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5 Best Cloud Based Free CRM Software For Small And Medium Business

By TechOneStop

5 Best Cloud Based Free CRM Software For Small And Medium Business

A company without CRM is like fish out of water – continuous growing competition, high customer attrition rate and frequent change in customers’ buying trends are most common challenges for an organization to sustain and grow further.
CRM is the only solution for an organization to nurture existing contacts properly and capture new customers. But it is really tough for a small or medium organization to spend a good amount to setup CRM application.

So what is the best solution?

Best solution is, choose free open source CRM to solve these business challenges. But there are lots of free open source CRM software with rich functionalities and number of such free CRM applications is continuously growing which is bit confusing for an organization to choose the right CRM for business. You could read our article on how to choose the best CRM for your organization.

Here we will discuss best 5 cloud based free CRM applications which could be life saver for a small or medium organization.

There are many open source CRM applications available in the market but not all of them are cloud based free CRM, for example Vtiger is free when it is installed locally but cloud version is paid. But we know, time and infrastructure, both matter for an organization, especially if it is SME. In case of cloud based CRM software, an enterprise does not need to spend any money for infrastructure, also application customization is real quick and easy task. There are many other benefits for cloud based CRM over on premise CRM but these are the main two reasons for which we suggest a SME to go for cloud based free CRM software.

Top 5 Cloud Based Free CRM :

Bitrix24

Most of the CRM applications with free basic plan allow only couple of users to have free account but Bitrix24 allows 12 users to create free account with 5 GB space. That is likely enough for a small or medium business to get start.

Free Bitrix24 account comes with unbelievable features–
– CRM includes almost all major business requirements like sales automation, contact management, quote management, business rules automation, invoicing, reports and sales funnel, direct email or call to clients from dashboard, integration with third party applications. It has mobile app for iOS and android to browse client records, create quotes, verify product catalog.
– It provides inter company social networking with ‘Like’ button, instant chat facility, computer telephony integration, photo and video sharing capability. It also includes employee motivational tools like badges, awards to show appreciation towards co-workers.
– It provides 5 GB free space for online file storage and document collaboration. There is no other CRM right now that provides 5 GB space with free plan. Also users can create or edit documents in Bitirx24 without any office suite.
– It has built in task and project management capability as well. Task can be created for oneself or assigned to colleagues, task report helps upper management to understand how much time an employee spends on a particular task.
Overall Bitrix24 is an application that helps an organization to run from one place.

Free account limitations:
12 users
5 GB storage
No record limit

Zoho CRM

Zoho is well-known CRM application with great features. It has web apps for almost everything that a SME needs like CRM, email integration, file sharing, social networking. It’s free edition allows an organization to create 10 free accounts with 1 GB space and limited functionalities but all these are sufficient for a small or medium company to generate leads, manage contacts and increase revenue.

Here are the few important features that Zoho CRM free edition provides:
– CRM includes almost all important features that an enterprise needs like sales force automation, marketing automation, lead management, contact management, quote management, live chat and email, tasks and activities handling, business rules and workflow management.
– It provides 1 GB space to an organization as document library. It can be used for file/folder sharing and documents attachment with file versioning capability.
– Zoho can be easily integrated with social networking sites like Twitter / Facebook or other Zoho apps like Zoho Projects, Zoho SalesIQ. It can be synchronized with various Google apps as well like Google calendar, Google contacts. Also it provides web to lead and web to contact form facilities to capture leads or contacts in web forms.

Free account limitations:
10 Users
1 GB space
No record limit

Insightly

Insightly CRM free edition grants 2 free accounts per organization with 200 MB storage. It includes almost all basic CRM features like Contact Management, Project Management, Task/Event/Calendar Management, Opportunity Management, Social Networking, Reporting, Email Integration. It provides the capability to import contacts from Gmail or Outlook or a simple spreadsheet.

Main drawbacks of Insightly CRM Free plan – it limits to store only 2500 records and allows to create 8 custom fields. Also its free plan does not include email marketing. But if these limitations are acceptable and want a simple way to start CRM, it is worth to give a try.

Free account limitations:
2 Free users
2500 records
200 MB free storage

Capsule

Capsule CRM is another lightweight and user friendly CRM application. Its free version provides very basic CRM functionalities with 2 free user accounts and 10 MB file storage. Beside CRM functionalities like contact management, opportunity management or task management, it has an unique feature called List. List uses filtering criteria based upon any possible options in CRM like name, updated on, type or status to group similar kind of contacts or opportunities or cases. With CRM object navigation bar at the top, there is a text link bar as well to bookmark contacts, cases or opportunities that you have accessed recently. Though it has good integration capability with other third party applications, free version has very limited integration features. Another drawback with free plan is that it allows to store only 250 contacts with unlimited opportunities and unlimited cases.

Free account limitations:
2 free users
10 MB storage
250 contacts with unlimited opportunities and cases

Really Simple Systems

Really Simple Systems CRM is really simple application with great functionalities like Sales automation, Contact Management, Opportunity Management, Task and Activities handling, Reporting. It’s free edition allows 2 users to have free account and 100 MB file storage. It also includes integration with KashFlow and SageOne accounting applications, custom reports, custom fields on all objects.
Drawbacks: Free plan supports only sales automation, not marketing automation or customer service management. Also it limits to create only 100 accounts with unlimited contacts, tasks and opportunities.

Free account limitations:
2 Free users
100 MB storage
100 accounts with unlimited contacts, activities and opportunities

Conclusion

There are many other cloud based free CRM applications as well like Podio, Clevertim, Raynet, Highrise, FreeCRM. But free edition of these CRM applications have more limited features like Podio does not include user management facility, Clevertim has no file storage and FreeCRM is free for 1 year only.
CRM market is ever changing and highly competitive place, so it is really tough to tell which one is best cloud based FREE CRM. But we can easily decide best CRM application for an organization.

Though we have listed down 5 cloud based free CRM applications here, we highly recommend an organization to try Bitrix24 and Zoho CRM.
If you want to know which FREE CRM suites for your business most, please contact us to get free quote.

Did we miss to mention any other great free CRM application here? Please write it below.

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<< How to choose best CRM software for your business

Policy Breach Notice: We are no longer detecting PII being passed to Google from the account

By TechOneStop

Policy Breach Notice - We are no longer detecting PII being passed to Google from the account

Recently one of our readers has received an email from Google AdSense Publishers with subject line ‘Policy Breach Notice‘.

As email didn’t give him enough information to clear his doubt, he dropped us email asking more information. He also mentioned that he didn’t receive any prior email regarding policy breach violation.

Email looks like below:

Dear Publisher,

We have now verified that we are no longer detecting PII being passed to Google from the account(s) under your control.

Thank you for helping to resolve this matter.

Regards,
The Google Policy Team

After our small research, we got to know that this problem is not with our particular reader only. Many of our readers have received the same email.

What is PII and how it is related to Policy Breach Notice?

PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information. To protect your account, Google AdSense policies mandate publishers not to pass any data to Google that may be recognized as Personally Identifiable Information. If any publisher does so, Google sends a notification email with subject line ‘Policy Breach Notice’ first to fix the issue. Once the affected publisher fixes the PII issue, Google sends the above email.

As you didn’t not receive any prior email to fix the PII issue, we think Google AdSense has sent this email by mistake.

However we have asked the question to Google also to give more information. If we receive any update, we will share it with you all.

So don’t worry and keep blogging !

*** Updated on 6th March, 2015: We told you that the mail must be sent out by mistake. Today we have received an email from Google asking for an apology for sending erroneous email. Probably you have also received the same email.

If you have any question about ‘Policy Breach Notice‘, Please feel free to comment below.

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How does OLX or Quikr make money

By TechOneStop

Question (posted by Rann):
“I am a regular visitor of Techonestop.com and like it very much. I would like to ask a question on discussion forum: How does OLX or Quikr make money ?“

Answer (posted by TechOneStop):
First of all, thank you Rann for posting your doubt on our discussion forum. This is in fact a good question.
OLX or Quikr does not charge anything from us for posting ads, then how they earn money?
Well, though they do not charge anything from us, there are many other ways to earn revenue.

1. AdSense Ads / Google Ads:
OLX, Quikr or any other eCommerce sites get huge traffic flows every day and millions of unique visitors every month. So displaying AdSense ads on every page gives a decent amount of money.

2. Sponsored Ads / Banners:
Beside AdSense ads, Quikr or OLX sells its website space to various enterprises to display their ads or banners, just like AdSense ads. Difference from AdSense is that sponsored ads are completely controlled by these eCommerce sites, there is no revenue share with 3rd parties.

3. Premium Ads:
If you want your products or services to make more visible or reach out more viewers to sell it faster, then premium ad is a good option. Quikr provides two type of premium ads – Top Of Page and Urgent. A ‘Top Of Page’ ad costs you more than ‘Urgent’ as Quikr shows this kind of ads at the top of each ad category highlighted in blue. It helps to get more visibility than Urgent ads. Urgent ads are indicated by a green star before ad title. To display premium ads, Quikr charges you depending upon product category, type of premium ads.

These are the main three sources of making money for any eCommerce site.
If you want to share anything on How does OLX or Quikr make money, please feel free to comment here.

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What is ‘Where 1=1, 1=2’ in Oracle SQL?

By TechOneStop

Question (Posted by Michael using Contact Form under ‘Contact US’ page):
What is the purpose of using where 1=1 and 1=2 in Oracle SQL?

Answer by TechOneStop:
Hi Michael, thank you for posting your question on our discussion forum.
In Oracle database, where 1=1 means true and 1=2 means false because 1 is never equal to 2 🙂
You could use any number like 2=3 or 3=3, only thing that matters here is both numbers are same or not.
Let us give you an example. Suppose we have to create a table (table_b) same as another table (table_a) but do not want to copy any record from table_a, only table structure will be same for both tables. Here we can write query like below:
CREATE TABLE TABLE_B AS SELECT * FROM TABLE_A WHERE 1=2;
– This will create table_b same as table_a without copying records from table_a, only table description will be copied to table_b.

Now if we want everything from table_a will be copied to table_b, write query like below
CREATE TABLE TABLE_B AS SELECT * FROM TABLE_A WHERE 1=1;
– This will copy table structure, all records from table_a to table_b.

Even you could use string also like ‘tech’ = ‘techonestop’ or ‘tech’=’tech’. You could use ‘where 1=1’ or ‘1=2’ in any query like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TABLE_A WHERE 1=2;

Please let us know if it was helpful. If you want to add more information, please feel free to comment here.

What is Caret Browsing ( or Caret Navigation) ?

By TechOneStop

Have you heard about Caret Browsing? This is quite old technical term but if you are not keyboard savvy person, you would not be familiar with caret browsing or caret navigation.
Like most of the people, you probably use mouse to select text on a webpage during internet browsing and just for typing purpose, you use keyboard. But what would you call it, if you can select text on a webpage by using keyboard only? This is what we call as called Caret Browsing or Caret Navigation where a caret (also known as ‘text cursor’ or ‘text insertion cursor’ or ‘text selection cursor) is used to navigate within webpage, same as Microsoft Word. But this feature is not supported by all browsers, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox support Caret Browsing.
To enable or disable Caret Browsing on a webpage, just press ‘F7’ function key. It will prompt you to turn Caret Browsing on, press ‘Yes’ and Caret Browsing will be enabled. Now you can use various navigation keys on your keyboard including ‘Home’, ‘End’, ‘Page Up’, ‘Page Down’, 4 arrow keys to select text, hold ‘Shift’ key and move the caret to select multiple lines. Almost it looks like a cellphone browser, quite useful when you are using laptop touchpad rather than a mouse.

To enable caret browsing in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox:
– Press F7 function key and then click ‘Yes’ on the popup window

What is Caret Browsing - techonestop.com

– To enable Caret Browsing for new window and tabs (only for Internet Explorer), click on ‘Tools’ (‘Gear’ icon on top right hand corner), go to Internet Options > Advanced and mark the check box ‘Enable Caret Browsing for new windows and tabs‘ true.

To disable Caret Browsing, press F7 again. If the checkbox ‘Enable Caret Browsing for new windows and tabs‘ is marked, uncheck it.

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Use of Keyboard Function keys (F1 – F12)

By TechOneStop

Every keyboard comes with a set of function keys (F1 through F12) but do you know functionalities of those function keys (or fn keys)? Sometimes in multimedia keyboard or compact keyboard, these function keys come as secondary functions on other keys like brightness, sleep, play media, player, mute. In such keyboard, to use function keys, you may need to press another special key ‘fn’ (beside Windows key) and then any function key. These function keys can be used with combination of other keys like ctrl or alt or shift.
Each function key is built to perform specific task but it may vary based upon operating system and the kind of program you are using right now. Let’s see few common functionalities that can be performed using these function keys. Few of such functionalities you may have used, few not.

F1:

– Almost every program uses this key to open its Help and Support window

– F1 with windows key shows up Windows Help and Support screen

– Can be used to enter CMOS setup

F2:

– Yes, I know, almost everyone has used this to rename files or folders or icons quickly

– Can be used to enter CMOS setup

– Alt + Ctrl + F2 opens document window in Microsoft Office

– Ctrl + F2 displays print preview window in Microsoft Office

– Alt + F2 opens ‘Save As’ window in Microsoft Excel

– Shift + F2 can be used to add comment box in Microsoft Excel

F3:

– Press F3 to open search window to find files and folders

– In MSDOS or windows command prompt, F3 repeats the last command

– On most browsers, F3 is used to open find bar

– In Microsoft Word, Shift + F3 changes the text from upper case to lower case or all capital letters

F4:

– Most common, Alt + F4 to close current program window. If no program window is open, it launches Shutdown dialog box

– Ctrl + F4 closes active window within current active window in Microsoft Windows

– Opens address bar in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer

– Press F4 to repeat the last action performed in Microsoft Word

F5:

– Almost in all modern internet browsers, pressing F5 refreshes or reloads the web page

– Starts slide show in Power Point

– Opens Find and Replace window in Microsoft Word, GoTo window in Excel

F6:

– Almost in all modern browsers, pressing F6 moves the cursor to the address bar

– Ctrl + F6 toggles between various Microsoft Word documents

F7:

– Press F7 to launch Spelling and Grammar dialog box in Microsoft Office program

– Shift + F7 opens Research window in Microsoft Office

– In few browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, pressing F7 turns Caret Browsing on or off

F8:

– Holding F8 during Windows boot process enters into Windows Safe Mode

– Pressing F8 displays a thumbnail image of all workspaces in Mac OS X

F9:

– In many application, it is used to send email like Microsoft Outlook, Siebel CRM

– Ctrl + F9 and Alt + F9 are used to build mail merge document in Microsoft Word

– If you are a programmer, you may have used F9 to compile and execute code in combination with Ctrl or Alt key

F10:

– In many programs, Shift + F10 opens up the menu window, equivalent to right-click

– Shows menu bar in Mozilla Firefox, internet browser or highlights the same in many programs

– Sometimes it is used to enter CMOS setup

F11:

– Is used to enter and exit from full screen mode in all modern internet browsers

– In Microsoft Excel, Shift + F11 adds a new sheet, Ctrl + F11 adds a new macro to the workbook

– Pressing Alt + F11 in MS Office program, invokes Microsoft Visual Basic window for that document

F12:

– Opens ‘Save As’ window in MS Office program

– Shift + Ctrl + F12 open Print window in MS Office

– Ctrl + F12 opens a document in MS Office

– Opens and closes developer tools in most of the internet browsers

Conclusion:

In earlier IBM keyboard, there were keys from F13 to F24 also. But we do not use these function keys any more. We have tried our best to give you functionalities of all Function keys or fn keys (F1 – F12). But we may have missed out some important uses of these function keys and that’s what we have readers like you. Please let us know if you have come across any other functionalities of these function keys. We will publish it with your name.

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Top 5 Cloud Based Free CRM :

Conclusion

<< How to choose best CRM software for your business

What is PII and how it is related to Policy Breach Notice?

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