You don't know what you don't know

[gabeh]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post on these forums. I hesitated to put this in the developer forum, but hopefully you'll be able to help me out. I work for a company who employs about 100 people. The company has grown to the point that our current home-grown CRM (I'm using that term loosely) is not able to keep up with the business. We've decided to go with SugarCRM Pro. We've allocated a position to help us customize our implementation to meet our business needs and also help migrate most of our current home-grown system's data and functionality over. The problem is, I have no idea what I should be looking for in potential candidates. Obviously I'd want to hire someone with SugarCRM experience, and maybe even someone with experience doing a migration like this. We're also upgrading our phone system to Asterisk which is one of the many reasons we decided on SugarCRM, and we'd like the two to integrate.

So my question to you out there is: what should I be looking for on these resumes I'm planning on getting? I'm going to Sugar Con next month and I'm hoping to be able to meet some experts for hire and I have no way to pick one from another right now.

I greatly appreciate your thoughts and ideas on this.

Thanks,
Gabe

[eggsurplus]

Gabe,

Having gone through that ourselves at about the same point you are at I'd recommend finding someone with a capable knowledge of SQL, web programming experience (not html, that doesn't count), not necessarily php experience although that would be a huge plus otherwise there will be a learning curve, and experience with the back-end of phone systems a big plus. The person must have strong ability to learn how things currently work and how they would best work (current and future processes). One thing you can do right now to get a head start is determine the perfect world processes that you would like in place. You can start by figuring out how things currently work and then find the holes where things fall apart and just don't work as they should.

I wish you the best of luck!