SugarCRM at a software development company?

[eveltman]

Hello everyone,

While looking for issue/defect tracking/support systems, I followed a link to the Jolt Awards Finalists
and coincidentally came across SugarCRM

It looks great and from the short test drive, it seems pretty user friendly too.
I like the way how you can easily create new (linked) bug reports from a case and all the power of having everything (including client/contact info) integrated.

Is there anybody around who's using SugarCRM at a software development company, and is using the customer support and bug tracking functionality of SugarCRM instead of a specialized system?

How do you feel those modules compare against more specialized systems like FogBugz, JIRA, Seapine TestTrack, TechExcel DevTrack, etc.?

In those specialized systems it's usually a no-brainer to set up mailboxes and let the system handle all incoming mail. spam is filtered out, e-mail with case numbers in the subject lines will be appended to an existing case, e-mail without case numbers in the subject become new cases. E-mail notifications are a no-brainer there too, and responses you add to a case are automatically sent to the customer by e-mail.

So my third question ... How good is the e-mail integration in SugarCRM customer support/bug tracking?

Greetings,

Eric

[andydreisch]

Hi eveltman, SugarCRM is a software company that uses SugarCRM!!

Our Support team lives in the Cases module and our Dev team live in the Bugs module and they benefit from the cross-linking of the two.

Sugar Support heavily utilizes inbound email handling as well though there is no auto-responder as yet. We also provide Case and Bug portals for external users. (Case portal for commercial customers only.)

OK, so I'm biased but we run SugarCRM in an organization responsible for more than 1000 commercial customers, a slew of partners, and many thousands of open source installations.

Andy

[eveltman]

Hello Andy,

That's fast!
That I didn't think of this. Of course, Sugar eats their own d... errr.. caviar

Best regards,

Eric

[czei]

Hello everyone,
Is there anybody around who's using SugarCRM at a software development company, and is using the customer support and bug tracking functionality of SugarCRM instead of a specialized system?

How do you feel those modules compare against more specialized systems like FogBugz, JIRA, Seapine TestTrack, TechExcel DevTrack, etc.?

In those specialized systems it's usually a no-brainer to set up mailboxes and let the system handle all incoming mail. spam is filtered out, e-mail with case numbers in the subject lines will be appended to an existing case, e-mail without case numbers in the subject become new cases. E-mail notifications are a no-brainer there too, and responses you add to a case are automatically sent to the customer by e-mail.

So my third question ... How good is the e-mail integration in SugarCRM customer support/bug tracking?
Eric

We are a software development company, and have been on SugarCRM for a couple of months now, but would never consider switching support from Jira. There's absolutely no comparison in the feature set or performance between SugarCRM and JIRA in the support areas. The downside of using Jira is that its not integrated with other parts of our company, so its a trade-off. (Jira's email support is excellent.)

You can take a look at our Jira-based support here: http://support.webperformance.com

Email integration is perhaps the weakest of Sugar's features. We attempted to do a real simple email workflow in Sugar for sales management, sending an email to a salesperson when a lead appeared for their territory, but even that broke with the last update. After two months of trying, filing bug after bug that didn't get fixed we've had to completely remove all functions of our company that uses email from Sugar.

Michael Czeiszperger
General Manager
Web Performance, Inc.

[eveltman]

Thanks for the info!

I just learnt that our Sales and Support departments don't think the benefits of moving to another CRM system (everything integrated) outweigh the costs (purchase, convert, test, train, etc.) for us. After hearing that and after reading about the problems with the e-mail integration, I've decided to only focus on a better customer support and bug tracking system. FogBugz and JIRA are the remaining two candidates.

Greetings,
Eric