Considering SugarCRM

[bjohnsonvg]

My company is considering deploying SugarCRM to our internal and external staff. We currently have a in house developed corporate outreach application in place. We were looking at salesforce but the cost just wasn't going to be approved through our budget process. The main reason for arriving at Sugar was for the CE product. I am coming from the more technical end of the house, and my partner in this project is coming from a salesforce background. We are the team that is to prove sugarcrm can handle our needs as a company and outperform our in house application.

Questions:

1.) What are the main differences between SugarCRM CE and Pro - I know there are a lot of little things but if somebody could highlight the major points that would be great.

2.) I installed the Fasttrack product with example data in a matter of minutes and everything is up and running smoothly for the CE product. How easy is it to upgrade to Pro if our budget task force sees fit to allocate money to us in the future?

3.) Our installation will have about 100 to 125 users in total. We will be maintaining 5000 contacts. Each operating unit will be developing their own corporate outreach in their region using the CRM - developing projects, tasks, etc. Can Sugar handle that load?

4.) In reading through the forums I have seen items concerning team/groups not available in the CE edition. I am not sure quite what that means, but people seem to be pissed about it. What is the impact of this? Our organization will be Grouped by region with a director for each region and mutliple business units under each region. We also have an executive level that will want reports over the whole group in addition to regional reporting. Does the team/groups issue in CE effect something like this?

Thanks everyone. If we do go this route I would love to get involved with the Midwest User group as it looks like it is lacking some much needed attention. Thanks again.

Brian

[kuske]

Hi, we introduded SugarCRM last October as a replacement for SalesForce.com.

To your questions:

1. The main differences are shown in http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html . So you can see that the PRO edition offers reporting ( no problem to implement with full db-access), teams (there is a teamos addon for ce), forecasting, productcatalog, quotes&contracts (there is a opensales addon for ce), workflow ( can be implemented by logic hooks).

2. I never needed to do this, but, as the database should be the same, I think no problem.

3. We have around 130 users handling ca. 6000 contacts. Our server runs with ca. 5% load.

4. The effect to have no teams is that everybody sees all data. In our SalesForce.com installation we had this feature and we had always problems managing the visibility of data to certain persons. Now we are happe to habe no restrictions in our self written reporting. AND you can try teamos, a Opensource team solution if you want.

[malcolmh]

Hi,

I will add a couple of comments to kuske's excellent post.

To 2) If you decide to start with CE, then upgrade later to PRO, Sugar provides a CE to PRO utility that converts a CE to PRO. We have done this successfully with several of our customers.

To 4) Without the teams/group module in PRO, you can still limit access to data in two ways, which may or may not meet your requirements: 1) using the "reports to" function in users e.g. B & C report to A and D reports to B, A sees all the data, B sees his own and D'S data, C only sees his own data. 2) using roles you can then define what each user can do with that data, e.g in the example above, give A only read access to data and say D cannot delete data etc.

With the Team component you can group people together to see each others data, e.g. add B, C & D to Team HQ, then B, C, & D can see each other's data, D, can see all the data, but can't delete anything. As A is higher in the hierarchy, A also sees all the data in Team HQ. If you wanted to give C access to D'S data without the above team you would create a team between C & D.

Hope this helps