Document Linking

[freshaspect]

I have installed and explored both Sugar 4.5.1 and 5 Beta 2. Both are excellent products and meet a significant percentage of some end client projects that I have in the pipeline.

However, there seems to be a massive gap in the document management capabilities. I'm not sure whether I've just missed or whether it's generally missing and I'm hoping someone can clarify things.

All I want to do is to be able to upload and associate documents directly with Sugar objects - notably accounts and opportunities. I don't want to have to use the Notes functionality as I would expect the same docs to be accessible via the Documents interface.

I could find no way of doing this out of the box so I scouted around and it looked like ZuckerDocs has been created to fill this gap. However despite spending an inordinate amount of time trying different configurations I found it highly unstable and way off being suitable for production use. It also left me worried about the effect of future upgrades.

So, is there *really* no way to do this out of the box? If it's not possible, is it on the roadmap? I find it so strange that a basic requirement like this has not been tackled in a product this advanced. Anyway, I hope there's an easy solution!

Thanks,
Paul

[Angel]

The Notes module is the only way to do this out of the box.

[freshaspect]

Ok, thanks Angel. Wow - that's disappointing.

I'll add Sugar and ZuckerDocs to my watch list and maybe the latter will reach production level maturity, but without this functionality I can't recommend this to my more document centric clients (the vast majority unfortunately).

How have other people tackled this limitation? From the odd post I was able to find on the forums I'm not the only one facing this hurdle.

[susiewilliams]

Hi freshaspect,

You can associate documents to contracts, which can be associated to accounts and opportunities, in the commercial editions of Sugar (that's Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise). You can check out this functionality by creating your own online demo instance of either Sugar Pro or Enterprise.

[freshaspect]

Yes, that's exactly the type of functionality that I need but applied directly to accounts, opportunities, etc. To be honest I would have expected it to be an option against any main object in the system.

The capability IS achievable with ZuckerDocs but as things stand if I associate more than 6 documents to an the object the whole thing blows up and I can find no viable solution. I appreciate that this is a Zucker/Knowledge Tree problem rather than a Sugar one.

[eddt]

freshaspect - I just started digging it the same sort of thing myself... I'm playing around with the Documents module in the Studio (I'm running Sugar 5) to see how tough it would be to add 2 dropdowns:

The first one lets you pick WHAT to associate the document to - a Project, Opportunity, Account - whatever. The selection you make would then populate the 2nd dropdown accordingly - Picking Opportunity from the first should give you a list of all Opportunities in the 2nd...

And Bob's your uncle! You've got the required association!

[freshaspect]

Sounds good but is that just when you add the new document to the document library?

What I would rather like is a documents subpanel to appear with each account, opportunity, etc. in details view listing the docs that are associated with it. I would also like to be able to add/upload a document from here too.

I need to explore the Studio in 5 in more detail but I don't think this is possible. Quite happy to be corrected though!