Sugar Community Edition Documentation

Welcome to Sugar, a commercial open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 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.

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

The Sugar Community Edition Application Guide introduces you to some basic CRM concepts and helps you get familiar with the Sugar system. It describes how to install and upgrade Sugar and access it through a personal computer and a Web browser. It also describes how to perform a broad range of customer relationship management tasks and administration tasks.

Readers are not required to have any programming or software development knowledge, but should be generally familiar with the use of a personal computer and a Web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

This guide is designed for users and administrators who are new to Sugar, or to CRM and Web-based applications.

Sugar consists of modules, each of which represents a specific functional aspect of CRM such as Accounts, Activities, Leads, and Opportunities. 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. Because 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.

The My Sites module allows administrators and users to link external web sites and web applications into the Sugar user interface, enabling Sugar to become a unified information interface for its users.

Sugar is built on established open-source technologies and widely supported industry standards, including the PHP development environment, the MySQL relational database, the Apache or IIS web servers, and the Linux or Windows Server operating systems. The system supports both the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) platforms.

With each revision of the Sugar software, significant advances are made in both the feature set and usability of the software. Sugar 5.5.0 offers the following new features: