| Introduction |  | |
Features | | |
How we tested | | |
Verdict |
How we tested
Rather than get stuck into the open-source package and set it up from scratch, we were fortunate to have the assistance of Insightful Solutions, a SugarCRM partner and Australia's main provider of hosted and on-site CRM systems using SugarCRM.
Insightful Solutions helped us get going by setting up a pre-configured test system. We got started by romping through the pages, trying to make sense of it all. At first glance, the interface is a bit of an information overload. There's so much at your fingertips that it's difficult to know where to start. However, once we got used to navigating the pages (which is extremely straightforward, fortunately), it all started to fall into place.
The interconnected nature of Sugar Suite became more apparent once we dived deeper -- creating employees, a new company, some contacts within that company and a couple of meetings with some associated tasks. When you go to schedule a meeting, you can choose invitees from the list of internal users as well as contacts entered into the system.
Sugar Suite can "communicate" directly with mail servers, so invitations can be sent directly from the system. Create a project and you can assign it to a particular team, and then schedule group meetings which appear on everyone's calendar, group tasks, assign customer contacts for this project (for example, a customer's PR manager if your project is a marketing seminar), and view the history of completed tasks. Once a project or two has been completed, you can go back to a specific contact (or company) and view all the tasks, meetings and projects that person has been involved with.
A very nice touch is that the portal is quite customisable. The My Portal tab allows you to link to external Web sites. These are rendered within an iframe and are given their own pages within the tab menu. This lets users access external information they need without having to exit the portal. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds -- either external or internal. Internal feeds are a great way of keeping users up to date.
Another great (and very cool) feature is the plugin for Microsoft Outlook. This allows the Calendar tab within Sugar Suite to synchronise directly with a user's Outlook client -- not via the Exchange server, but directly with the local client application. It can also be used to push e-mails from Outlook straight into Sugar Suite -- very useful for documenting correspondence with clients.
| Introduction | | |
Features | | |
How we tested | | |
Verdict |
3%
2%
Sugar CRM is a great product for small to medium companies looking for an entry level customer management tool.
We have a number of startup and small to medium businesses where we have implemented Sugar CRM and it is now handling all customer relationships.
The installation is easy, normally deployed on a low end Linux server.
We simply 're-skin' the web based application so the product looks and feels just like their other systems displaying company logos and colours.
Good review! Sugar is a great product which we also run across our businesses.