Overview
Welcome to Sugar, an open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. Sugar enables organizations to efficiently organize, populate, and maintain information on all aspects of their customer relationships.
The Sugar Application
Sugar 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.
Sugar also provides 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
The Sugar Developer Guide provides information for developers who want to extend and customize Sugar functionality using the customization tools and APIs provided in the Sugar Ultimate, Enterprise, Corporate, Professional, and Community Editions.
Application Overview
Sugar consists of modules which represent a specific functional aspect of CRM such as accounts, various activities, leads, and opportunities. For example, the Accounts module enables you to create and manage customer accounts while the Meetings, Tasks, Emails, and Notes modules enable you to create and manage activities related to accounts, opportunities, etc. Sugar modules are designed to help you manage your customer relationships through each step of their life cycle, starting with generating and qualifying leads, through the selling process, and on to customer support and resolving reported product or service issues. 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 view and edit this information and also create new information.
As a developer, Sugar gives you the ability to customize and extend functionality within the base CRM modules. You can customize the look and feel of Sugar across your organization, or you can create altogether new modules as well as build entirely new application functionality to extend these new modules.
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 statuses
- Automated quote and contract management functionality to generate accurate quotes with support for multiple line items, currencies, and tax codes
- Sales forecasting and pipeline analysis to give sales representatives and managers the ability to generate accurate forecasts based on sales data in Sugar
- Sugar dashboards to provide real-time information about leads, opportunities, and accounts
- Sugar plug-ins for Microsoft Office to integrate your CRM data with Microsoft’s leading productivity tools
- Sugar mobile applications for iPhone and Android to access contacts, opportunities, accounts, and appointments in commercial editions of Sugar while logging calls and updating customer accounts
- Sugar mobile browser to access mobile functionality through any standards-based web browser
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 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
- Customer self-service portal to enable organizations to provide self-service capabilities to customers and prospects for key marketing, sales, and support activities
- Knowledge Base to help organizations manage and share structured and unstructured information
Collaboration
- Shared email and calendar with integration to Microsoft Outlook
- Activity management for emails, tasks, calls, and meetings
- Content syndication to consolidate third-party information sources
- Sugar mobile functionality for wireless and PDA access for employees to work when they are away from the office
Reporting
- Reporting across all Sugar modules
- Real-time updates based on existing reports
- Customizable dashboards to show only the most important information
Administration
- Edit user settings, views, and layouts quickly in a single location
- Define how information flows through Sugar (workflow management) and the actions users can take with information (access control)
- Customize the application in Studio to meet the exact needs of your organization
- Create custom modules in Module Builder to develop the additions to the application that are unique to your business to ensure all the critical interactions can be easily tracked and analyzed.
- Implement Sugar Logic formulas and dependencies that help define the workflow and automated calculations to guide your users efficiently through their daily responsibilities.
