You find references to teams sprinkled throughout the Pro and Enterprise editions. The administrator can create and manage teams based on job type, division, geography, or any other criteria he can think of. After the administrator creates a team — and assigns users to it — he can assign access rights to the team.

You can assign most of the record types that you create in Sugar to both an individual user and a team. For example, Opportunities, Contacts, Accounts, and Cases can all become the shared responsibility of a team of users.

Putting information into Sugar is only half the fun; the other half comes from being able to mine and manipulate the data to give you a good feel for what's working in your business — and what's not.

If you're a single user running your business from a tree house in your backyard, you probably have most of the facts and figures about your company whirling around in your head. The amount of data in your database grows proportionately with your number of employees; relying on your memory is no longer a viable solution.

The Reports module (see Chapter 14) transforms piles of data into organized knowledge. Managers can evaluate performance by running reports on salespeople, marketing campaigns, and customer service issues. Reports are drillable which means managers can double-click the information in a report to see the underlying data.

The Reports module includes a basic report writer, so managers can develop new reports based on customized queries. Customized reports can also take the form of a chart or graph so they can appear on the Dashboard module. Reports can be printed in PDF format and you can schedule them to be sent to your Inbox on a regular basis.

Although a handshake is binding in some parts of the world, most of us would prefer to have our business dealings committed to in writing. Sugar Professional allows you to create Quotes (Chapter 7) and Contracts, which you can deliver to customers via e-mail, Word, or PDF format.

Sales reps can generate quotes that calculate line items, currencies, and taxes — saving you the worry of having to double-check their math. Version control makes it easier to manage the myriad versions of quotes and contracts that your users have issued.

The Quotes module integrates with the Products module so that you can create a Product Catalog designed to arm your sales reps with product information ranging from the amount of inventory on hand to discounted pricing available to preferred customers.

Large companies — especially those with lots of cubicles and a large sales force — live and die by quotas. The Forecasting module (refer to Chapter 14) allows sales managers to view the committed sale amounts of individual sales people as well as sales teams.

Forecasts are based on opportunities. The module includes a forecasting worksheet that allows you to set a quota and predict the best- and worst-case scenarios for that quota. At the end of the sales period, you can then see who is meeting or beating their quota — and who's not.

Who says you can't take it with you? Certainly not the folks at Sugar who give you an option for accessing your database when away from the office — and possibly away from an Internet connection.

The Sugar Offline Client enables users and administrators to use the Sugar application on their local machines without connecting to the Sugar server. This allows users to work in locations where it's not possible to access the Sugar server. They can then synchronize the data on their PC with the data on the Sugar server to make the updated information available to all users in the organization.

You can use the Sugar Offline Client, which is only supported on the Microsoft Windows platform, for the following subset of Sugar modules:

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 Professional and Enterprise includes plug-ins to two of the most popular Microsoft products — Outlook and Word (refer to Chapters 12 and 8, respectively).

Sugar's Customer Self-Service Portal module allows companies to provide marketing, sales, and support services via the Internet. Customers with a problem can create a case, upload relevant information, and track the case to its resolution without ever having to pick up a phone. All cases automatically appear within the Sugar Cases module.

Using the customer portal reduces the time your customer service and tech support people spend on the phone — and this typically helps your bottom line.

In addition to creating a case, the Sugar portals allow additional functionality:

A workflow (see Chapter 14) is a defined series of tasks to produce an outcome. Sugar Professional and Enterprise editions include a Workflow module that allows you to define different workflows for different types of jobs. Defining workflows has several benefits: it allows the company to standardize their business processes, it automates the procedure, and it insures follow-through.

In Sugar, a workflow consists of four parts:

If you are the only user of your Sugar database, your security might be limited to the password that allows you access to your entire database. In the Community Edition of Sugar, the administrator can create roles (refer to Chapter 16) that determine the access level of each user to the various modules and what they can change and/or see when they access that module.

Sugar Professional and Enterprise editions take the issue of security a bit further by giving you a few more options:

MySQL and PHP are both Open Source (meaning they are free to download and use) software products. The PHP/MySQL combination has become a popular choice for database-driven Web sites and the combination that Sugar supplies with all three versions. Although MySQL can be used for a variety of applications, it is most commonly found on Web servers.

For most of you, the MySQL database is powerful enough to run your business — and your database software. However, larger corporations often require beefier database software to run their various business processes. The two most popular database applications are Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

SugarCRM Enterprise allows you to connect Sugar to either an Oracle or SQL Standard Server database. This is enticing to large companies for a number of reasons: