[sllug-members]: Looking for starting point for software.

[James Knowles]

There's a broad spectrum of expertise here, so I'm hoping that somebody 
might be able to make a suggestion. I've been searching high and low for 
a couple of weeks now.

I'm doing some research for a group of professional that do one-on-one 
and group consultations as well as put on events, publish e-newsletters, 
and hold regular classes. They also produce A/V media for sale. Each 
professional generally has an assistant who handles scheduling, etc.

I'm having difficulty locating a good starting point (rather than start 
from scratch) for software (preferably web-based). This is a odd 
combination of requirements.

For example, one popular package is a fixed fee for one quarter. This 
gives the client a certain number of private consultations, access to 
certain classes and group consultations during the quarter, and certain 
events. They want to ensure that clients have their private 
consultations scheduled and used (people usually don't schedule them all 
at once up front). They also want to track attendance to group events.

The second thing is that the assistants normally handle scheduling for 
each of the professionals in addition to themselves. Thus, the assistant 
would have to have control another user's schedule.

I've played with demo sites of different CRM products (e.g. SugarCRM) to 
get a feel for what they're intended for. There're some good feature 
sets, but if a CRM were used as a software base, it'd have to have the 
heck hacked out of it because what they want isn't straight down the 
line CRM selling stuff out of inventory.

It's not CRM, it's not patient management like a psych clinic, it's more 
than a spreadsheet (which is what they're using right now).

I'm a software engineer and should have no problem creating custom 
modules if we need.

Anyhow THANK YOU very much.