N00b questions

[mhayhurst]

Just got Sugar 5.0b2 up and running thanks to those nice people at siteground and am enormously excited about the potential for using it in our little business. A few questions though...

We sell 99% of teh time to individuals rather than companies or organisations - I'm not really sure whether there is really a distinction to be made between Account and Contact but it looks like I should set my customers up as Account (eg "John Smith") and also as a Contact under that Account (eg also "John Smith") - is this correct?


Not really sure what the distinction is between User and Employee? Seeing as I only have 3 employees who are all users it may not matter but when I look at the Employee records there is no text box (let alone editable) next to the Email field - why is this?


Our business is 90% web-driven and all our products, suppliers and customer data is in our main website's SQL2000 database. This will always be the master and people can subscribe to the newsletter etc there too. What I want to do is be able to sync my SugarCRM database every day (or perhaps more often) with my main business database and automate this. I'm quite happy to write PHP, SSIS or whatever to do this but could do with some pointers as to where to start. In particular it won't always be inserting, often it might be applying updates to existing records so how can I make sure that there is a business key I can use for tracking whether a record is an INSERT or an UPDATE into the Sugar database?


Has anyone done any multi-currency mods? We have products priced in 4 currencies based on a hidden base price in a specific currency and customers orders are in one of 4 currencies depending on where they are in teh world (natch). I haven't looked at the Professional edition support for Products yet but haven't seen reference to more than a single currency at any one time - is this possible?

Also on currencies - has anyone implemented a mod to automatically update exchange rates daily from an internet source?


That'll do for now - ihave plenty of reading up to do!

Cheers,,
Mark

[mhayhurst]

Another question as a ps to this:

I have various types of accounts (subject to question above) that I will be brining thur in sync with our main site. I will want to store their system IDs in Sugar eg SMITH001 and then be able to hyperlink both ways between the sites eg:

http://www.mysugarsite.com/accounts/...ierID=SMITH001

What will I have to modify in order to be able to do this?

m