How safe is it to move email to Sugar for a small business?

[ultranet07]

We have enjoyed using Sugar open source as our CRM for over a year now. I'm upgrading from 4.0.1 to 4.5.1, and am contemplating moving all our incoming email (for 3-4 staff) onto Sugar.

We have been sending email from Sugar, but relying on Outlook Express (and an IMAP server) for incoming and non CRM email.

I'd like to hear from other Sugar users who've experienced Sugar as a turnkey app for email... for example, we need to backup & mirror our Sugar installation - current Outlook Express folders are hundreds of MB - how would this impact on Sugar? We need a bulletproof solution

While I'm here, can anyone point me to some simple instructions for a. backup and b. mirroring of our Sugar site and db? Is rsync the answer?

Tech stuff: We've moved from shared to Virtual Private Server. Will probably back up to in-office, offline Linux box. No in-house Linux gurus here, but I can just manage a bit of SSH. Plus FTP, PHPMyAdmin.

[susiewilliams]

Hi there,

I'll answer the "backup" portion of your question:

You can find instructions on how to back up your MySQL database in this Wiki article. Also, this article has some helpful tips on cleaning out old records if you decide to do some housekeeping.

[aspeno]

We have been running our email on Sugar for the last 5 months. Sometimes attachments do not get saved but it is still worth it to have our email so easily integrated with our crm. We have found the best solution is to use google's free business email and set the email accounts to archive after pop so we have the original emails if something goes wrong.

If you want to use gmail for sending you need to modify the core files to allow this. You just need to comment out the line that splits the url if it has a : and then put the tls in the url.

We run two godaddy vps servers with MySQL set to replication and use rsync to ensure the email attachments are kept in sync across the systems.

[smantena]

Hi Aspeno:
Could you please elaborate on your suggestion on how to get the gmail to work for sending out emails? Do we need to modify the code and re-compile? If so could you please elaborate.
Thanks in advance.

[roblaus]

@aspeno

Would you mind to explain which core files you changed and why? I am using gmail for quite a while now (without any modifications) and it seems to work. I'm using pop for incoming mail and sendmail for outgoing (smtp never worked for me).

@ultranet07

re. backup: being not a Linux guru myself I found it the easiest way to do it like that:

Use webmin (or mysqldump if you feel ok with writing a command manually) and backup your db into a directory like "db_backup". The easiest is to have this dir within the sugar structure. Use gzip for size.
Then again use any timed utility (webmin is also fine here) to dump the entire sugar directory (including your new db_backup) to another (ftp) server (that's what I do) or any other media (of course NOT on the same machine if it is non removable...). You might also use gzip here because the upload dir can become fairly large.

In the case of a needed restore you just copy the sugar directory to any place with proper permissions and web access, unzip the db file, import into a new db and change the config.ini accordingly. Takes 3 mins and you are up and running again (use .htaccess in the sugar dir if you can...)

Did this a 100 times already.

rgds
rl