Sugar Community Edition: Preface

Overview

Welcome to Sugar, an open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

The Sugar application

Sugar enables organizations to efficiently organize, populate, and maintain information on all aspects of their customer relationships. It provides integrated management of corporate information on customer accounts and contacts, sales leads and opportunities, plus activities such as calls, meetings, and assigned tasks.The system seamlessly blends all of the functionality required to manage information on many aspects of your business into an intuitive and user-friendly graphical interface.

The system also offers a graphical dashboard to track the sales pipeline, the most successful lead sources, and the month-by-month outcomes for opportunities in the pipeline.

The Sugar community

Sugar is based on an open source project, and therefore, advances quickly through the development and contribution of new features by its supporting community.

Welcome to the community!

Audience

This guide is designed for system administrators who want to install Sugar Community Edition.

Feature overview

Sugar consists of modules, each of which represents a specific functional aspect of CRM such as Accounts, Activities, Leads, Opportunities, and so on. For example, the Accounts module enables you to create and manage customer accounts, and the Activities module enables you to create and manage activities related to accounts, opportunities, etc. These modules are designed to help you manage customer accounts through each step of their lifecycle, starting with generating and qualifying leads to customer support and resolving reported bugs. Since many of these steps are interrelated, each module displays related information. For example, when you view the details of a particular account, the system also displays the related contacts, activities, opportunities, and bugs. You can not only view and edit this information but also create new information.

As an administrator, you have the power to implement access control for these modules. You can customize the look and feel of Sugar across your organization. You can even create new modules if needed. You can also create multiple forums as platforms of discussion on various topics amongst your users and customers.

Core Features

Sales Force Automation

Lead, Contact, and Opportunity Management to pursue new business, share sales information, track deal progress, and record deal-related interactions
Account management capabilities to provide a single view of customers across products, geographies, and status

Marketing Automation

Lead management for tracking and cultivating new leads
Email marketing for touching prospects and customers with relevant offers
Campaign management for tracking campaigns across multiple channels
Campaign Wizard to walk users through the process of gathering information such as the marketing channel, targets, and budget needed to execute a campaign effectively
Campaign reporting to analyze the effectiveness of marketing activities
Web-to-Lead forms to directly import Campaign responses into Sugar to capture Leads

Customer Support

Case management to centralize the service history of your customers, and monitor how cases are handled
Bug tracking to identify, prioritize, and resolve customer issues

Collaboration

Activity management for Emails, Tasks, Calls, and Meetings
Content syndication to consolidate third-party information sources

Administration

Edit user settings, views, and layouts quickly in a single location
Customize the application in Studio to meet the exact needs of your organization
Create custom modules in Module Builder

Preface