Sugar CRM Funictionality Questions

[tittlerm]

Hey everyone,

We have a customer that is currently looking for an upgrade to their existing solution (currently using ACT for Notes v.3 integrated with Domino 5). Their goal is to centralize all of their customer information so they can avoid duplicates, keep up to date customer records, and begin things like sales and marketing initiatives. Below is a list of questions that I'm looking for answers for. Any and all help is appreciated


1. Does SugarCRM only support MySQL, or can it be run on a Microsoft SQL backend?

2. Are you able to modify the database tables (or at least create new tables and associate them)? The customer has an e-faxing solution that currently requires them to send a specially formatted e-mail in order to send a fax, and they need to store this information somewhere (maybe they could put it in the contact record as an alternative).

3. Can contact fields be added/customized/queried?

4. Is there any way to audit/record e-mail and e-fax transactions, and associate them to customers?

5. How is the reliability and performance with Sugar CRM and MySQL?

6. Can users be prevented from exporting and printing customer records?

7. Will our client be able to write with Visual FoxPro, .NET, and VisualStudio, and be able to integrate well with the MySQL back-end? Is it substantially easier to do development with PHP?

Again, thanks for everyone's time, and have a good holiday!

-Matt

Matthew Tittler
SMPL Technologies
tittlerm@smpltechnologies.com

[gdoss]

1. http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/about/pr...microsoft.html Not sure if it is in play yet since we are happy with MySQL, but MS SQL is/will work with SugarCRM.

2. Don't know. Though yes, you can modify or create new tables and associate them. The code is open source and in your hands. You can do whatever you want as long as the Sugar logo stays at the bottom.

3. Yes.

4. I don't know the technical details of what you are looking for, but I'm sure you could explain your needs to some WAMP/LAMP programmer and have them do what you want.

5. Has been reliable for six months. Performance has been relatively quick. It is still a web-app so it has its performance limitations.

6. Exporting yes. Printing... unless you somehow disable printing from a browser, no. Though anyone could get around that with a screenshot.

7. Don't know the first part. For the second part, since it is written in PHP, yes, yes it is substantially easier to develop in PHP for SugarCRM.

[Proware]

I am a VFP programmer and can easily manipulate Sugar data using the Sugar ODBC connector.

However, we have also had to learn PHP as this is what Sugar is written in.

[andydreisch]

Hi all, a quick note that support for MS-SQL will be available starting with our 4.5 release. This release is targeted in August.

Andy