Hello and welcome (back) to my weblog! This weblog is still focussing onto F/OSS within organisations, so I decided to give some attention to the subject of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in organisations that make use of F/OSS in their daily activities.
In this blog post, I will sketch a scenario in which an organisation may be doing CRM while using free or Open Source software. Imagine yourself an environment in which employees use the web browser Firefox. No matter the operating system installed, the users are enabled to use Firefox (and thus F/OSS) to access CRM software that runs remotely on a server (retrieved 20 April, 2010 from http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/faq.html).
Employees can use Microsoft Windows, but for example also Linux distributions like Ubuntu, SUSE, Red Hat or Mandriva on their PCs or thin clients. Thus if the company decides to ditch proprietary software (or at least for a part), they should not think they can not step away from Windows for CRM-related activities within the organisation. However, if it has some reasons to keep using MS Office instead of switching to e.g. openOffice.org, then it remains advisable to keep using the operating system with the number one position on the desktop market on that particular computer.

Please keep in mind that I am not responsible for wrong (parts of) information. This blog post may only be capable of acting as a starting point for further research, by companies that wish to combine CRM with F/OSS. I am not an expert in this particular subject, so I suggest doing inquiries elsewhere as well..