Getting started with SugarCRM CE: help neede for customization in a non-standard appl

[mwelte]

Hello,

I'm a newbie to CRM in general and SugarCRM in particular. I've got a view starting questions and would be glad to get some helpful hints.

My background:
I'm part of a team at a German university managing a part-time Master's course for people already on a
job. We would like to manage our contacts to interested people and our "sales campaigns" in a
(semi)professional way (i.e. get away from excel sheets) and so we chose SugarCRM CE.
Now we have the typical beginners questions and problems. We got the book "Implementing SugarCRM 5.x" to help getting started, but if you have another tip for literature, we'd be happy to try more.

The testing version of Sugar is installed (SugarCRM Version 6.1.2 community edition) and it's waiting for
configuration and data input.

At this time I have some general questions:
- Do you have experiences with similar application areas?
Our utilization is somewhat different to the "standard application", for example there are some contacts
that are not conected to an account (as they are persons not part of any company).
- Which modules did you use (and which not) / which would you recommend to customize in this scenario?
- Do you know any useful extensions (available for CE)?

More questions will surely pop up when I get to the "import existing data" part of my trial run.
But I'd be glad for hints - and also redirecting to the correct forums/groups.

Thanks in advance!
Martina

[eitrix]

What you can do to group up some of the contacts is turn accounts into some mock up groups that would hold all relative contacts and which you could target later for campaigns etc.

As for modules i mean it really depends what you identify as a need for your CRM. Good thing is modules are easily created andrelated to others so that should get you started pretty much instantly.

As for literature apart from CRM focused literature, there isn't anything specific i could recommend to you that is focused on SugarCRM.

[mwelte]

Thank you, eitrix.
That's one possibility to manage the "loose" contacts, I'm sure to try.

As I have thought about my needs some more, I'll close this thread and look for more specific help.