Customer Portal & Case Management Questions

[MuppetMaster]

We have some questions as we are finalizing our internal CRM selection. Right now we are evaluating the opensource version of Sugar (with the possibility of going with the commericial/add-ons at a later date) and that 'other' opensource fork of Sugar, which will will refer to as Zeus since Sugar appears to block its name in these forums. As of now, our selection team prefers Sugar due to the ease of extensibility with some of our other systems.

Having said this, our short term priority is for case management/customer support, and Zues appears to be stronger for this. For example, Zeus has a built-in customer portal for support, while Sugar does not (add-ons via Mambo and TribalCMS, but apparently based on old versions of Sugar and the CMS platforms - and even more concerning with the fracture at Mambo) and in Sugar cases are assigned globally to an account as opposed to a user (so for example, you can not auto-generate emails based on case state changes).

We have searched the Sugar website, the forums and Google and have not found any solutions for a good customer portal, which is a requirement for us. Any ideas or resources we have not been able to find yet?

[rpmorgan]

It would be nice if someone would answer this question.. as it's also critical for me to have customer portal module / function.

[longreach]

My personal feeling is that the Mambo-Sugar project's time has passed, and that a Joomla-Sugar link, with a superior architecture (especially in the area of shared authentication) needs to be developed. Once that is in place, additional application modules may be put in place for the portal - all levering a common authentication model. We are hoping to get this done with Jamboworks and a group of customers. If we are successful the results will be available via SugarForge.

[rpmorgan]

I've been looking on sugarforge and haven't found much, so with all of sugarCMs installed clients are you to tell me that none of them have a need to integrate a client portal into their CRM solution and that an OS solution for this has never been done?

[sansbury]

I could live happily with a lot less than a full "portal" solution. All I need is a way to allow a client/partner to login and view/enter/update cases and bugs associated with them only. It's not the ideal solution but would allow me to centralize all my customer support in Sugar.

[y2chuck]

I currently use SugarCRM 3.5.1e and Mambo 4.5.3 for my portal. It really depends on how complex of a support portal you need. Mambo works perfectly for me as it integrates the Case and Bugs Sugar modules and I wrote a VERY simple document section that allows my Sugar users to post documents and mark them for portal use.

It's not very elegant, but it works in my situation. The only problem I have now is that the Mambo sugar components will not work with 4.0 (well, it might, but not officially...) and 4.0 has a bunch of Campaign features I need as well as inbound email monitoring.

[julian]

Hello all,

I've been in charge of deploying the Mambo components (twice) and have met with success both times.

While the components have not been tested against Joomla (and are not yet designed to work with it), some community members have been able to install them without a problem. For an example of how the Bug Portal can be set up, check out Sugar's Bug Tracker here:

http://bugs.sugarcrm.com/

I'd be happy to answer any questions about functionality/implementation/limitations of the portal components.

[csc]

Hi,

I am having a problerm with the joomla bugs component. Users can enter bugs but they cannot followup and see that status of any bugs they have entered and the search option does not work. Any ideas? Does your bugs component work?

Thanks

Ed

[excess1973]

where do you get this joombla component. Did you build it, program it, or is it a module?
Are there other modules or how to's on setting up the bug tracker for the public.
Sorry I'm somewhat of a newbie and have no clue at the moment.
Thanks