SugarCrm ce and exchange

[gdurham]

Hello all,
I know that this sort of question has been asked several times but here goes. I was wondering if it was possible to:
1. have sugar monitor a mailbox on an exchange 2007 server. (i believe this to be possible)
2. here is the catch, all emails from all users (sent as well as received) will be sitting in this email box. (I know that it is a lot of space, however if there is a better way to do this please chime in.)
3. What I would like to do is be able to have sugar link these emails to contacts

I am trying to find a way to do this in the easiest manner. We currently have an old version of Goldmine and are wanting to either upgrade it (which I really don't want to do) or implement a solution like this with exchange. If anyone has a better way to do this it would be great to hear about it.

Thanks for everything!
Greg

[Angel]

I am not entirely sure I understand what you are trying to accomplish in point #2.

Sugar is capable of retrieving your e-mail and linking it to contacts, and if you want to, all your users could share the same e-mail account (although it might become rather messy). I am not quite sure what it is you are trying to accomplish with the latter point though.

If you elaborate, we might be able to suggest an alternative.

[gdurham]

Thank you for getting back to me angel, sorry my post wasn't clear. Anyhow my company wants to move over to Microsoft exchange and we would like to use outlook as our email client. We would like to be able to track incoming and outgoing email using sugarcrm where it will auto link them email to a contact. The way I had thought of doing this is by creating a mailbox that would have everyone's incoming and outgoing emails automatically forwarded to this box and sugar would then listen for new emails coming into this mailbox and link it to a contact. My question is will this work or is there a better way? Should I use IMAP for this? Thank you so much for all of the help!

Thanks,
Greg

[Angel]

Apologies, but I am still not clear on why you want all your users to use the same mailbox.

If your main goal is to have everyone's incoming/outgoing e-mail tracked within Sugar and attached to the corresponding contact, there is no need for that. Each user can have their own mailbox and still take advantage of that functionality.

As for using IMAP vs. POP3, it is more of a personal preference, usually involving other factors such as security as well. It won't have an impact on the aforementioned functionality.

Another option is to use the Outlook plug-in.

[gdurham]

Hey Angel,
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, The only reason I thought of putting them in the same mailbox was so that sugar would have a centralized location to pull emails from. If users can continue to use outlook and their emails (sent and received) will automatically populate and link the emails to contacts that would be great. I am planning to use imap as it is much more secure then pop3. If you have any guides that I can look at in order to find how to do this that would be great, even just a pointer in the right direction. Is this what you believe I should do? Thanks so much for all of your help!

Thanks,
Greg

[Angel]

Quick side note, if you are going to use Outlook, it will require a little user intervention to link it as you need to manually sync the two applications.

[gdurham]

Hey Angel,
Thanks alot for all of the information anyhow I had a couple of more questions. By user intervention do you mean using an outlook plugin or does this have to be done in the sugar application? Is there a way to script it out at all?

Thank you so much,
Greg

[Angel]

I think I get what you are trying to mimic. Are you trying to mimic the auto retrieve behavior in GM? If so, you can't do it with out of the box functionality.

You could try scripting it, but e-mail in Sugar is rather tricky so it may prove to be a tedious task.

[gdurham]

So what is the behavior of Sugar exactly? When emails come into exchange server and go into the users mailbox does sugar listen on that mailbox and put them into its own mail system automatically or is this the point where it requires user intervention to have emails imported? Once the emails are in sugar does sugar auto link the emails to contacts or again does this require user intervention? I am sorry that these are newbish questions and thank you so much for all of your help!

Thanks,
Greg

[Angel]

No prob on the questions..

When it hits the mailbox, the user would need to check their mail in Sugar in order for it to appear as a message that they in turn can pull into the Sugar DB.

Thus, the user interaction is necessary to poll the mail and then import it into the database. Like GoldMine, if the e-mail address is in the database, it should automatically link it at the time of import, so that part wouldn't require user interaction.

Another option would be to create the accounts as group e-mail accounts within Sugar and that would allow them to be polled. However, that feature is more intended for purposes such as generic mailboxes like support@yourdomain.com, not for individual mailboxes.