Customer relationship management

When a company builds a customer list, tracks interactions with customers, designates activities to close business, or handles a customer problem, they are undertaking CRM-related activities. Customer Relationship Management systems standardize, automate and share these activities across the organization to improve these existing processes.
CRM applications address four major functional areas. A CRM application integrates this information so companies have a complete view across these various activities.

• Marketing - Manage customer lists, identify prospects, create marketing campaigns, track success rates, capture leads for sales follow-up.
• Sales - Identify leads; manage sales opportunities and accounts, present product and quote information, forecast quota attainment.
• Customer Support - Handle customer cases, manage customer incidents, escalate customer issues.
• Collaboration - Manage activities and projects, share customer and product information, access third-party content.

Regardless of size, every company engages in customer relationship management (CRM).

What is SugarCRM?

The SugarCRM project was started with the belief that open source technologies had reached a point of maturation where a fast, flexible and feature-rich product could be delivered to companies who did not have money to burn. In less than two years, SugarCRM has proven that a best-in-class CRM system can be built and delivered to customers in a more economical fashion.

The SugarCRM application furthers the high standards set by the open source community around the world. Unlike most proprietary CRM offerings, all SugarCRM applications are natively built on the pure Open Source LAMPS (also WAMPS) platform: Linux or Windows, Apache or IIS, MySQL, PHP, and SugarCRM. Our community of users actively test and contribute to the features, performance and stability of the SugarCRM application.

Stack Technologies

• Operating SystemSugarCRM runs on the most common operating systems, including:
• Linux - An open-source operating system derived from the Unix operating system.
• Windows - An operating system for desktop computers, workstations, and network servers.
• Mac OSX - Apple's Unix-based operating system for Mac computers.
• Web Server SugarCRM is supported by the two most popular Web Servers
• Apache - A free, open source web server that can run under several operating systems, and has become the de facto internet standard.
• IIS - Microsoft's high-performance, secure, and extensible internet server based on Windows NT Server. IIS supports the world wide web, FTP, and gopher protocol.
• Database
• MySQL - SugarCRM runs on the MySQL open source database, a simple, yet powerful, Open Source Software relational database management system which uses a subset of ANSI SQL (Structured Query Language).
• Language
• PHP - SugarCRM is written in PHP, an open source web development language.

SugarCRM Highlights

Risk-Free CRM for Anyone
At no cost or obligation, SugarCRM delivers a feature-rich CRM application. Sugar Open Source is right for you if you do not have a current CRM system; your current system is too expensive; or is not delivering the value you expect.
Great Functionality
If your company does not have a systematic way to handle CRM processes such as coordinating contacts, opportunities, and accounts, managing email lists and marketing campaigns, or handling service requests and customer issues, give SugarCRM a try. We think you'll like it.
Flexible
SugarCRM was built with flexibility in mind, so you can easily import data and customize tabs, views and layouts to display only the information that is important to your business.
Quick Installation
Sugar Open Source is a "light-weight" web application so it can be installed quickly without the need for additional hardware and long implementation processes. You'll be surprised how quickly you are up and running.
Easy-to-Use
The user interface is fast and intuitive so your employees will understand how to use the application in a matter of hours.
Community Support
You are not alone! SugarCRM is supporting thousands of small businesses who contribute their thoughts and practices for using Sugar Open Source on our user forums.

Features Summary:

Manage your website
Manage users, roles, permissions; configure calendar, your site's look & feel and more.
With your Administrator user id, you will have full control over your SugarCRM site. Create or delete users or assign them to roles. Configure a whole host of things in your system - user interface style, minimum password length, calendar views, user interface display, email server configuration, session handling settings, and more.
Manage users
Manage user accounts, roles & permissions.
Reports View PDF reports on task logs, allocated hours, overdue or completed tasks & more.
Projects Project workflow, statuses, timelines, gantt charts, tasks, task assignments and more.

Calender Create regular or recurring events by type, invite resources, notify attendees by email, handle event clashes.
Files File storage by project or task, versioning, check-out &check-in, email notifications & more.
Tasks Hierarichical tasks, dependencies, timelines, task logs, email reminders, assignments.
Create tasks under projects, assign priority, owner, resources. Set task dependencies. A full task hierarchy can be created by creating tasks under other parent tasks. Tasks can be searched. View Gantt charts and detailed PDF reports on task assignments, status, logs & statistics .
Tickets Ticket workflow, search, logs, email notifications and more.
Contacts Import, export & search.

Features Detail

Manage Users
With your Administrator user id you will be able to create users by capturing information like name, email id, company and department, you can then assign a role to the user. You will also be able to edit or delete a user id. Create new roles by assigning 5 types of permissions to each module within SugarCRM - Create, delete, edit, view or access. Edit or delete a role at any time. View active & inactive sessions, also view logs of user activity.
Reports
View task reports in PDF. Following reports are available: * Task Log - View the user task logs * User performance - Report that shows the amount of hours worked by a user against those allocated in tasks * Allocated user hours - This report shows how much hours does a user has allocated in the specified period of time * Tasks sorted by user - This report shows the tasks allocated to each user. * Task List - View the Projects Task List * Overdue - Tasks currently overdue * Completed - Tasks completed in the last week * Upcoming - Tasks to be completed in next week * Overall Report - Gives an overall snapshot of all projects * Tasks end date - View the task's end date (real and theorical) * Project Statistics Report .
Manage Projects
Capture basic project information from company to dates to budgets and owners. Create tasks hierarchy including dependencies, priorities, resource assignments, and dates. Projects & tasks can be color coded for usability purposes, different colors are available for different task statuses. View task logs with data on hours booked by user and cost code. View Gantt charts for a month, a date range or for the full project, or view the charts by work or duration. Update project status and other attributes at any time. Maintain project documentation files with full check-out & check-in capabilities. Maintain a project calendar by creating regular or recurring events of different types, invite resources or attendees via email. Create moderated project discussion forums, include forums in your watch lists. Create trouble tickets related to your project, assign them to resources and manage their workflow to completion. Create projects by company type- internal, vendor, supplier, client, government etc.
Calendar
Create regular or recurring events, invite resources or attendees and notify them via email. View calendar by day, week or month, filter events by company or by user. Create events by type - general, appointment, meeting etc. Capture project or company attributes. You can even create private events. SugarCRM can check for any clash in event timings. .
Files
Maintain project documentation in SugarCRM. Files can be uploaded against specfic tasks & projects. Task or project assignees get notified by email when a file is uploaded. Create file categories and assign them to files to them for easier navigation and viewing. Files can be check-out and checked-in, multiple versions of a file can be viewed together. Create folders to manage files, navigate folders via folder explorer. .
Tickets
Create tickets by capturing description, priority, project or company. Assign ticket to a resource. View tickets categorized by status. Update tickets by posting internal or external (client) followups. Notify client by email when creating external followups. Tickets can be searched and can be outputted to a PDF report. .