I have embarked on a project to move our company from Goldmine 6.7 to the open-source SugarCRM.

I have successfully dumped and loaded Accounts and Contacts using the SugarCRM Wizard. The Contacts were linked to the appropriate Accounts automatically. This is great!

Now - I want to work on the scheduled calls, (both pending and completed) . I am confident that I can create a Table in the proper format, but how are they linked to the "correct" contact and/or account? It looks like there are indices - how do I create them? Also - how do I create valid ID's for the calls?

I have a related user question. I have experimented with entering Pending Calls and then updating them to be Held. I have entered some associated with a Contact and some Associated with an Account. If I were a salesperson I'd want to see ALL of the contacts with a prospect or customer before I made a call. Is there a way to see all the linked activities (including e-mail) associated with a Contact at an Account? Part of my confusion is probably associated with the fact that we have been using Goldmine which does not really distinguish between an Account and a Contact. We have been using our own procedural workaround by setting up the accounts (which are newspapers in our case) with a dummy contact name. Then we use the secondary contacts as our "real" contacts in different departments of a newspaper. This would never work for us if we didn't also have Master Mine which lets me extract info for mailings, etc. from the secondary contacts information. It's a mess and that is why I am pursuing SugarCRM as a new solution.

HOWEVER - I need some guidance both on how to use the system well AND on how to import data other than Accounts and Contacts. Can anyone point me towards some info about this?

I am running Sugar Open Source V4.2.0C on a server running Windows 2003 server.

Martha