E-Mail Issues...Tried As Long as I Can

[markb14391]

Hi,

It's very frustrating dealing with the limitations of the SugarCRM e-mail client, especially the various issues. For example, when trying to import a message to Sugar, many of the lookup functions are broken. I can choose "Opportunity" and start typing, but the lookup function pulls in account names instead...so the lookup cannot be used. If I enter "Account" the lookup doesn't work, and I get similar results when trying to look up by contact (which is especially odd, since you'd think that the contact could automatically pull up the right person and populate the field anyway based on the e-mail addresses).

I've tried Thunderbird and Outlook integration, and those solutions have issues too.

Then I see things like Zimbra that show what an e-mail client can be. Since e-mail is such a vital part of CRM, I'm just baffled that it seems to hard to get the e-mail client in Sugar up to a par like that. Even Roundcube and other webmail apps are far better IMHO.

I've seen the integration using the DataSync Suite, but that involves setting up a lot of stuff just to integrate integration between Zimbra and SugarCRM. The integration is beautiful (as is the DataSync Suite in general), but so far I cannot get all the components to install properly. So I give up on that option too.

So, two questions:

1) Why is decent e-mail in Sugar such an elusive goal?
2) When (if at all) can we have e-mail functionality that's as good as the rest of Sugar?

Thanks.

[roblaus]

There are 100s of posts like yours and never any reply from Sugar. In my opinion there are two reasons why it is what it is.

1. Email is not an easy topic and there are not very many (even much bigger) companies out there who can really handle it well.
2. Email is supposed to work, it is a commodity not an asset. Nothing shiny, cloudy, mashy, cool or connected, social networked and web 3.0. In short - nothing you can sell to an investor.

But it backfires and badly so. My guess and my experience is that about 80% of the people who do not go for Sugar (although they tested and often liked it) do so because of the bad or non existing email and calendar functions.

[crmsiva]

yes roblaus is correct. The wonderful CRM looses customers because of the emails & calendaring features. From my observation, most of the users want the calendar to look and behave like in outlook. As far as i know, there is no importance given for this two areas even in 5.5 release. Sugar people really really need to take care of this two areas.