n:m relationship Contact to User

[jlabuelo]

Good Morning

We are trying to adapt SugarCRM CE 5.2 to our new business needs. We are now in the situation where we have two sales divisions which are related to two product lines.

We would like to get some module that could reproduce the Team functionality of the SugarCRM Pro in SugarCRM CE so we can reproduce the new Sales hierarchy of Team leaders and Sales Agents.

Do you know about any module in SugarForge that we could use? I have been checking CETeams, however I see that there are some questions in the forum of the module regarding the way it works.

Also now, most of the times we have a situation where a contact or account needs to be visited by one sales reps from each division. Our normal behaviour would be assigning those two users to the Contact or Account, so both of them would appear in the data of the user.

Is this possible? Does SugarCRM 5.2 support n:m relationships between Contact/Users and Account/Users.

if not, How does people solve this situation where a contact or account needs to be visited by more than a sales rep??

Thanks a lot for your help in advance!!

[roblaus]

Check out the security suite. The first version is for free, updates (for new/patched Sugar versions) require a small yearly fee. This should solve your problem.
As per design Sugar uses an "owner" concept which is just one user (without additional modules). You may add more than user to appointments and meetings. You can always assign tasks to users (like a presentation) independently from the owner.

[jlabuelo]

Thanks a lot for your quick reply!!

Sorry but dont understand exactly what you mean by "Security Suite". Is it a module you have built? Where can I find it.

I know SugarCRM is based per design in the "owner" concept, but in our opinion in the CRM world, lots of companies share their contacts or accounts between sales reps, so both of them can visit the contact/account for the same product, or for different product like in our case.

I also know that SugarCRM allows you to assign tasks and plan activities to contacts/accounts that are not assigned to the user, however as in the "Role Configuration" we just let the Sales Reps see the contacts or accounts assigned to them so they can plan the activities by their own and manage their agenda, we need this Contact/Account Share.

I know that in previous version with empty SugarCRM CE was not possible, just wondering if now it is.

Also any ideas about how to reproduce the Team functionality in SugarCE, this is also basic for us.

Thanks a lot for your help and time, very appreciated!!

[jlabuelo]

Sorry for asking again, dont know if the answer given by roblaus is definitive (thanks for the answer again btw). I mean is it not possible at all to modify SugarCRM and store a relationship between Contacts-User Account-User n:m where several Contacts are assigned to the same user, and same Contact can have more than anuser assigned????

We used to work with CRM systems like SalesForce.com and Siebel and it is a normal functionality in all our business cases we used, we thought would be the same with SugarCRM.

Please any help with this will be much appreciated, if no n:m relationship can be performed even with an external development, in this case we would need to remove SugarCRM as one of our CRM options.

Please let me know your thoughts

Cheers!!

[jlabuelo]

sorry for this confusion. I just found in another post that "Security Suite" is a module that can reproduce Team functionality and also n:m relationshipts between contacts and users.


I am going to review the documentation and play a little bit around. Will update the post with my conclusions

Cheers