Feature set: SFCRM's design has been driven by experts in the CRM domain, and consequently, it sports a feature set comparable to the best in the industry. Some salient points include:

• Support for account-centric, contact-centric or opportunity-centric perspectives, suited to the way you work
• Integrated email client, with chat and voice support under development
• Flexible, powerful security management
• Advanced user management
• Lead management support, including a lead portal for partners and field service personnel
• Complete customizability of look and feel
• Powerful report writer, supporting extensive business analytics

More details are available here.

Client application: On the client side, SFCRM requires nothing more than a web browser to access it. SFCRM's user interface layer is very lightweight, designed with plain HTML and DOM-compliant dynamic HTML (DHTML), without requiring Java applets, ActiveX components or other client-side components. This means zero installation costs on client computers. It also means that you can access your SFCRM application from any internet-accessible computer anywhere in the world.

Software prerequisites: SFCRM is a pure-Java application, and is distributed with all components on which it depends. The standard distribution package includes an SQL92-compliant database engine. So you do not need anything else (except Java) on your server computer to get started. The distribution package does not even depend on whether your server uses Linux or Windows, and works just as well on either. (Support for MacOS X is being developed.) This means there are no hassles with installing and configuring third-party software to get your CRM application working.

Deployment: Deploying SFCRM is merely a matter of unzipping the distribution and starting up the application. Once you have Java installed on your computer, SFCRM can be up and running fifteen minutes after downloading it. The application is entirely self-contained, and operates only within the directory/folder structure under which it is installed. Moreover, SFCRM does not depend on any proprietary operating system features (such as Windows registry keys, for example). Consequently, moving your SFCRM installation from one machine to another is merely a matter of zipping up its directory on the source machine and unzipping it on the target machine.

Database independence: Most competing applications are coded around specific database engines. For example, Microsoft MSCRM requires Microsoft SQL server for its operation, and does not support any other database. Not so SFCRM: our application requires only that the underlying database should comply with industry standards SQL92 and JDBC 2.0. This approach offers several benefits:

• It avoids vendor lock-in: If you don't like or can't use your current database vendor any more, it is extremely easy to migrate your application to another vendor. SFAfinity offers database content migration tools that will make this process smooth and painless.
• It allows you to scale well. If your particular database content is too demanding on your current database, and you wish to move to a different database, the SFCRM application will be last of your concerns.
• It enhances application reliability: since the application conforms to SQL 92, and so does just about every database engine available today, there is far less likelihood of problems arising from the application's use of vendor-specific database extensions.

SFCRM has been tested with several different database engines (Oracle, PostgreSQL, Pointbase and Mckoi).

Customization: sfCRM includes extensive tools for customizing its behavior — all accessible right from the browser, with no need to get down to the nitty-gritty of coding. For example, you can:

• Add custom fields: You can create new custom fields for any of the major entities in the system. Adding a new custom field is a simple matter of choosing the name and data type of the field. The new custom field becomes immediately available in all the records in the system.
• Build calculated fields: Any field of any record in the system can be made a "calculated" field, by associating an arithmetic or logical expression with the field. The full power of JavaScript is available to you in creating such expressions.
• Create custom filters: You can create and manage a range of filters for extracting just the data records you want. Filters can span multiple entity types. For example, one filter can be used to retrieve all account records that have opportunities closing this week but do not have activities posted to them. You can also use filters to designate contact and activity records that you wish to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook.
• Control your menu options: Add frequently used options to your main menu, so that the information you need is available to you in one click.
• Change your look and feel: sfCRM comes with a range of built-in color and font themes that you can choose from, to suit your taste and style of work.
• Build your own page layouts: The sfCRM page layout control enables you to choose just the fields you wish to see in a page, in just the order you want them laid out. To create a new layout, all you need to do is choose the fields you want, in the order you want, give the layout a name and save it. The new layout is immediately available for use by everyone in the system.

Email integration: The design of SFCRM allows smooth and seamless integration of multiple data sources such as databases, web services and news feeds into the application. Consider one example: with one click, you can sort your emails based on the account rating or annual sales of the customer from whom the email originated. SFCRM supports SMTP, POP3 and IMAP, and can therefore work with just about every mail server available. It has been tested with a wide range of mail servers, including Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Groupwise, sendmail and MDaemon.

Application scalability: The notion of "scalability" is multi-dimensional. Scaling can be measured in several different terms: database size (number of records), maximum number of users,  maximum concurrent sessions, performance in tight memory conditions, and so forth. A primary design goal of SFCRM's core engine is that it scales extremely well in all of these dimensions. Our tests show, for example, that the application provides response times (times for page loads) of under two seconds for up to 20 users on off-the-shelf PC hardware and very-low-cost databases. Moreover, SFCRM includes built-in monitoring tools that can track not only page load times but detailed low-level statistics of the times taken by each individual database query, as well as the memory used by the application over time. Because the tools are built into the application, they are available not only to the application's developers but to its end users, thus enabling us to continually refine and improve the performance of the application.

Application size: The entire distribution package for the SFCRM application weighs in at under ten megabytes. The reason for the small size is the tightness of the code and the high degree of code reuse. One obvious benefit of the small size is reduced download time, but far more important, the degree of code reuse ensures that the application is highly stable, reliable and bug free. This is because of the well-known fact: the more code you have in your application, the more you have to debug and maintain.

Database normalization: Broadly speaking, the idea of "normalization" is to ensure that a particular piece of data is stored on one and only one place in the database. For example, a normalized database stores all street addresses in one table, and provides links to that table from the contact and account records, corresponding to (say) the work address and home address of the contact. A non-normalized design, by contrast, might choose to maintain extra sets of fields in the contact table, one for set each for work and home addresses. Such repetition of data fields makes the application harder to maintain and modify. In this example, multiple copies of application code must be created for maintaining each set of fields, and adding a new address type (say, second office address) is a difficult matter. With a normalized database, adding a new address type is significantly easier. SFCRM's database is fully normalized, resulting in a very reliable, extensible data model.