Month: January 2012

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A Comparison of Sugar Editions

SugarCRM editions include Sugar Startup, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. All of the editions have the features such as advanced security, email integration, team selling, support and marketing automation, full sales, social CRM and workflow automation.

In addition, they have regular back-ups for all customer/client information and include unlimited API Calls. Supporting 22 different languages, these editions are either on cloud-based or on-premise deployment. Scroll further down the page to see a side-by-side comparison of the editions.

 

 

 

Startup Edition Professional Edition Enterprise Edition
Sales & marketing Sales & marketing Sales & marketing
Activity Tracking & History Activity Tracking & History Activity Tracking & History
Lead Tracking Lead Tracking Lead Tracking
Web-to-Lead Capture Web-to-Lead Capture Web-to-Lead Capture
Opportunity Tracking Opportunity Tracking Opportunity Tracking
Customizable Sales Process Customizable Sales Process Customizable Sales Process
Document Attachments Document Attachments Document Attachments
Salesforce Automation & Forecasting Salesforce Automation & Forecasting Salesforce Automation & Forecasting
Mass Email Campaigns & Tracking Mass Email Campaigns & Tracking Mass Email Campaigns & Tracking
Target Lists & Automated Follow-ups Target Lists & Automated Follow-ups Target Lists & Automated Follow-ups
Analytic Snapshots Analytic Snapshots Analytic Snapshots
Visual Workflow Visual Workflow Visual Workflow
Standard & Custom Reports Standard & Custom Reports Standard & Custom Reports
Advanced Reporting
Daily Activities & Social CRM Daily Activities & Social CRM Daily Activities & Social CRM
Email & Reminders Email & Reminders Email & Reminders
Task & Activity Tracking Task & Activity Tracking Task & Activity Tracking
Group Calendaring Group Calendaring Group Calendaring
Mobile Access: Android / iOS Mobile Access: Android / iOS Mobile Access: Android / iOS
Company Forums Company Forums Company Forums
Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/Google+ Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/Google+ Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter/Google+
CRMSync: iOS, Android, OS X, Outlook CRMSync: iOS, Android, OS X, Outlook CRMSync: iOS, Android, OS X, Outlook
Google Apps Integration Google Apps Integration Google Apps Integration
Skype Integration Skype Integration Skype Integration
Citrix GoToMeeting Integration Citrix GoToMeeting Integration Citrix GoToMeeting Integration
Order Management Order Management Order Management
Product Catalog & Inventory Tracking Product Catalog & Inventory Tracking Product Catalog & Inventory Tracking
Quote Management Quote Management Quote Management
Sales Orders, Invoices & Payments Sales Orders, Invoices & Payments Sales Orders, Invoices & Payments
Purchase Orders & Bills Purchase Orders & Bills Purchase Orders & Bills
Shipping & Receiving Shipping & Receiving Shipping & Receiving
Quickbooks Integration (additional fee applies) Quickbooks Integration (additional fee applies) Quickbooks Integration (additional fee applies)
Price Books
Project Management Project Management Project Management
Tracking Project Tasks Tracking Project Tasks Tracking Project Tasks
Gantt Charts Gantt Charts Gantt Charts
Resource Management Resource Management Resource Management
Expense Reports Expense Reports Expense Reports
Standard & Custom Project Charts Standard & Custom Project Charts Standard & Custom Project Charts
Time Sheets & Booked Hours Time Sheets & Booked Hours Time Sheets & Booked Hours
Customer Support Customer Support Customer Support
Service Contracts Service Contracts Service Contracts
Case Management Case Management Case Management
Customer Support Email Management Customer Support Email Management Customer Support Email Management
Joomla 24/7 Self-Service Portal/eStore Joomla 24/7 Self-Service Portal/eStore Joomla 24/7 Self-Service Portal/eStore
Bug Tracking Bug Tracking Bug Tracking
Knowledge Base Knowledge Base Knowledge Base
Community Forum Community Forum Community Forum
Customization & Configuration Customization & Configuration Customization & Configuration
Access Control via Roles & Teams Access Control via Roles & Teams Access Control via Roles & Teams
Drag ‘n Drop Screen Layout Editing Drag ‘n Drop Screen Layout Editing Drag ‘n Drop Screen Layout Editing
Customized & Scheduled Reports Customized & Scheduled Reports Customized & Scheduled Reports
Workflow Automation Workflow Automation Workflow Automation
Module Designer
PDF Form Designer
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A Comparison of Sugar Editions

Sugar
Professional


$40

user/month
billed annually*

Sugar Professional
includes:

  • Sales automation and forecasting
  • Marketing lead management
  • Support automation
  • Call center automation
  • Reporting & Dashboards
  • SugarCRM Mobile
  • Cloud or on-premise deployment
  • 15GB storage
  • Unlimited Studio customizations
  • Unlimited online support

* Minimum annual subscription starts at $4,800/year,including 10 user licenses.

Sugar
Enterprise


$65

user/month
billed annually**

Sugar Professional functionality plus:

  • Enterprise opportunity management
  • Enterprise forecasting
  • Customer self-service portal
  • Custom Activity Streams
  • Native SQL reporting
  • Phone support
  • 60GB storage
  • 2 sandbox instances (On-Demand)

** Minimum annual subscription starts at $7,800/year, including 10 user licenses.

Sugar
Ultimate


$150

user/month
billed annually

Sugar Enterprise functionality plus:

  • 24×7 support
  • Assigned Technical Account Manager
  • 250GB storage
  • Up to 5 sandbox instances (On-Demand)

 

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Sugar Opens Cambridge Office: The Growing Global Presence

Customer relationship management solutions provider SugarCRM has opened a new facility in Cambridge, England as part of its efforts to have robust growth globally. The fastest growing CRM company in the world, SugarCRM has been expanding through the products and services it offers to its customers. It has been providing CRM solutions intended to help companies grow to the highest level and assist them with their sales activities and customer management processes.

New Area for Innovation

The new office will be located in Cambridge’s most dynamic technology center. The company, which is headquartered in Cupertino, California, decided to open the new site to meet the needs of its customers and partners in Great Britain and to increase its presence in Europe. The company wants to ensure that its customers and clients are effectively assisted with best outcome for their business activities.

With strong focus on technological innovation, SugarCRM wants to increase its business revenue while improving the satisfaction level of its existing customers. It describes Great Britain as its largest market outside Germany and the United States. The decision of SugarCRM to open the Cambridge site is mainly fueled by Cambridge University, along with growing demand for cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS).

SugarCRM’s IBM Partnership

SugarCRM has just announced its partnership with IBM for the SmartCloud platform. The alliance, which SugarCRM hopes to last, will boost its ties with IBM in providing services and products to the CRM community. The company believes that the new office in Cambridge will have a dramatic impact on its business as it aims for global expansion with growing number of customers. Also, the company attributed the success it is experiencing to the increasing number of CRM customers worldwide as well as the strategic relations with tier one businesses. It adds that its goal for increasing its range in the said area is imperative, allowing it to further enhance its offerings and services.

An overview of Sugar

SugarCRM has been selected as the only open source solution for customer relationship management deployments in the public sector. The opening of the new office will mark Sugar’s launch of its initiatives for capturing all enterprises and businesses that are still not using CRM solutions. Sugar is partnering several CRM businesses which have helped it to translate the Sugar software into over 40 languages, making it to be globally adopted by customers and companies worldwide. Furthermore, SugarCRM offers packages to help new clients improve their productivity through professional support with knowledge transfer and configuration. It is highly dedicated to help CRM businesses to collaborate as a team with quick response time to customer inquiries.

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SugarCRM Collaborate With IBM: Sugar 6.3, SugarLogic and SmartCloud

SugarCRM has included its programming interface, SugarLogic, to make its software become more extensible and customizable. Through this interface, a workflow driven by process can be created by the users directly inside the customer relationship management application. This interface can easily adapt depending on the actions of the end users and what information the screen displays.

A leading open source provider of CRM solutions, SugarCRM has released its new Sugar 6.3 version and made partnership with IBM on the SmartCloud platform to gain more advantage in the CRM market’s tough competition. The software from SugarCRM was anointed by IBM as the first CRM system for the SmartCloud platform following the recognition of Sugar as an IBM Alliance Partners for cloud services. The general availability for the Sugar Software running on the SmartCloud enterprise platform was certified andannounced by SugarCRM.

SugarCRM’s Software with IBM’s SmartCloud

The collaboration between SugarCRM and IBM was announced in the effort of making the Sugar 6 available on the SmartCloud Platform. The integration of the Sugar software with the IBM’s platform allows clients to have all the advantages that a private cloud environment has to offer while securing the benefits of advanced CRM solutions.
SugarCRM wants to be a part of the 7 billion dollar-line business for IBM, which has been making dramatic steps to reach into a specific area of the market. The partnership with IBM is hoped by SugarCRM to give credibility among enterprise-class consumers, some of who still see its open source applications as an alternative solution that does not have the features to fit mainstream business transactions.

Version 6.3 Features

In this new 6.3 version, enhanced management capabilities and administration control are provided to users to better the way they handle business processes. Another main factor in this version is the improvement of the performance to the user interface based on its Ajax. It is noted that the ability to import information in a seamless way is one of the most necessary aspects to a user when a new CRM system is adapted.

A wizard has been created to facilitate information import process by letting users import contact details wherein the capability to programmatically make updates via SugarLogic and other programming tools is added. This makes the possibility of updating the contacts of users in large numbers. Substantial improvements were also made by SugarCRM to SugarLogic, allowing users to create a much more fine process-driven business work flow.

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SugarCRM Software: The Fastest Growing Solution for Your Business Problems

With the competitive world that keeps growing, manual processes are not the only main area where business activities are restricted to. As the scope of information technology systems to better the management of quotes, leads, marketing campaigns, cases and sales opportunity increases, customer relations management (CRM) software has become a pivotal factor in combining people, business processes and technology to keep customers and clients satisfied with the products and services offered.

The software from SugarCRM is one of the fastest growing business solutions to manage customers and clients. Because of being an open source designed for customer relationships management, the Sugar software is used by businesses of different sizes globally to manage their marketing, sales and customer support. There are thousands of people are subscribing to the editions of the SugarCRM software, which proves that global companies have heavy reliance on Sugar to grow sales, executive marketing strategies, create customer business applications and retain clients. Offering an on-demand software-as-a-service solution, SugarCRM assists customers for the deployment of Sugar on-site without taking high risks.

Looking for the Right Sugar Expert

Sugar can be deployed by users whether in public or private clouds such as Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, and IBM cloud if they want more flexibility. However, you should look for the right experts of SugarCRM possessing the experience and specific knowledge in customizing and integrating SugarCRM with your business process when deploying the software in your business.

Perhaps the best first step to make when tapping a Sugar Expert is ensuring that the professional holds partnership with the Sugar Company. The high level of partnership in Sugar is the SugaCRM Gold Parnership, which is only given to organizations and companies having the strong desire to achieve business growth. Organizations awarded with this partnership can obtain benefits such as MDF, integrated marketing campaigns, marketing plans and qualified leads.

In addition, make sure that continuous support is offered by the SugarCRM expert to your business. This could make the functioning of the Sugar implementation become smooth as usual. Mostly, there are professional service groups or organizations operating as SugarCRM experts. These groups may have effectively developed their own customers relationship management practice. They may also have extensive experience and expertise, making them to be very reliable when advising customers, clients and prospects on how the CRM software functions and offers advantages to their business.

Some of the basic features of the Sugar software are email integration with MS Outlook, activity tracking, account and contact info management, opportunity handling, reporting and handling. These features are fully designed for CRM purposes. Thus, you can always have ease in handling your customers with Sugar.

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Grow With What Sugar Has to Offer

The SugarCRM software has been considered by many as the best solution when it comes to facing issues related to customer relationship management. You can have the best by choosing Sugar for the development of your sales, the accomplishment of promoting marketing steps, the satisfaction of your prospects and existing customers and launch of your personalized business applications.

Knowing the SugarCRM Development

The Sugar is a very incredible application since it is designed to make progress and growth in a company through good customer relationship management. Business planning and strategies are created in the form of good customer handling. The known versions of the Sugar software are Professional, Community and Enterprise. These versions are enabled to easily adapt and fit all businesses of different sizes. Sugar Development also covers Internet hosting, making all companies to conveniently execute installation on their own server.

The web hosting of Sugar keeps up with the integrity of high quality and good performance whenever a client instance is upgraded by the developers of Sugar. Furthermore, adverse consequences of the enhancements on the modifications of users are successfully avoided.

There are SugarCRM forums that allow the Sugar community to connect with each other. In this way, they can share their experiences, insights and problems involving their use of the Sugar Software.

Sugar Customization

SugarCRM developers are well facilitated by Sugar’s open source architecture, making the software to be more ready for installation into business procedure and for customizations. In addition to configuration functionalities, SugarCRM customization is assigned for the delivery of good service to purchasers. Business activities such as sales procedures are becoming more improved with the aid of SugarCRM integration. The Sugar company executes effective approaches to systematically compete with its competitors in the customer relationship management market.

The SugarCRM software is dedicated to help the sales department in following new clients and prospects, marketing campaigns, leads, revenue matters and sales projections. There is no way for a business to achieve growth without the loyalty and retention of its customers. And SugarCRM can always help in giving full satisfaction and gratification to customers, clients and prospects. The Sugar software not only improves the ways in management and interacting with customers, it also ensures a successful CRM strategy to effectively support CRM processes.

Sugar integrates with your business ideas to provide effective solutions for every problem that involves customers. Sugar is best for any business wanting to achieve growth for long term. Embrace what Sugar has to offer and make your business grow to the highest level.

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Let Sugar Take Your Business to the Highest Point

SugarCRM is a customized and flexible environment providing powerful customer relationship management features. SugarCRM provides businesses and organizations with what they need to increase the loyalty, the value and the satisfaction of their customers and prospects.



With broad support for marketing, sales, comprehensive reporting, intuitive customization tools, and support processes, SugarCRM helps companies improve their revenue growth and sales performance by providing the tools needed in identifying and tracking opportunities, managing accounts, creating and monitoring forecast and pipelines and launching successful selling initiatives. Additionally, SugarCRM allows sales representatives to work offline and online through mobile access and Microsoft Outlook Integration. It combines its functions and features with maximum customizability and flexibility, allowing businesses to leverage a customer relations management software that can easily adapt to unique client-facing processes. With SugarCRM, companies and organizations can make their marketing campaigns become more profitable and successful. Not only it empowers marketing executives to deliver accurate segmentation, SugarCRM also creates and produces solutions, initiates effective email campaigns and organizes leads from multiple sources.



 

SugarCRM Dashboard

 



 

While centralizing customer requests across different channels, SugarCRM enables support and service teams to make solutions for customer complaints in a consistent, prompt and professional way. With CRM support from Sugar, managers are allowed to examine incident frequency and analyze the responsiveness and performance of team members. They are provided with the insight into how to improve the delivery of service continuously and how to increase customer retention. Moreover, the Sugar software includes robust analysis and reporting capabilities to allow executives and the team to evaluate business performance, identify critical metrics and quickly determine sales opportunities across all client and prospects-facing departments.



To satisfy the data needed by users within different functions and roles, reports and charts can be fully customized. It is able to deliver collaboration features beyond the capabilities of other CRM solutions in the market. Enabling true cross-business communication and providing syndicated third-group content, Sugar permits teams in marketing, sales and support departments to coordinate in activities such as sharing documents and other related information and tracking the status of projects.



Through a comfortable environment provided by Sugar, developers can make rapid CRM solutions customizations to meet the specific needs of their business. With the design tools that the Sugar software has, users can have easy and quick definition of workflows and other business-related processes. Eventually, they can integrate SugarCRM with all their business systems while setting access privileges based on profiles, user roles and more.

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From SugarCRM’s Launch to Successful CRM Solution Offerings

Introduction

SugarCRM has been the leading provider of open source customer relation management (CRM) solutions for businesses of different sizes in the world. The Sugar Software offers cost effective and more flexible alternative than any proprietary application in order for it to quickly adapt to any working environment. The open source software architecture of SugarCRM enables companies of all sizes to customize and integrate all business transactions in a very easy way for building and maintaining more income-generating relationships. The deployment options offered by SugarCRM include on-premise, on-demand and appliance-based solutions that are designed for suiting the needs of customers with regards to integration, security and configuration.

A Brief Historical Overview of the Company

Founders Clint Oram, John Roberts and Jacob Taylor launched the company on April 1, 2004 to introduce an open source project to SourceForge. There were only 10 employees when the company started. 149 dollars per user per year was charged for a set of support services in accompanying the free open source software. The first 2 million dollars financing was raised by the company in August 2004. By September of the same year, the free Sugar Open Source was downloaded in more than 25 thousand copies from SugarForge. Board member Larry Augustin was appointed by the company as its interim chief executive officer following the departure of founder John Roberts in May 2009. In July 2010, the company released the SugarCRM version 6 with new features including easier installation, a PHP application and better mobile device integration.

The Business Model of SugarCRM

The business model of SugarCRM is tiered in three. The company provides the basic open source solution application and sells the Sugar professional version including more enhanced features such as Microsoft Outlook Integration. It then offers the enterprise version of Sugar with disconnected mobile support, support for Oracle, customer self-service as well as system integration functionalities for businesses aiming for achieving full customer relation management software potential.

Sugar Editions

The CRM software editions of SugarCRM include Sugar Enterprise, Sugar Professional and Sugar Community Edition which originated on the Lamp stack of MySQL, Apache, Linus and PHP. The can also adapt other platforms that are capable of delivering PHP, MySQL and Apache such as
Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

Why Sugar

The SugarCRM software is designed to offer devoted hosting abilities through Sugar On-Demand that handles maintenance and upgrades. It is made for businesses that find comfort with housing their customer data outside of their firewall without a support from an information technology staff for managing their CRM systems. All the advantages of hosted applications are provided to customers with the added flexibility in migrating to an appliance or on-site solution from a hosted service. A more secure environment is offered by Sugar On-Demand compared to other hosted CRM software solutions because there is an independent management of application, data and API.
All hosted CRM software may not meet the needs of a business because of the growing complexity in terms of business processes. The Sugar Sofware is the only CRM software on the CRM market that provides a seamless transition to an on-site, open source deployment.

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Identify Your SugarCRM Solutions Provider

SugarCRM is a provider of open source Customer Relation Management (CRM) systems which companies in the world use in streamlining the processes of their customer management. Robust CRM solutions are being provided by the developers of open-source SugarCRM systems for the integration of information systems designed for planning, scheduling and controlling activities related to sales in an organization or business.

Available in both commercial and free versions, the SugarCRM software covers call centers, technical support, marketing campaigns and sales force management in any company. It creates an effective feedback process by smoothing the communication between a business and its prospects.

Launched in 2004, the SugarCRM Company still emerges on top despite the tight competition in the market. This is mainly due to its use of PhP Language as well as the CRM functionalities it provides such as tracking of leads, sales management and project management. The SugarCRM software is very flexible that it can perfectly run on various operating systems like Max OSX, Windows and Linux. Also, the popular web services IIS and Apache are supporting the program.

Because of the strong demand for CRM solutions, different industries from retail to BPO to Heathcare have been using the software to better their relations with their customers and prospects. The growth of the CRM market prompts the emergences of SugarCRM solution providers. These people or companies are dedicating to providing customized solutions to address the needs of their clients.

If you want to deal with a good SugarCRM software provider, make it sure that that provider provides with support and training programs for users, conducts periodical review sessions, does system integration as well as hosting, installation and the maintenance of the software on hosting servers. They should be able to include advanced search capabilities and elaborated supervision of company information to further improve technical support and to provide centric forms to the CRM users.

Importantly, you must have the idea on how helpful the SugarCRM program is to you and to your business. The most notable advantage of using SugarCRM is that there is a free version which allows you to make integrations and customizations without incurring cost on the application. Providers of the SugarCRM software must be devoted to giving the best customer management tools for their clients. They should increase the business lead sources while maintaining the satisfaction of their clients. Moreover, they should understand the behaviors of the customers in the aim of improving profitability and promoting long term growth.