can sugar do this with email?

[cgchris99]

Sugar seems to have more features than I need but is what I MUST have.

The way we do things now, you don't know if someone is or has already answered the incoming email. It looks unprofessional for two email responses to go out.

I need it to allow a group of people to answer incoming emails. It must display emails from multiple address as well as multiple servers.

And it must allow us to answer the emails and also be able to track what was said to the customer or potential customer.

Can it handle this?

[andydreisch]

cgchris99, the 4.0 Inbound Email feature covers each of these sceanrios. Have you had a chance to check out the preview at www.sugarcrm.com? Log in as admin to set up a monitored mailbox and assign incoming emails from that mailbox to users represented by the group designation in that same screen.

Replies made to emails can take the form of "support@company.com" or something similar. Emails associated with existing Sugar items are linked as well.

It's a very complete offering.

Andy

[cgchris99]

I will do some more testing today with the demo.
However, I could not find an installation guide for the 4.0. Will the 3.5 installation guide give enough info to get it installed?

[sugarchris]

Hi Chris,

I'm the guy you want to blame for Inbound Email. =)

From the sound of your post, your company seems like it has the ideal internal workings to put I-E through its paces .

Issue - reply tracking:
When an email is taken into Sugar, it will initially be assigned with a status of "Unread." If a rep opens it for reading, it will be assigned a status of "Read." If/when the rep actually composes AND sends a reply, the initial email will be assigned as status of "Replied." This functionality will address the unprofessional double reply bit, as well as allow a group of reps to field inbound emails seamlessly.

Issue - multiple emails from multiple addresses:
When setting up I-E for the first time, a "Group User" is created - this user can be thought of as a queue mechanism. If you create more than one I-E instance, they can all map to the initial group user, and transparently queue inbounds from multiple accounts. If your company fields inbounds from accounts like "info@" or "support@", they may all be queued to the single group user, and when replied to by a rep, the outbound will have the from name and from address that you assigned (such as "SugarCRM Support <support@sugarcrm.com>").

Issue - tracking what was said to the [potential} customer:
If the [potential] customer exists in the system, such as when you "Create a Lead" from an inbound email, all in/outbound communication is tracked and linked to that customer - this is done fully automatically . Once that customer exists, the rep can view its communication history by viewing the Lead/Case/Account detail view and scrolling to the History subpanel. A future item I am currently fleshing out is conversation threading, so you can look forward to that in a subsequent release.

I really hope you find I-E as useful as it can be!

[cgchris99]

Thanks for the information. I am trying to do simple test on your demo site by having it access a test email account. So far, I have not been able to get it to retrieve any emails.

I have gone into admin and gave it the inbound email account information. I hit the test button and it shows "inbox" which I believe means it is working. I then click the emails tab and do not see any emails listed.

Am I missing something or is this feature disabled on the demo on your servers?

Thanks

[ispytodd]

cgchris, maybe Andy was asking if you have downloaded and tried the preview/beta for yourself. I don't know, but maybe the online demo is not suited for testing incoming email functionality.

-T

[siloway.com]

Thanks for the information. I am trying to do simple test on your demo site by having it access a test email account. So far, I have not been able to get it to retrieve any emails.

I have gone into admin and gave it the inbound email account information. I hit the test button and it shows "inbox" which I believe means it is working. I then click the emails tab and do not see any emails listed.

Am I missing something or is this feature disabled on the demo on your servers?

Thanks

I'm having exactly the same problem, having installed the beta version both on windows and on a linux server I get a positiver response from either pop or imap servers when I run the test setting button then nothing appears in the inbox when I go check it out ... I was getting all excited about this function, I thought "yeeehaa" this is gonna rock...

[sugarchris]

Hi All,

I can't speak to the failures on the demo server - although from the sound of it in these forums, a few folks have gotten the Inbound Email component to work.

There is one pertinent known issue: You must Edit then Save a scheduler (doesn't matter which) to refresh job instances in the db. Otherwise, the jobs actually never get picked up (mea culpa).

As for those of you who are running a non-demo server instance (locally or hosted), have you set the crontab or Windows Scheduler to call the cron.php file as instructed in the Schedulers admin section (below the list of preset Scheduled tasks)? Without that, unfortunately none of your jobs will run.

I hope this gets you beyond the state you've found yourselves in, and can hone in usability bugs, and not get blocked by setup issues. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Please rest assured many issues that have come up from beta feedback have been addressed in the GA release (scheduled to go public this week) and the issue above is fixed .

[Suagar pie]

Chris,

Is there anything else that would cause the inbox to not populate with email aside from the obvious, i.e. no emails in the inbox. I was able to get this to work once, but used the wrong inbox, then deleted the inbox and used the info@ and it does not work anymore. Is there a play by play directive that shows all steps involved in this process? From Conception to birth of the inbox, anything. I have been on this for a few days and am ready to throw my laptop across the room.

I will deal with the psychological factors after I get the inbox to work. Anything would be nice!

Cheers!

[sugarchris]

Hi Suager pie,

Sorry for the long delayed reply. This thread got past my I-E radar .

Since you got it to work once, a quick fix may be to make sure that your I-E mailbox has something set for "Possible Actions" - just set it to "Create [all]".

If that doesn't fix it for you, I would recommend a trip to the Help forums. At the top, I've created a set of sticky FAQs for I-E issues. Go through the threads and make sure you've done all the stuff in there - don't stop at my first post, the users here contributed a lot of knowledge! Unfortunately, we shipped with some bugs, but the fixes in those FAQs are fairly comprehensive.

After you've done that, if you haven't found the solution, we can take a closer look at your particular case.

I've subscribed to this thread so I will be notified if/when you reply here.

Good luck!