A free CRM solution from Sugar CRM

April 11th, 2009 by Ben Carigtan | File in: Product Reviews

Customer relationship management systems or CRM systems are used to support the need to manage customer relationship processes. Information about customer interactions and accounts can be entered so that they will be easier for the employees to access information.

Managers love an effective CRM system because they can monitor their operations real time. One of the most popular CRM implementations written for PHP and MySQL is created by the Sugar CRM community. You may download the free community developed version at their website: http://www.sugarcrm.com.

After downloading the zipped package, unzip it and transfer it to the httpdocs folder of your web server:

NOTE: Because, as of this writing, the the default folder name of the package is “SugarCE-Full-5.1.0c” I needed to rename it to “CRM” so that it will be easier to browse and remember. So instead of http://www.mydomain.com/SugarCE-Full-5.1.0c I will use http://www.mydomain.com/CRM.

After you put it on your web host, browse the CRM folder so you can start the installation process. It will ask you for the database name, user name and password.

The installation, from my experience, is a breeze and you can also browse for online documentation about the installation like this one:

http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation

Once you get it installed, the page will appear with several sample reports and users for you to play with. The charts on the dashboard are well done and are effective for any business who wants a serious CRM solution:

There are also calendaring tools, tasks management forms, an email client for each employee, a documents repository, contacts management, and other useful tools.

The main functionality is to be able to manage tasks for each of your customer or accounts. SugarCRM provides a neat way to see all of the data related to a specific customer.

In summary, SugarCRM is a great CRM tool. It is comprehensive and could fit right in for most needs of small business operations. It has the benefits of being a web-based app so you won’t have to install client applications to your employees. All they need to do is login and update their tasks. Managers will also appreciate it’s intuitive charts and reports.