Richard's Blog » Open Source: SugarCRM
One of the more useful Open Source tools we use is SugarCRM. SugarCRM is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). A CRM is used to track and organise contacts with current and potential customers or clients.
We find SugarCRM invaluable for this and use it to store information about every contact we have with our clients. We track all phone calls, e-mails and snail mails through Sugar. Doing this gives us a complete client history. It enables staff to look back and find when things were done, what was said during phone calls, when that important letter was received and so on. It also allows new staff to quickly come up to speed with an account and be more productive early on in their employment.
SugarCRM is very modular and very configurable. We only use a subset of the available modules. Our main ones are:
There are also modules for managing e-mail campaigns, documents, sales leads and opportunities and more. All of these come with the Open Source edition of SugarCRM and can be switched on or off as required through an easy to use admin page.
This CRM is also very easy to extend yourself. It comes with a built in module builder which works through a click and drag interface. We have used this facility to build modules to track incoming/outgoing snail mail and phone calls. These all link back to the relevant client Account so we can see at a glance what contacts have been made. In addition we added a Time Tracker which is used to track the amount of time spent on various tasks for clients.
SugarCRM comes in a number of editions. We use the freely available Community Edition but there is also the Sugar Express, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions. These editions come at a price. Using a CRM can help your business manage its customers better and understand their requirements. A good system will help you improve the service you provide to them.
Have you considered using such a system?
Thought to let you know managed to install SugarCRM successfully this time round. Nice - probably rather more power than I need but gives me another string to the bow for clients who like this sort of thing.
Best regards to you both,
Trevor
Posted by Trevor Ulyatt, 01/01/2011 5:01pm (1 year ago)
I reckon it was the full installation. I almost always install in such a way that I can choose options or component parts. I think I may have opted to do something undesirable regarding control of the MySQL server.
I removed Sugar CRM and WAMP, then did a clean re-installation of WAMP and (blessedly) all is back to normal (except I haven't had the pleasure of trying out the CRM). I don't think there's anything much I could email across, Richard. Thanks for your interest.
Cheers,
Trevor
Posted by TUlyatt, 18/11/2009 6:22am (2 years ago)
Interesting, Trevor. I can't say I have had any experience running SugarCRM under Windows but I'm a bit surprised by your experience. Did you download and install the full Windows stack rather than just SugarCRM itself? If you did the full stack then, yes, it would probably wreak havoc with your setup.
Could you e-mail me some detail of your problem so I can have an idea of what to look out for should I do a Windows install of it.
Thanks
Posted by Richard Thomas, 29/10/2009 1:28pm (2 years ago)
Well, Richard, I was intrigued by this, installed it and it (seems) messed up the operation of MySql as a windows service in my WAMP installation. Have spent much of the morning unstitching it and putting WAMP back together. Thought you just might like to know that caution is advised for some configurations.
Cheers,
Trevor
Posted by TUlyatt, 29/10/2009 1:14pm (2 years ago)
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