Setup of users in a new Sugar install

[cmartinite]

We've been using Sugar in our non-profit avidly for almost 2 years now. When we set up our employees, we also created contacts for these employees (in our case - also users) to accumulate histories - thinking that the employee profiles would not monitor activities as well as contacts would.

It seems that this creates problems within sugar - meeting invites, email distribution among other things are somewhat disfunctional because there are duplicate names between contacts, users and employees - so when a particular employee/user emails another employee - we sometimes receive 3-4 duplicate emails.

We also occasionally invite eachother to meetings, but when we go to our own user homepage in sugar - the invite does not appear.

Is there a way to merge contact history entries (emails, notes, activies etc) into the correct employee record?

[salesagility]

I agree that accumulating history for Users isn't great.

You could try always inviting users to meetings but attaching meeting notes to either the meeting or to the contact record for each contact.

If you use Users as the person that gets invited to the meeting, this will appear in the invitations list on the dashlet.

[cmartinite]

To rectify our current problem (duplicate contact/user/employee) would it be best to delete the contact record that is associated with a user to clean things up?

EG: Tom Gillen - admin & user and listed as such with appropriate role in admin console;
Tom Gillen - contact record - container for information transactions such as notes, emails, tasks etc...

If I drop Tom Gillen - the contact, I will lose all that records associated history entries won't I? If Tom is only recongnized by Sugar as a user, will the same data be saved/viewable?

Thanks for the help. this is crucial for us right now - building a much more updated (5.2x) Sugar server to migrate to from our current install of 4.5.1x. Would like to rectify these user/contact issues before doing so.

[salesagility]

No, if I understand you correctly, dropping/deleting records is not the way to go.

When you invite a colleague to a meeting, invite them as a User.

When you want to record notes against a colleague, do so against that colleagues Contact record.

So, I don't think you'll have to change anything ... apart from the way you having been using sugar.

Hope this helps.

[cmartinite]

Thanks - this helps.

I guess the difficulty I'm having is conceptual. I cannot locate a good description of the differences between 'Users', 'Contacts' and 'Employees'.

I understand that to access/use Sugar - you must first be a 'User' - but which records/activities/history entries are recorded for someone with only a 'User' Account? It seems that 'User' record keeping is limited to accumulating only data specifically 'Assigned' to them and not 'related to'?

Contacts seem to have all the record keeping - such as notes, history, activities and such, but are not dynamically connected to users or other contacts for things like meeting invitations or call assignments. Contacts (and Accounts) seem mostly just information repositories;

Employees seem almost completely irrelevant - creating an employee doesn't automatically give usernames or rights, nor does it relate to any particular contact info. At least Users have email capability etc. Does the employees area have any value at all?

Funny that 2 years into using Sugar and as much as we have done with it, we don't seem to have a solid grasp of these very basic premises. Do you have an answer that would shed light on this?

[D_M_S]

Thanks - this helps.

I guess the difficulty I'm having is conceptual. I cannot locate a good description of the differences between 'Users', 'Contacts' and 'Employees'.

I second this post.

I think there's a lack of info on exactly these topics. Also, some people would benefit from just understanding what is lead? contact? account?. I'm sure more than a few people have made the rookie mistake of going right into contacts

As much technical info is out there on Sugar, it would be nice to see something "basic" to the effect of, "a user is this . . . ", "this is why you convert from lead to contacts . . . ", "you need employee listings for this . . . "

[dtokeefe]

Hi,

Users can login to the system.

Contacts are customers, people, as opposed to Accounts, which are businesses. Leads are people too, not businesses. Leads should be converted to Contacts and Accounts once you have qualified them (determined that they have the need and budget to become your customer in some reasonable timeframe).

Employees are listings in your Employee Directory.

If a person needs to login to your system, they must be a User. You should not also create Contact records for Users, as it leads to the confusion you are experiencing.

The History of a User's Calls (or Meetings, Opportunities, etc.) can be found by searching in the Calls (or appropriate) module, on the Calendar (the Shared Calendar view is especially useful) or by creating a Report.

The simplest approach to cleaning up your system is to delete the Contacts you created for Users. Note that this will not delete any records, so you can undo it by simply resetting the deleted field = 0 in the contacts table, if you do not like the result.

I hope this helps.

[D_M_S]

This does help thank you. I wish there was more of this type of documentation available

[datatoo]

I wish there were a checkbox for converting a Contact, Employee, or anyone you wanted into a USER.
It seems like all of this would be a simple management task if you could enable someone in mutiple roles one of which is a USER.
And USERs are not necessarily always Employees, but may be Contacts.

I would love to select contacts, employees or whoever I wanted and convert them to USERs perhaps with a default random password notification.

Is there anything like this available?

[dtokeefe]

Hi.

Maybe Sugar Portal for Zend Framework is what you are looking for. It allows you to provide access to certain modules of SugarCRM to certain contacts. It can be used for Customer Self Service, Partner Relationship Management and other scenarios.

Please feel free to contact me for more info.

Best regards,

David