In This Chapter
Personalizing Sugar
Synching Sugar to your Blackberry
Capturing contact data
Synching Sugar to other software
Organizing your documents
Adding reminders
It's only natural that Sugar, an Open Source product, has captured the imagination of developer types who love to program. Literally hundreds of add-on products work with Sugar. The products range from little things like changing the screen colors to robust solutions for your HR department. In this chapter, I highlight my favorites.
You can go to two areas to find the products listed in this chapter — as well as investigate hundreds of other products on your own:
Warning
There is a bit of "good and bad" news that goes along with SugarForge. The good news is that many of the products listed here are either free or very inexpensive. The bad news is that sometimes you get what you pay for — and you might find that some of these products are "handyman specials" that require a bit of tweaking. Many of the products mentioned here come with free trial versions — you might want to try these products before you buy.
If there is any question as to the worldwide popularity of Sugar then check out the fact that Sugar has been translated to over 75 languages. Called language packs, you find these translations on both SugarForge and SugarExchange by clicking the Language Packs category on the left edge of both sites.
In addition to typical languages, such as French and Spanish, you find Sugar language packs in everything from Hebrew and Hungarian to Thai and Turkish.
Out of the box, Sugar comes with a number of themes (Chapter 3) that change the color of your Sugar installation as well as the look of the Module tabs. Although changing the theme won't make you work better — it just might make you feel a bit more at home in Sugar.
Some of the themes are designed to be very functional. For example, the Enhanced Notes theme gives you the ability to attach notes to your various records that include a username. Other themes, such as the Golf theme and the Love theme, are a bit more whimsical. There are even RTL themes that — you guessed it — work with languages that read from right to left.
Who doesn't use a smartphone these days? And more and more of those phones are a BlackBerry. Although Sugar can be accessed directly from the browser of any smartphone, there are a few limitations:
The screen on a handheld device is much smaller than on your laptop or desktop machine. Therefore, although you can see Sugar on your phone, you'll be doing a lot of scrolling to see an entire record.
Pulling up links on a handheld is much slower than on a computer.
If you don't have connectivity — such as when you're traveling on an airplane — you don't have a database.
Mobile Edge is a monthly subscription guaranteed to keep you up-to-date with your Sugar database. Quite simply, it installs a mini version of Sugar on your BlackBerry. You can view all the basic Sugar modules — Accounts, Contacts, Activities, Opportunities, and so on. Any changes you make are instantly available to the home office, and vice versa.
You might have a love/hate relationship with Sugar: You love having a CRM database but hate entering all of that information. If that's the case, then Contact Capture by Broadlook Technologies should rank high on your list of must have add-ons.
Contact Capture can capture information from a variety of sources including e-mail signatures and Web site directories. The procedure is simple: highlight the information, press a hotkey, and indicate where you want the information to go (Contacts, Leads, and/or Accounts records). For example, you can highlight contact information from the signature area of an incoming e-mail and within seconds add a new record to Sugar. Better yet, you can find a list of contacts from virtually any source and export the entire list to Sugar.
Broadlook is so sure that you'll become addicted to Constant Capture that they provide it free for the first year.
Face it. Microsoft is everywhere. Most likely, you're running more than one of its products on your computer. Like many other software products, Sugar takes the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy. Sugar offers plug-ins to two of the most popular Microsoft products: Outlook and Word. You can download the plug-ins free if you are using either the Professional or Enterprise versions of Sugar; you'll have to pay for them if you're using Sugar Community Edition.
Even though the following two products are mentioned in Chapters 8 and 12, they are so useful that they bear repeating in this chapter.
A common misconception I hear from potential CRM users is that they don't need CRM because they're using Outlook. I like to think of SugarCRM as Outlook on steroids because of all the powerful tools you can find in Sugar that aren't available in Outlook. However, many Sugar users continue to use Outlook as their e-mail client yet want to have those e-mails linked to Sugar.
The Outlook plug-in (refer to Chapter 12) installs a Sugar toolbar in Outlook. From there you have a number of options:
Archive to Sugar: Attach the e-mail — or edit the e-mail content on the fly — to Bugs, Accounts, Contacts, or other Sugar records.
Create a new Sugar record: Create a new Accounts, Bugs, or Contacts record from an incoming e-mail.
Sync to Sugar: Synchronize your Outlook contacts, appointments, and tasks to Sugar at the click of a button.
Chapter 12 shows you how to create e-mail templates using Sugar's template editor. However, many of you would probably prefer to use Word because you're already familiar with it. With the Word plug-in, you can create templates in Word. The process is quite simple. You start by creating a document in Word — or editing an existing one. Anytime you want Sugar data to fill the template, you select the appropriate Sugar field name from the SugarCRM toolbar that appears in Word. Once completed, you can perform a mail merge on the fly by selecting Sugar Contacts, Accounts, or Opportunities records.
Chapter 8 talks about creating a document library in Sugar. The Word plug-in takes the concept one step further by allowing any of the documents you create in Word to be uploaded directly into Sugar. Once loaded, they're available in the Documents module — or any other module that uses templates.
A new business has it fairly easy. They can download a copy of SugarCRM and have their marketing, service, and support needs met instantly. Throw in a piece of accounting software and they're ready to go.
However, the plot thickens with larger or more established companies. First, they might have information floating around in a variety of legacy systems that Sugar is replacing; these products can range from Outlook and Excel to Access and SQL or even Salesforce.com. Although you can import information into Sugar fairly easily, the process becomes very cumbersome if you have to bring in multiple data sources — many of which include multiple tables of information.
The process gets even more complicated. Some of your systems may contain data that you need to keep in both Sugar and the other, existing system. For example, you might have proprietary inventory-tracking software that includes customer contact information that must be updated on an ongoing basis. It's enough to make most of us wave the white flag and admit defeat.
But wait, the cavalry — or in this case Talend — arrives to save the day. Talend software will
Help with your data migration.
Synchronize the data among your various systems.
Give you a 360-degree look at all of your data.
Talend includes connectors to over 250 different data source types for purposes of migrating and synchronize your data. You can "click and pick" to define very complicated mapping systems between your various databases. In addition, Talend helps you clean data and even eliminate your duplicates.
But wait — there's more! After you synchronize your data, you need a way to analyze it. You might want to identify trends or target a certain class of customer. For example, you might want to focus on your customers who have placed the biggest orders — and logged the fewest support calls. Using Talend, you can run just such a report.
Talend is available in both Open Source (free) and Enterprise (subscription) editions.
Most business owners need at least two pieces of software to run a business: database software like Sugar to keep track of customers (and to market to potential customers) and accounting software to help keep an eye on the bottom line. Unfortunately, software that does it all often comes with a whopping price tag — and a very steep learning curve. As a result, you might have chosen Sugar for you CRM needs and QuickBooks for your accounting needs.
QConnector, by RPS Technology, lets you have the best of both worlds. It eliminates the need to enter your information into both sets of software because it synchronizes your QuickBooks data with your Sugar data. The synchronization includes your account, invoice, payment, and product data so that you can bid adieu to double-entry data input.
Chapter 8 shows you how to attach a document to the Documents module. However, if you're attaching a lot of documents, you might find this feature to be somewhat limited because there's no way to organize these documents into a file system.
If you plan to attach lots of documents to Sugar, check out SalesFolders by InvisibleCRM. Here's a few of the things it does to make your life easier:
Creates a desktop application that allows you to drag a document directly into Sugar.
Lets you create a file structure for the documents you store in Sugar.
Automatically synchronizes your new or changed documents between your desktop and Sugar.
Allows you to save documents in Word or Excel directly into Sugar.
Unlike many other CRM products, Sugar does not contain "pop-up" alarms that appear shortly before your scheduled activities. Enter SalesAlerts.
Using SalesAlerts, you can be notified of activities as well as changes that occur in other designated fields. For example, you might want to receive notification when a Leads record changes to an Accounts record, or of an upcoming event, such as a birthday or expected closing date.
SalesAlerts also includes a desktop application that further expands Sugar's native functionality. Sales managers can opt to receive alerts for their sales force — or access the desktop application to see all their alerts in one central location. End users can use SalesAlerts to quickly search for information scattered throughout Sugar without having to go directly into Sugar to initiate the search.