General Licensing Questions

[pilotget]

I have two general questions about licensing:

Question 1:
There are five of us here at the company (including me... my name is John), so I purchased five licenses to Sugar Professional. I am both an administrator and a user. But, if I set up all the users, I end up with a warning that I have exceeded the max allowable licenses by 1, because apparently "admin" requires a valid license. But "admin" doesn't work here, and I don't want to pay for his license. The way I see it, I have three options:

(1) Grant John administrative privileges and disable the admin user. (I think this is the preferred solution.)
(2) Change the name of the admin user from "Administrator" to "John", and leave the login userid to be "admin". That way, anyone who looks in the database can see that "John" added a contact, scheduled a call, etc., instead of "Administrator". I don't like this, since my userid will by "1" in the database instead of a long uuid. In the future, if we export the database and get another administrator, all my contacts/tasks/etc. will go to the new administrator.
(3) Ignore the warning that I have exceeded the number of licenses and wait for Sugar to contact me. Then I can explain the situation.

Are there any ideas as to which option is preferred?

Question 2:
Soon, we will be upgrading from 4.5.1 to 5.0 (I thought the release date was supposed to be today). i don't want to upgrade my live system. If I make a copy of the live system on my local computer so that I can test my procedures before upgrading the live system, does that violate the licensing agreement? (I will have 2 IP addresses using the same license).

I also am developing custom code for our company. Does it violate the license agreement to make an operational copy of Sugar Professional to use for development purposes?

I know some of you will suggest that I simply use Sugar Open Source for development. That's what I have done until now, but there are always problems when I move the code to Sugar Professional. The database schemas are not identical between the two. For example, my accounts/contacts import routines failed because there is another field "team" in the professional tables that doesn't exist in open source.

Thank you!

John Kounis

[longreach]

Excellent questions

Yes - suspect option 1 is the way to go on your first issue.

Have never seen an official position on the second issue, but it would be nice to get it on the record here, as they are very real issues for essentially every sysadmin. Suspect it might be best to at least combine the test and dev instances, so you would only have two installations - but the license may not even allow that.

[pilotget]

You mentioned that you "Suspect it might be best to at least combine the test and dev instances..." I don't understand what you mean by this. Are you recommending that I run both on the same hardware platform rather than copying it onto my local server for testing purposes, or something else?

[julian]

Hello pilotget,

I agree that #1 is the most viable option.

For the issue you brought up into #2, however, I've begun a discussion with the engineering team. I don't see why the default 'admin' user's id needs to be 1-- perhaps we can get it changed in a random GUID in a future version.

[deji]

Julian, I'm seriously considering deploying Sugar CRM, but i would like to know if i can replace the CRM Logo with my company's and what are the conditions for this. Thank you.

[JVWay]

Yes, you can upload your logo. In Admin | System Settings there is in fact a facility for that use. It even tells you the size of the file you need.

In terms of setting up another install Sugar does not "phone home". You can create a second install for testing, add in your download key and all will be fine.

I'd suggest getting it into a VMware environment. This will allow you to do testing and rollback to a known good state if things go wrong.

Jerry