What you are referring to is the standard email functionality in Sugar. On the user settings page, you have the ability to specify the use of the external email client or the Sugar email client. If you select the Sugar email client, anytime you click on an email address in Sugar, it will pop-up inside of Sugar (i.e. you have the ability to type and send an email in the Sugar page). You can then send that email through Sugar. After it is sent, that email will automatically get archived with the correct record.
If you choose external email client in the user settings page, when you select an email address link inside of Sugar, it will open up your regular email client (i.e. Microsoft Outlook, etc.). You would then type and send your email as you normally would using that email client. However, that email will not automatically be archived into Sugar as it would using Sugar email client.
For more information on Sugar email client, click here.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a process to manage customer information and communication in order to provide a superior customer experience. The goal of CRM is to maximize the value of each customer interaction and thereby make each customer relationship as profitable as possible.
CRM is typically supported by software systems that manage customer information and interactions. CRM systems can be broadly categorized into the following groups:
Sales Force Automation (SFA) – Systems that automate sales lead generation as well as tracking of qualified sales opportunities. These systems typically help enforce a repeatable sales process that has been proven successful for a given company or market. SFA systems often automate the management of product catalogs, pricing, and proposal generation.
Customer Service and Support – Systems that track customer service inquires and resolution to customer problems. These systems often track customer satisfaction metrics or other measures of success.
Marketing Campaign Management – Systems that automate direct customer communication in-person or via mail or email. These systems typically track the cost of customer acquisition by linking marketing and sales expenses to leads and ultimately, sales generated.
Project and Implementation Management – Systems that track and automate projects critical to customer success. These systems are often used to manage customer implementation processes and to communicate project status to different departments in an organization.
For more information, see the Wikipedia.
SugarCRM added two new products in May 2011. All SugarCRM licenses include hosting on the SugarCRM Open Cloud. Pricing is as follows:
- Sugar Professional - $360 per user per year
- Sugar Corporate – $540 per user per year
- Sugar Enterprise - $720 per user per year
- Sugar Ultimate – $1,200 per user per year
For more information CLICK HERE to download the datasheet.
Epicom provides an application snapshot service for Standard, Advanced, and Premium hosting plans. With this service, a complete snapshot of your SugarCRM application and database are taken every four hours and stored on your server. That way, if an accidental data loss takes place through the error of a user, your system can be restored to a point earlier in the day and the lost data recovered. We have found that the the majority of problems caused in CRM applications are not due to hardware failures. They are due to users accidentally deleting information from the system that is of critical importance. With Epicom’s snapshot service, the risk of this type of data loss is greatly reduced. Four-Hour Snapshots
A Business Logic Hook is a piece of custom application code that can be linked to SugarCRM as a way of customizing the application. SugarCRM has a defined set of events that take place as the application is used. When it encounters one of these events, Sugar checks to see if there is any custom code that must be executed before or after the event fires. Business logic hooks are a powerful way to customize SugarCRM because they provide an upgrade-save method for making complex customizations to the base Sugar application. When a new version or bug fix is released for Sugar, the application sees and preserves each business logic hook. Business logic hooks are far superior to modification of the SugarCRM base application code because code modifications are always at risk of being overwritten during the next application upgrade or patch.
Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced ‘sass’) is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer’s burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support. Costs to use the service become a continuous expense, rather than a single expense at time of purchase. Using SaaS also can conceivably reduce that up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing. The SaaS software vendor may host the application on its own web server, or this function may be handled by a third-party application service provider (ASP). This way, end users may reduce their investment on server hardware too. For additional information, see the Wikipedia.
Open Source Software (OSS) is computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. A report by Standish Group says that adoption of open source has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers. For more information on OSS from the Wikipedia, click here.