Zurmo CRM is a feature-rich customer relationship platform. Built from the ground up using agile and test driven development, this open source project not only makes it easy to manage accounts, contacts, and sales opportunities, but also showcases some truly inspired software design and engineering.

Zurmo CRM Dashboard

In future articles, we’ll be discussing some of Zurmo’s unique features such as the fully integrated gamification engine, embedded workflows, import, api, designer functionality  as well as  how to customize and secure your  Zurmo installation.  In the next 5 minutes, we will show how easy it is to set up an instance of Zurmo CRM from your Arvixe hosting account using the Softaculous installer which can be accessed right from your cPanel utility.

Once you have logged in to your personal hosting account at www.arvixe.com, open your hosting control panel and look for the Softaculous icon under the Software/Services tab.

Install Zurmo on Arvixe via Softaculous from the Control Panel

Next, you will select Zurmo from a list of many applications which can be autoinstalled. It’s easiest to simply type “zurmo” in the search bar at the top right corner of your screen.

Save some time, and locate Zurmo using the search bar.

You can take a moment to review some of the features, check out some screenshots, or try an on-line demo before you commit to install.

Get ready to install Zurmo CRM from the autoinstaller

Once you click install, in the following screen, you can take most of the defaults. If you have more than one hosting account, you can specify where to host this instance of Zurmo. You can also change the name of the MySQL database, as well as enter a super-user password.

Here you can review the default installation settings.

It’s strongly recommended that you create a secure password for your installation. You can press the handy key icon on the right margin to generate a password.

1. selecting your domain. 2. entering a secure password.

If you want more control over how your password is composed, use a site like www.strongpasswordgenerator.com, which will give you some extra choices, such as specifying the password length and whether or not to use special characters.

Handy site for generating passwords of various length and complexity

Once you feel comfortable with the installation parameters. Simply click the install button, and wait for the progress meter to complete. It should take less than a minute.

A fictitious example of a successful installation.

Congratulations! Now you can login and explore your new instance of Zurmo CRM.

Zurmo login screen

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