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Outlook, Bugs and Disappointed Customers
Today we had our first client disaster, and I wanted to put the main details up for discussion as I think that this kind of situation is likely to crop up alot.
We had begun an implementation for a customer in the creative and marketing industry. Deploying SugarCRM CE 5.0. We have been working on our clients requirements for some time. We understood that they used MS Outlook significantly, and that much of their communication with clients and associated was via the medium of Email. Additionally they are a project lead organisation, who use alot of briefing papers, PDF documents and Images etc..
Further more they have strong brand guidelines and want to create a fixed look and feel to their email communications using simple images, coupled with fonts with defined size and colours. The main functionality of SugarCRM was exactly what they required, but the integration with MS Outlook was not suitable via the MS Outlook plugin connector, because of the Project lead nature of the business.
So here are a list of issues that the customer put forward to us after 7 days of working on SugarCRM
LIST OF ISSUES:-
The email typing field can lose text at the end of the lines. This need to keep the text in the main typing window.
'To' Field and others on email - Mostly a problem in the Sent Items view, does not have the To: field instead it shows From (i.e the user ! ?)
Width of 'To', 'From', 'Subject' columns on emails, they can be adjusted from the main view and they can be dragged around, but they return to defaults as soon as the screen refreshes, why allow the rag and drop if they get put straight back ?
Is there a function that will automatically remember or ask if email address that have been received or sent to can be remembered/added to the address book?
Sometimes signatures don't work when sending to external email addresses - e.g hotmail
Flagging emails (prioritising). The flags are simple ! - perhaps it would be possible to add a selection of Flags
Lost attachments to email - e.g. Tom 23/08/08 13:25 - In this example the email content is completely missing, I wonder if it has been stripped due to its formatting ?
Was not able to copy a 'print screen grab' and paste it into a SugarCRM email?
Lots of formatting is going 'strange' - particularly when I forward emails? Multiple line spaces, image positions etc..
Forwarding does not work well. How can I delete the previous email text?
Is there a way that the attached file in an email can be checked/opened? - Is it possible to make the attachments links so that the attachment can be downloaded and opened. This would make the client for more like a native desktop application, and allow for attachments to be checked immediatley before sending.
Why do the emails (from forwarded/reply) get so spread out? - The formatting seems to have multiple the LF or CR making the line spacing in the original text bigger
Attachments? It would be good to have an attachment flag, say like a little paper clip.
When sending attachments - when you go in and out of an email they seem to automatically attach 2 or 3 times. - E.G Create an email and attach a file then save this to drafts and reopen, check the attachments and see that the number of attachments has multiplied.
Tab key to get to body of email - currently goes through each icon on toolbar. Is there anyway to force the tabbing order on the email composition window ?
Symbols on e mails to show Reply, Forward etc. i.e Little envelope icons, llke outlook which relates back to the message status
In Outlook when you load an email in the preview pain, it does not get marked as read. It only gets marked as read when opened fully in its own window. Is it possible to replicate this behaviour.
When replying to an email with Replyall, the users address also gets added, causing a copy of the email to be sent to ones self.
LIST ENDS
And the final nail in the coffin is this little Gem
Our clients customer is developing a PDF brochure, and they are updating the file and emailing the updates, which are received in SugarCRM. The attached file is always the same name, but that data had been updated. The first file that was originally received is the only one that is downloadable from the attachment link, even thought there mught have ben several subsequent revisions, the first copy is always the one that is attached.
This problem looks as though Sugar is associating the attachment file name to a file in the cache, and when an new attachment arrives with the same name, its being linked to the original file. I have to say I was mortally embarrassed by that one. This all gets topped off with the user using Hotmail to handle their email.
Needless to say we have had to postpone the deployment and project role out, and our customer has gone back to MS Outlook.
We are really keen to look at this experience from a positive stand point, and we want to work with the development team to address these issues.
Most of all we would really like to get some feedback on this from the community.
What can be done ?
How did these bugs get through Beta and RC testing ?
How can we better bridge that awful adoption barrier MS Outlook ?
Best Wishes
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