Evaluating SugarCRM ... a few questions

[twhiteford]

We are looking at a few different on-demand CRM packages. I had a few initial questions and would greatly appreciate any input that folks on this forum might have.

1. How do mobile sales reps access contact information on the road when they are not connected? How would they create new notes for an account without connectivity? Is there any offline capability with SugarCRM?

2. What level of customization is there with SugarCRM? With it being open source ... any changes we would make obviously would then make our installation not that easy to upgrade.

The customizations we would like to make involve adding additional fields to a case or account. Is there a UI for this or do you need to modify the SQL database?

3. The pricing is a little confusing ... at $40/user/month for the Professional edition it is very close to the $65/user/month that salesforce.com is quoting ... it is tough to pick SugarCRM when the pricing is so close. I think $10-$15 /user/month is a scenario that can be justified a little easier.

4. Staying on the pricing topic ... iRadeon is a company that is offering SugarCRM for $8/user/month. I assume this is the free version. Does anybody have any experience with them?

5. Does anybody have a link to a document explaining the detailed difference between Professional and Free edition. I will try searching the forum for this.

That's all my questions for now. We are a small company with about 10-15 users of the CRM and Support Package.

Thanks in advance for any comments,

Tom

[longreach]

I have had a lot of Salesforce.com customers convert to Sugar and/or Info At Hand - and they all tell me that salesforce quotes $65 to start, but that in fact they wound up paying $130 US per user per month.

For mobile users - you can use Sync4j to sync mobile devices - but that just syncs objects like calendar, contacts, tasks.

Sugar Enterprise has an offline client, and the same offline client is a $100 per user per annum optiion for self-hosted Pro.

Sugar has a UI (in the Admin area) for basic customization features such as you describe - and customizations may be migrated to future versions automatically. More advanced customizations require code changes - and then you need to track those changes across version upgrades. We find that upgrading code changes to another version takes about 10% of the effort to create them in the first place.

[malcolmh]

Tom,

In additions to the above comments, there is mobile access through any WAP enabled device, like a mobile phone or PDA , standard with Sugar Professional & Sugar Enterprise versions.

Comparing features between SugarCRM and salesforce.com you need to comparg Sugar Professional with the Enterprise version of salesforce.com

Also you can synchronize contacts, activities and notes attached to appointments between SugarCRM and MS Outlook.

Look at this link for more information on the differences between the different editions: http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html

[ftreml]

What level of customization is there with SugarCRM? With it being open source ... any changes we would make obviously would then make our installation not that easy to upgrade.

It is possible to adapt every single facet of Sugar, as you have the source code. there are certain adaptions which won't affect upgrades, and other ones (mainly when changing original files) which have to be redone on upgrades. Sugar has the "Module Loader" which can be used to build a package from your modifications and apply them to an upgraded version with a single click (ok, honestly spoken, there are four clicks involved).

The customizations we would like to make involve adding additional fields to a case or account. Is there a UI for this or do you need to modify the SQL database?

If there are fields in the Account or Case module which you don't need and loosely match your new fields, it would be best to simply rename these fields to maintain upgradability. You can use the "Sugar Studio" in the "Admin" section to add custom fields to these modules.

Florian