Sugar Community Edition User Guide Version 5.0

Overview

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. You can also create multiple forums as platforms of discussion on various topics amongst your users and customers.

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 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 5.0

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

Redesigned Emails Module

You can use the new Emails module as an email client to manage your inbound and outbound emails. Sugar supports POP3 and IMAP protocols. Using either of these protocols, you can view and manage emails in your external mail accounts through Sugar. You can send the emails that you compose in Sugar through any of your mail accounts.