Sugar Community Edition Documentation

Sugar Community Edition 5.5 Documentation

Sugar Developer Guide

Version 5.5.0

Preface

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. 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.

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.

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!

About this Guide

The Sugar Developer Guide is designed for developers who are new to Sugar, or to CRM and Web-based applications. This 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 to perform a broad range of customer relationship management tasks.

Readers are expected to have basic programming and software development knowledge, be familiar with the PHP programming language and the SQL database language.

Audience

The Sugar Developer Guide provides information for developers who want to extend and customize SugarCRM functionality using the customization tools and API’s provided in the Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional Edition and Sugar Enterprise Edition.

Overview

Sugar consists of modules which represent 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, while the Activities module enables 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. 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 can 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 and build entirely new application functionality to extend these new modules.

Core Features

Sales Management

•	Lead, Contact, and Opportunity Management to share information 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.

Interface Consolidation

The My Portal 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.

What’s New in 5.5.0

With each revision of the Sugar software, significant advances are made in both the feature set and usability of the software.

Dynamic Teams

You can now assign a record to more than one team. This feature enables users who are spread across multiple teams to perform tasks related to the assigned record.

Password Management

The Password Management feature enables system administrators to create and manage system-generated passwords and password rules for users.

Sugar Mobile Editor

For Sugar Mobile, you can enable or disable modules for mobile views. In Studio and Module Builder, you can customize the mobile view page layouts for Detail View, Edit View, and Search

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Sugar Community Edition 5.5 Documentation

Sugar Developer Guide

Version 5.5.0

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