Perfex CRM and all it’s modules

So as a business we have been using the Perfex CRM system for many years now (www.perfexcrm.com), over the years it has evolved more and more and become an essential part of our day to day business.

We currently use the Perfex CRM to:

• Manage all our invoices
• Customer support tickets
• Task management
• Expenses
• Team password management
• Team mailbox

As the newer versions of the CRM got released features like add on modules started to appear. This is basically the same as adding WordPress plugins so you are able to add even more features to your CRM system. We have recently purchased a few of these for example:

• Mailbox – Webmail based e-mail client module for Perfex CRM (https://codecanyon.net/item/mailbox-webmail-client-for-perfex-crm/25308081)
• Team Password for Perfex CRM (https://codecanyon.net/item/team-password-for-perfex-crm/27730444)

But they are not without their share of bugs. For example out most recent addition, the Webmail based module by themesic is filled with bugs:

• To begin when you read the comments on the Code Canyon website you will be greeted by a sarcastic customer care person who depending on how he/she feels will provide some basic information or says they are sales and will not help. They keep saying to open a support ticket and that they will reply within 24 hours, and then they dont, but as we know this is a one man so the same person replying to the “sales” enquires can easily provide some sort of support.
• We use Office 365 for our emails to it seemed pretty straight forward to set up, we installed the module and continues to populate the SMTP information which was entered in the actual Perfex CRM settings, this meant that the whole system would use this SMTP plus individual mailbox users, but here is where we start to go wrong. So the staff member with the same credentials for both the IMAP settings and system SMTP settings would be able to send emails going out but other users who had different IMAP settings could not, digging into the code we can see the team at themesic have forgot to take into consideration that not all staff members have permissions to send emails using the main SMTP settings. Meaning we get the following error: user2@markupdesign.co.uk is not allowed to send as user1@markupdesign.co.uk. But if user1@markupdesign.co.uk is logged in they can send successfully. So this is a huge flaw in their system. What did we do? we had to use Send in Blue for SMTP which allowed all users to send emails.
• Again another flaw is when the Webmail module pulls in unread messages it switches these to read on your server, this is so it doesn’t pull them in again. This is annoying if you are also using your IMAP on your mobile for example as all you messages would be set to “read” so we found a work around this. In the database we created a unique entry: the date the email was send, the user it was sent to, the user it was sent from must always be unique. So then we removed the auto set to read via IMAP. But every time the cron ran and tried to reenter the same email it could not as it already existed.
• We also proceeded to code in a feature that set the IMAP email to read once it was opened via the Webmail module.
• The last edit we did was the emails would only show in plain text and non HTML as the team at thermesic claimed this could not be archived safely. We created a iframe in the show mail section and securely displayed the emails in rich HTML inside a safe iframe which worked perfectly.

Overall, it is workable but not perfect and certainly not worth paying over £40 for this module. At Markup Design we have decided to being creating British Standard modules for the Perfex module in the future. If you require any bespoke modules or even a module that does not exist, or does not work very well please get in touch with our team and we would be more than happy to discuss this with you in more detail.

If you would like to know more on this or see how we are able to help you, please send us an email to info@markupdesign.co.uk or visit our contact page.