How to best handle emails and associations in Sugar

[carl.giljam]

Hi Forum,
I'm fairly new to SugarCRM, came in during late 2008 and have evaluated 5.1 for a while and recently upgraded to 5.2 (then downgraded again...too many bugs).

Email handling seems very (very...) heavy to me. Have a look below, am I doing something wrong?

Here's how I have handled my own emails during the testing:

1. I first log on to our IMAP server and kill all Spam, since it is too slow in Sugar and also Sugar seems to be unable to delete emails off the IMAP server. Sugar is very slow so handling the simple deletion of 10-15 spam emails just take too long there. When I tried to delete from within Sugar, the email seemed to go away but it crept up again later. It was definitely left on our IMAP server.

2. Getting Emails from our IMAP server - it doesn't seem as if the right click and "check for new email" is reliable..Sometimes it finds (some of the) emails, but not all. I found though that if I go into general settings, go to the actual email account tab and click SAVE (with no changes), it does get all emails right. It appears to use a better "get emails" routine here. I don't want to set it to automatically get all emails as I then would get the spam as well and these are much faster removed when logged onto the IMAP server itself.

3. Once I have an email visible in Sugar, I first import it (strange....I thought that was what I did when I "got the email" but apparently not). I set the drop down list with relationships to the right account but as I want to use more than 1 relationship, I have to do one more step: After import, I click the relationships and set these for
a) contact
b) account (well....that was set in step one, just mentioning it here to make list complete)
c) project (if required)
d) contact2 etc (if required)
I also read the email here (because it comes up in a bigger window so easier to read) and decide if I need to reply to it.

4. I reply if needed. Then I go back into sent emails (in Sugar) and click the relationships again and yet again set them to the same list as above because it seems that sugar only carries over one relationship (usually account).

That's it. Takes a long time. Not sure if I can ask our staff to do all this.

The problems I can see are:

- Sugar does not automatically relate an email from a known email address to the right contact and account (both!). So I have to do it manually. This should really be done automatically, or there should be a switch to set if I want it this way.

- When I reply to the same (now well organised) email, Sugar again fails to relate it properly. If I have related it to an account, a contact, a project and an employee, Sugar only carries over one of these. It seems Sugar can only handle one relationship automatically. If an incoming email has 4 associations, then I think a reply to this should be automatically associated in the same way.

- If the email is to/from an employee or user (not a normal contact), it seems I can ONLY set the relationship in a separate manual step. Employee/user isn't even on the drop down box for the quick association.

I really miss more options for setting automatic recognition of email addresses and having Sugar automatically relate these to both contact and account (if I choose to set it that way).

I also think Sugar should maintain multiple relationships when I reply to an email (automatically).

So why do I want many associations? Well, if the email relates to a project, then 6 months later that project might be history and deleted from Sugar. In this case the email becomes "headless". It then won't show up under the contact and the account.

Also, if I talk to contact X on the phone, I really want to see ALL communication with X on my screen.

Also, if I want to see if I've discussed some product of some company with them, I would like to pull up the account and glance through all communication with that company, regardless of what contact it is. So in this case it is not enough to relate to a contact only - it appears that sugar does NOT relate to the account if I relate to a contact (belonging to that account)? (questionmark....because I might have got that wrong). Surely if I relate to a daughter (contact), there should be a relationship with the mother (account) automatically created?

Finally - speed. I'm running my test version of SugarCRM on a production server with decent resources (2xXeon 3.06, enough memory etc) but it is painfully slow (even late nights when no-one else is logged on and even if I shut down other resource guzzlers). It can typically take 1.5 minutes just to import an email, relate it to account and contact. I've noticed there is often some 20-30 seconds delay just to pull up a contact with all communication details (searching for the contact, clicking the right links, etc). Is this normal?

I will try and put SugarCRM on a dedicated server for test purposes, but from the experiences above I don't expect a lot of more speed although I would love to be proved wrong.

I'm grateful for any comments & ideas as I'm really keen to implement SugarCRM for our sales staff.

Carl.

[carl.giljam]

Anyone? Surely you can't all think of the email handling as perfect? And if you do....could someone give me a hint what I may be doing wrong?

Have tried setting up some sort of group email box as some forum posts hinted that may do the trick of automatically importing AND associating. Failed so far though, it is rather messy so if someone could give some guidelines (please don't just point to other threads in this forum, I've tried them and failed...).

[JVWay]

Carl,
You have a lot of questions in there so it would be time consuming for someone to want to answer this so I'll be general as it's the end of the day on Friday and I don't want to do much else .

The email in 5.x is progressing. Sugar is trying to make it fairly feature rich and some may say too rich. But it's getting there. I've just upgraded a system from 5.0h to 5.2 and have only run into one bug of note but I have a very stable system.

Yes, from the email client in Sugar you can only relate to one thing at a time, but the relationships cascade. Meaning, if you relate it to a contact, from the account view you will also see those emails with the contact it's related to listed. The system works like this all over the place.

I was never at 5.1x but in 5.2 you can specify a deleted items and sent items folder that resides on you email server. (it would be helpful if you mentioned what your email server is) We are using exchange and since this addition I've not had any emails I've deleted come back.

1.5 minutes per email indicates another problem. We are also running on fairly powerful hardware but it is on a Centos system running XEN virtualization. So this server is also serving two Sugar instances, a MySql database and a content management system. Our emails are nearly instantaneous.

In 5.2 if you click on an email from the list under a related entity like a contact there is a Reply button. If you use this then the reply email is related to the record. I'd rethink the desire to have emails automatically joined to Sugar records. You'd probably end up with a great deal of cruft from small comments exchanged. I recommend to my users that they join the end of an email exchange rather than every little message. You say you want to see all communications whenever you're talking. If you had every email joined up that would be impossible if you exchanged much at all.

The pro version has some excellent reporting that allows you to search text to pull up salient info. There are add-on reporting tools if you don't do the pro version.

You don't mention your underlying OS but I tried running Sugar on Windows and it sucked.
Definitely handle your spam at that gateway. Letting it get to any client to manually delete would certainly be a problem no matter what.

Finally I'd say that I read a lot of griping on the forums about Sugar but I've been running from more than a year on the 5.0 stack with no stability problems and great praise from my user base. Including a rather dyed-in-the-wool Salesforce user. I've done a good deal of customizing and the upgrade to 5.2 when very smoothly.

It's hard to say what the issues you're facing in terms of speed are but I've even had production Sugar running in a VMware with good speed. Running it on a stripped down Linux box is really the way to go. This has the added benefit of low licensing costs and low attack surface.

[carl.giljam]

Hi Jerry
Thanks for your comments, sorry for the delay in reply, I got caught up in something else for a while (normal life that was...). I appreciate all help I can get here and you're right...I put too much in one post.

RELATIONSHIPS [PARTIALLY SOLVED]

I didn't realise about the cascading, but you were right - sort of. That solves a bit of the problem, saves me one step extra in most cases. It is very confusing though.
I would still of course prefer if I chose manually which emails to import, then when importing SugarCRM automatically relates to the sending email if in database. Over 2-3 months I have had to do this for every single email without exception (because the ones I don't want to relate, I don't import) so it should really be automated (or left as a choice).
Here's what is very confusing:
I get an email from John Smith of Enterprise Ltd, relate it to John Smith. So far so good, it turns up everywhere as it should. I reply to it, without relating anything. It then still turns up under both John Smith and Enterprise Ltd., but when looking at Enterprise Ltd, there will be nothing in the "Contact" column. If looking at the contact John Smith, there is also nothing in the contact column (now THAT is strange, surely it appears here because it has related the email to the contact John Smith). In some cases (not found pattern there yet), it does NOT turn up under the account name though, only under the contact (still testing, can't see any clear pattern). If I do "View Relationships" on the email, there are none. So why is it turning up under account and contact....strange.

DELETED EMAILS NOT RELIABLE [COMPLETELY SOLVED!]

We use IMAIL 8.22 as email server. It turns out that the "Deleted" folder is not created until you delete your first email. We have the setting to "Purge" emails so they never go to the "Deleted" folder and so it was never created. The tricky thing was that IMAIL web interface still shows it (as empty) by default. By changing from "Purge" to "Send to Deleted" and deleting one email, it got created and everything works with SugarCRM.
Thanks for your mentioning of the Deleted folder, that's what made me doubt that it really existed.

BUGS [STILL THERE]

The major bug I have (in both 5.2 and 5.1) is that when I click REPLY to an imported email, it does not always get saved in the SENT (local) folder although it does send properly and is saved OK on the email server. It seems to have something to do with the email address(-es) I use, maybe the fact that I use several (on the same email server). In one instance (I'm working with both 5.1 and 5.2) it seems to work for one sending email address, but not for others etc. I have opened a separate thread for this under Help (no replies yet....).

PERFORMANCE [SOLVED!!]

It really sucks in Windows. However - I tried it on a clean Suse 11 Linux VM (on a host with enough power) and that was a DIFFERENCE! I will definitely put the CRM on it's own Linux machine, thanks for the hint there.
For others reading this, here are some typical timings to compare yours with:
(Windows) Clicking Email tab from home page in Sugar - 15 seconds (every time).
(Linux) Same thing - 5 seconds.
Both machines are VM:s, clean, actually running on the same host. Linux simply feel "instant" while Windows is a lot of waiting between clicks..
MySQL + Sugar on the same machine (in both cases above).

Thanks again Jerry, I had given up on SugarCRM but after reading your reply I decided to give it one more shot and it certainly looks better now, performance being the major problem and that's now solved.

[ddbtek]

Setup:

Sugar CRM CE 5.2.0
Mysql 5.1
PHP 5.2.1
OS RHEL4

Have to say that 5.2.0 looks nice and in many ways works very well. Have found it to be a lot more reliable. But the email area is really not working well. It's nice to go after "feature-rich" but not at the expense of reliability. We're seeing these issues:

* can't send an email with attachments from filesystem or sugar document library, it just stalls
* can't save draft if there is an attachment, it just disappears, no errors
* sugar and php 5.2 version conflict causes email cronjob failure, working on that code bug
* group folders do not seem to properly fetch from IMAP server. They fetch nothing even though "test" works and mail exists in IMAP.
* does not properly fetch sub-folder-folders in IMAP directory tree during mailbox configuration, but can manually enter them and they work fine.
* PHP errors "Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in InboundEmail.php on line 5974
* PHP errors "Undefined variable: cacheUsed in InboundEmail.php on line 5940

No errors are showing up sugarcrm.log

We've noted speed with IMAP is not an issue and sending without attachments and replies seem to work fine.

We're looking at the above PHP errors to see if we can identify it. Solving that will probably solve the attachment issue.

Cheers,
David