assigning accounts to more than one person

[vinouspleasure]

Hi,

Is it possible to assign an account to more than one employee in the open source version? If not, is there an add-on module that will provide this capability?

tia,
jd

[salesagility]

No, there's no native way of doing this. But you may be able to use one of the Teams modules in sugarforge to deliver similar functionality.

I'm curious, why would you want to do this?

[vinouspleasure]

thanks for your reply. By way of example, we have a consulting company that works as follows:

- we assign a sales person the citibank account
- we'd like to assign solution partner(s) to the same account to provide pre and post sales support. We'd also like to provide the sales director with the capabilitiy to look at the employees data.
- the citibank account grows to the point we need two sales persons to cover the account.

does this make sense or is there a way to accomplish this without creating a one to many relationship between account and sales person (employee). I believe the paid-for editions of sugar support this concept. btw, I searched sugarexchange for "teams" and came up empty. Is there a particular module(s) you can recommend?

tia,
jd

[roblaus]

i guess you're mixing up two or three (Sugar) concepts.

1. Assigning more pople/companies to an account - this can be achieved by assigning opportunities and or projects to the account. I makes a lot more sense because you might run a couple of sales activities in parallel, each with different people and partners. Nonetheless you may need some small customizations in order to see e.g the total forecast for this account.

2. Salespeople. Sugar uses the record owner (usually the sales guy) in order to realize sort of a role based permisson scheme. This doesn't allow for a second person. If permissions are of lesser interest you may add as many sales people as you want but they will be normal contacts in an opportunity with a specific role.

3. Permissions. The CE version doesn't support teams out of the box but this can be easily compensated by using CE teams for the masses (free) or the security suite (which costs a little money). But please be aware of the fact that neither Sugar Pro nor the team substiutes can assign Sugar (permission) roles to teams. It's always on off - a team sees or doesn't see a record. Hierarchies are possible though. Extended permissions (read, list, delete, edit...) are always tied to the owner of a record and this is one and only one user.

And yes, it's a bit complicated...

[vinouspleasure]

thanks, I'm pretty sure I don't understand what you mean but we're going to take the security suite for a test drive and I should be a better position to understand your comments post our eval.

[eggsurplus]

But please be aware of the fact that neither Sugar Pro nor the team substiutes can assign Sugar (permission) roles to teams

Just an FYI, in Security Suite you can assign one or more roles directly to a team. The user's rights will be determined by the collection of roles that are assigned directly to the user and inherited through the user's team memberships as specified in the module's options.

Also, the rights are determined by which team is assigned to a record. For example, if a user is a member of Team A and Team B and a record is assigned to Team A the user will have only the rights assigned to Team A for that record. Team B's rights will not take play. Hope that helps clarify things a bit.

[roblaus]

Jason - maybe you can clarify one thing for me: would it be possible with your tool to have a number of departments where everybody (the whole company) is allowed to see everything (contacts and accounts in this case) but only department members can edit records belonging to them? Plus there are a few people (non admins) who can see AND change everything.

[eggsurplus]

Correct, that is possible. You'd set the roles for View to All and Edit to Group Only. For those few people who can edit everything you'd simply assign them an additional role that grants them the appropriate access either directly to the user or to a Full Rights Team.

[roblaus]

Perfect. Just tested it...