. We have avoided multiple data entry points. Our communication and sales processes are more unified now than they have ever been. Our pipeline has never been so big or as well managed!"
"We showed one of our engineering customers how we are benefiting from Riva GroupWise CRM integration—all our opportunities, accounts, past communications at our fingertips. Even though they are not currently using a CRM, I suspect they will be moving forward pretty quickly."
"I would absolutely recommend Riva to other Novell partners and sales-focused customers who are looking to increase revenues and integrate their email and CRM systems," said Sauvé. "Riva delivers a great way to tie everything into GroupWise. Riva leverages the power of GroupWise. It turns GroupWise into a full, more valuable, collaboration client because it delivers a unified view of email and CRM data."
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