Sugar CRM :
SugarCRM helps manage:
- Generating and qualifying leads
- Selling process
- Customer support
- Resolving reported product or service issues
Ranking CRM Solutions:
According to : http://www.crmsoftware360.com/
Top 5 On-Demand CRM
- Aplicor
- Entellium
- Microsoft Live CRM
- RightNow
- Salesforce.com
Top 5 On Premise CRM
- Microsoft CRM
- Consona Onyx
- CDC Pivotal
- SAP
- Oracle’s Siebel
Top 5 Open Source CRM
- SugarCRM (current open source leader)
- Anteil
- Compiere
- Daffodil
- Vtiger
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant:
http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/article86/article86.html
Varied Commentary:
Open Source Page: http://www.crmsoftware360.com/crmopensource.htm
While there truly is no open source CRM product designed or well suited for the enterprise market, SugarCRM makes the greatest strides and comes the closest.
SugarCRM at a glance
- The current open source leader
- Good venture financing
- International expansion underway
- Microsoft friendly solution
- On-premise or hosted delivery
Prediction #9
Open Source CRM and ERP Fail to Gain Traction (Again)
2008 was to be the year that open source CRM and ERP software applications evolved from an interesting proposition to a viable business option. It did not happen. The back office and ERP open source community failed to show growth, demonstrate customers successes and actually moved backswords in many aspects. The CRM software open source movement saw similar declines from the recognized players, with the possible exception of SugarCRM. SugarCRM enjoys good media coverage, a vibrant open source community (60,000 members strong) and proclaims growth and an IPO in 2009, however, the open source CRM company is rumored to be losing well over $1 million per month and living off its continual stream of venture capital infusions (now totaling approximately $50 million). Additionally, despite the company’s aggressive efforts to acquire enterprise level customers, demonstrated successes and documented case studies are absent. Expect open source CRM and ERP projects to show slow but steady penetration in the small business market, however, continue to be passed over by the mid- and -enterprise markets.
Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group LLC
http://www.crmforecast.com/opensourcecrm.htm
The open source value proposition suggests that free software is good and when a community of technical participants can read, modify and redistribute software source code, the community and the software evolve. While this value proposition is valid with some types of software, such as (Linux) operating systems and (Apache) web servers, opensource has not proven successful in the front office CRM or back office ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) business applications market.
Core Features
Sales Management
- Lead, Contact, and Opportunity Management to share info and pursue new business.
- Account management to manage all customer interactions in a single location.
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
Collaboration
- Activity management for Emails, tasks, calls, and meetings
- Content syndication to consolidate third-party information sources.
News Service
- The RSS news feeds module lets you select and manage your favorite news feeds, and display them on your My RSS News Feeds screen.
Administration
- Quickly edit user settings, views and layouts in a single location.
- Customize the application with Sugar Studio so that Sugar meets the exact needs of your company.
Technology Stack: LAMP or WIMP
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP)
- PHP development environment
- The MySQL relational database
- The Apache or IIS web servers
- The Linux or Windows Server operating systems.
Editions / Pricing
Link: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html
|
Sugar Community Edition |
Sugar Professional |
Sugar Enterprise |
|
Free |
$360/user/yr |
$600/user/yr |
|
GPLv3 |
5 users min |
5 users min |
Licensing:
GPLv3 – See excerpt below [link] [ from Stallman on GPLv3 : “free speech”, not “free beer”. ]
While open source licenses by definition are not very restrictive, the GPL is among the most restrictive of open source licenses. The GPL is used for, among other things, the Linux kernel and most software released by the GNU project.
Can money be made with SugarCRM? [yes]
Add-on modules can be sold. Sugar CRM even has a marketplace for that: Sugar Exchange.
Apps can be built to “Share or Sell”.
New in 5.2
- Cloud Connector Framework to pull outside data into your system
- Sugar Feeds Framework leveraging logic hooks
- Module Level Administration to allow better granularity of the management of your system without having to give users full admin access
Documentation:
https://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/support/documentation
[5.2 Online Development Guide]
[5.2 ER Diagram] 29 Tables w/ diagrams (full: below) and logical “parts”. There are a variety of ways to access data in the DB (SOAP, REST|JSON/XML)…
Logical ER Parts like Activities
Custom Modules
- A basic how to build Modules: [ LINK ]
- Access Sugar Data using JSON, REST… [ LINK ]
- Access Sugar Data using SOAP: [ LINK ]
- Custom Modules Blog Post: [ LINK ]
SugarCRM has come a long way from it’s early days as a basic CRM application. It is now gradually becoming more of a platform than an application. … all a module does is describe the properties and supporting UI elements required to support a certain type of data object. SugarCRM supports many objects (modules) out of the box - accounts, leads, projects,cases, calls etc. If you want to add support to a new type of object, you need to to create a new module to represent that object.
Books
After a cursory search on Amazon, there were few recent books of interest. There is one book that is soon to be published by aPress.
The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications
By: John Mertic : ISBN13: 978-1-4302-2439-6 : ISBN10: 1-4302-2439-8
300 pp. Will Publish Nov 2009 Print Book Price: $59.99 eBook Price: $41.99
SugarCRM is a leading open source Customer Relations Management tool and development platform with nearly 5.5 million downloads, nearly 17,000 developers, and lots more users.
The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM is the first official SugarCRM book available to developers and users. This definitive book begins by talking about the SugarCRM platform components, namely MVC, Studio, Module Builder, authentication, and themes.
Next, you see how to customize the modules SugarCRM comes with out of the box in an upgrade-safe manner. The text then presents an example application that a typical business might use and shows how to build it using SugarCRM, using both existing functionality as well as newly added functionality.
What you’ll learn
- Understand how the SugarCRM platform works
- Customize the modules that come with SugarCRM
- Build new modules and functionality into SugarCRM
- Explore MVC architecture, users/authentication, built-in modules, and other platform features
- Use SugarCRM Studio for customizations, logic hooks, and overriding existing code
- Build on top of SugarCRM using Module Builder, custom modules, and existing/custom modules mashups
- Design a complete application
Various technical details
- Templating : (recommendation) SMARTY for templating. http://www.smarty.net/
- JavaScript QuickSearch: Sugar 5.1 uses QuickSearch based around ExtJS
- Module (add-on) Level Administration allows configuration of value add features
- Scheduler will execute functions at predefined periods
- Logging is supported
- Web Services are supported (SOAP [WSDL]) , REST/JSON|XML
- Cloud Connectors Framework provides access to SOAP/REST (e.g. Cloud) services
Conclusion
OpenSource CRM is a small percentage of the over all CRM market. There is little optimism that Open Source CRM will make significant strides in the Enterprise. That being said, SugarCRM is the Open Source CRM leader and has made great strides to ease customization (mainly through Modules and Dashlets). The application embraces open standards and should make developing “for profit” add-ons for specific industries like Healthcare possible.
Having said that, a company should not solely rely on a Sugar CRM install base, especially in the Enterprise. This is not a platform to be married to as “the” CRM solution / application framework, rather a company would be smart to provide plug-ins for SugarCRM but also target other CRM solutions / frameworks.