Newbie question - Is SugarCRm a good choice for legal market?

[Freemyer]

All,

I've installed SugarCRM 5.2 and it looks promising. We sell our "expert" services into the legal market.

Being brand new to Sugar, I don't know if we lose compatibility with future Sugar upgrades if we start customizing it. I definitely would not want to fork off an entire new branch just for us.

One key feature we need is the ability to perform conflict checks. Basically that comes down to having a way to enter all the parties in a civil litigation. Then when a new opp comes along, perform a search and see if we've ever worked for any of the parties before. If so, we have to notify the new potential client so they can determine if they want to proceed or not with us as an option for them.

I don't see any plugins at www.sugarforge.org and www.sugarexchange.com along those lines.

We can likely extend Sugar ourselves to do the conflict check, but again I would not want to lose the ability to upgrade Sugar in the future.

So my question is how extensible is Sugar? Can we add make fairly major changes like the above without breaking our upgrade path?

If so, what are some good resources (websites, books, wikis) for how to do the customizations in a maintainable way?

Thanks
Greg

[susiewilliams]

Hi Greg,

I would start with the Developer Guide (located as a link from the home page of the Developer website). This guide will give you a good introduction to developing your customizations in Sugar, and it touches on what's upgrade safe and what isn't.

In general, customizations made through Studio and Module Builder are upgrade safe. When you start modifying the code, you need to be aware of how to make modifications that are upgrade safe.

[kuske]

Preface:
Everything I write here is without warranty of any kind and I assume no responsibility for what I write here.

If you enter all your clients in Sugar as accounts and if you add all your opps as Opportunities you could define any litigation as a "Project" with opportunities and accounts associated with.
So you could use Sugar standard features to build up a knowledbase on you business.
With the global search you can always find any client and with the associated project you can see all involved parties and cases.

I think - this is my personel oppinion - version 520 contains all you nedd without any plugin or extension.

[crmsiva]

SugarCRM has been downloaded more than 2 Million times. IMO - It is the best Opensource CRM in the world. So, SugarCRM is definitely a good choice.

[sugarcane]

Hi Greg,

you can definitely use Sugar for the legal market. Minor changes to fields and field names could be done which would not affect an upgrade, and make the system more relevant to the legal market (in terms of fields and legal lingo).

There are different search mechanisms within the system, so that you can easily search and perform conflict checks. We would really need to know more details about your specific use case to recommend a best approach, and which modules to use to fit your needs. As kuske mentioned, account, opportunities, and projects can be used, but this can also be achieved with contacts or other modules repurposed to best fit your needs. If you are interested in a workshop to discuss your use case and determine the best approach, please contact Ray Stoeckicht at rays@intelestream.net or 888-435-2221.

good luck!