Newbi: How to?

[jbarzuna]

We are looking for an alternative for Goldmine, we recently installed Sugar to test and have not been able to figure out how to do several things which I believe Sugar can handle but we just have not been able to figure it out:

1- Schedule recurring activities ( a meeting every 1rst Monday of the month for next 10 months, a reminder to bill a customer every year on the anniversary of product purchase), this seems like a basic need in CRM but could not find it
2- We found the field for birthday, however I have been totally unable to figure out how to make a filter to know which contacts will have their birthday withing the month or the next week, there does not seem to be a way to filter contacts based on birthday information
3- We have been unable to figure out how to enter what Goldmine calls contact details, this is similar to the emails field where you could have one email or 50 and you would just keep adding records for every additional email where EMAIL would be the type of detail and every email listed would be part of a list of values, for example, if you had a customer with 3 different credit cards that he uses to purchase from you you could keep track of the different cards by having a detail called CREDITCARD with a field with the card issuer, the card number and the expiration date, since not all customers would pay by credit card or have more than one card then the fields get attached one at a time on a need to basis

Best regards,

Jose

[andopes]

Hi Jose

1- Schedule recurring activities ( a meeting every 1rst Monday of the month for next 10 months, a reminder to bill a customer every year on the anniversary of product purchase), this seems like a basic need in CRM but could not find it

This is possible but require programming. We had did it for some customers and it works like a charm.

2- We found the field for birthday, however I have been totally unable to figure out how to make a filter to know which contacts will have their birthday withing the month or the next week, there does not seem to be a way to filter contacts based on birthday information

This also needs programming. We had no developed it before, but we know the way to do this in an upgrade safe way (without modifying core files).

3- We have been unable to figure out how to enter what Goldmine calls contact details, this is similar to the emails field where you could have one email or 50 and you would just keep adding records for every additional email where EMAIL would be the type of detail and every email listed would be part of a list of values, for example, if you had a customer with 3 different credit cards that he uses to purchase from you you could keep track of the different cards by having a detail called CREDITCARD with a field with the card issuer, the card number and the expiration date, since not all customers would pay by credit card or have more than one card then the fields get attached one at a time on a need to basis

This also needs programming. Actually we are developing an easy to implement code to perform requirements like that.
Perhaps it is possible to extends the existing code for email, but I can not tell right now how upgrade safe it is.

SugarCRM is a powerful and flexible CRM solution and Development Frame Work, so some features should not be implemented by default but they can be coded without big deal.

Ping me on skype (dtokeefe) if you need to discuss some points.

Kind regards

[hubcrm]

1- Schedule recurring activities ( a meeting every 1rst Monday of the month for next 10 months, a reminder to bill a customer every year on the anniversary of product purchase), this seems like a basic need in CRM but could not find it

- The second part of the first request is a part of the Pro product under contracts and you could then use workflow to create a reminder. The first part indeed requires development. I can vouch for andre and the rest of the team at Lampada. Good guys. Not sure what happens with outlook when you create a repeating appointment in outlook and sync through the plugin. I expect it does something unhelpful with it.

2- We found the field for birthday, however I have been totally unable to figure out how to make a filter to know which contacts will have their birthday withing the month or the next week, there does not seem to be a way to filter contacts based on birthday information.

You might actuslly solve this simpler by hiding the birthday field in the layout and replacing it for a custom birthday field. Maybe call it report_birthday. You should then be able to specify it as reportable.

3- We have been unable to figure out how to enter what Goldmine calls contact details, this is similar to the emails field where you could have one email or 50 and you would just keep adding records for every additional email where EMAIL would be the type of detail and every email listed would be part of a list of values, for example, if you had a customer with 3 different credit cards that he uses to purchase from you you could keep track of the different cards by having a detail called CREDITCARD with a field with the card issuer, the card number and the expiration date, since not all customers would pay by credit card or have more than one card then the fields get attached one at a time on a need to basis

- again it does require development but you may be able to work that out yourself in module builder. Neither of the above two customisations are going to cost you a lot.

Some food for thought for you. Old versions of goldmine are very flatly architected. You likely need to spend some time thinking about your existing contact database and how it translates to SugarCRM. Sugar manages a transitio0n of a contact where Goldmine tends to dump everything into one pot and then manages transition of a contact from prospect to client etc through a dropdown. So for migration think about contacts in buckets and where each one should go. This assumes you're migrating.

Later versions of Goldmine I'm told have nice integration with Outlook. Other than that no contest. Don't think of it as an alternative, think a step forward in CRM.

[jbarzuna]

Thanks for the insight, I am exploring the suggestions provided and some potential avenues that I have found in the different forums over the weekend.

One additional question:

If we choose to include additional variables or programming, where can we find the proper procedures to make changes upgrade safe? since I started testing Sugar the program has been updated form version 5.1a to 5.1b to 5.1c and now 5.2 in just a few days so we recognize the importance of making any programming efforts in a manner that constant upgrades will not require constant module fixing.

We believe to have iron most of the requirements to initiate the move to Sugar, our IT is preparing the migration to start using the community edition on January 5th and Management has decided to start with a fresh installation migrating only basic contact information, the old Goldmine will remain as a consultation tool for a couple of years instead of investing in moving all data, for years we felt that Goldmine, at least the edition we were using V6.0 running on the Borland database engine, was rather unstable and prone to getting database corruptions, for years we maintained contact with FrontRange attempting to resolve the issues, further, our servers are Linux and we move more and more towards Linux every year that goes by and Goldmine does not seem to have an interest in migrating any of its programming to Linux which was a real problem that required us to maintain two separate systems, being the Windows server an XP system with the limitations of it, especially the lack of capacity to have more than 10 users logged on at the same time due to the connections limit of XP, thus the management decision, the amount of real CRM information in our current Goldmine is not all that trustworthy nor as valuable as if Goldmine had been more stable and management feels better inclined to get started from fresh as a long term investment

Best regards,

Jose