Today I spent a couple hours revisiting SugarCRM which I already liked pretty much about 1,5 years ago when it was just releases as 4.0 (you shouldn’t buy into something.0 versions, or did you like Windows 3.0 ??)

The past 1,5 years have shown that my gutfeeling about the product was ok, as it has REALLY been hyped a lot in the enterprise application world… german C’T magazine recently called it the best-of-class earlier this year,

and that is mainly attributed to the HUGE developer and addon community at SugarForge (where I spent the most of the time evaluating today)

You will find a lot of interesting links for SugarCRM in my del.icio.us tags for sugarCrm but here are the most impressive and notable things that will make me spend more time with Sugar from nowon (okok – I wanted to go that path in 2005 already, but back then I hadn’t even chosen a good strategic CMS platform for my company, which is different today – drupal )

So here we go with what the top10 things I love about SugarCRM

1. Outlook and Word integration

Needless to say, I will continue on my existing business app platforms and I give a damn about switching to OpenOffice just to save a couple hundred bugs and have my clients not being able to ready my documents…

The Outlook/Word Connector was only available in the pro version back then (starting at $2k per year) but can now be ordered with the SugarNet package at $129/yr for a user. deal!

2. Drupal integration

YES – a good decision for Drupal (IBM & Google continue their sponsoring efforts) and a good gut feeling for SugarCRM… Today there’s a bridge already available with the Drupal to SugarCRM connector which provides a full integration between the Drupal user base and the SugarCRM lead db… contacts may login in drupal (if allowed to) as well as new registrations are created in SugarCRM (make sure you watch that video which shows the nifty configuration to achieve that!)

3. WebChat integration

If you do business on the web, you have to have them – contact forms and chat… and I’m really sick of wading thru my logfiles, old mails that arrived somewhere and somehow… with the SHINE Live Help for SugarCRM you can slap up the typical javascript applet on your site (as know from LiveSupport, Kayako and such…)

When you finish your chat, you can log transrcipt of the chat to the CRM lead or contact… that means – you will FIND it again if the guy comes back after 3 months with more questions… and you have those “canned responses”... because often people as the same questions… and maintaining canned responsed is necessary – no matter how huge your FAQ section is…

So you can store all that to the CRM and even create a new lead directly with data from the chat… a convient feature, time-safer and should def. increase your lead queue

4. Workflow automation

With the process manager addon you can automate stuff… so for example it allows you to automatically send emails, schedule calls, or create tasks based on the create or modification of objects in Sugar. So the easiest thing would be an auto-responder (wow, there are own applications and services out there to do JUST that!) ...

5. Skype and VOIP integration

You can let SugarCRM use your SkypeOut to call up clients – or you can even integrate a full scale Asterisk VOIP appliance ... impressive and crucial if you want to build a full scale sales department

6. Time Invoicing addon

In addition to the obvious product catalog, a service company (and 85% of the austrian companies are service companies, and so is mine), need to invoice by time … so there’s a time invoicing addon available which I found here

product_details.php?product=449

Of course I think in some cases this won’t replace a full scale Accounting/Invoicing application, but i would give it a try… after all it’s the sales people that should do the invoicing (and be AFTER the overdue invoices), and not the accountants … but that’s just MY take.

7. Recruiting support

With this new recruiting HR support module you can manage job posts and candidates info… obviously this is just another “person relation” to manage, so why not use the CRM infrastructure for it? I hate to wade thru the old CVs sitting on my disk without being able to search thru them… but then – I haven’t yet checked if this addon does a full text index over the applications

8. the deployment options

Still, after 2 years of knowing I want a CRM I’m not yet sure if I want to run it on my own servers (and maintain them) or get a hosted edition… Sugar CRM offers both options, starting with a free OpenSource version (which lacks ForeCasts for example, but good to start probably)...

I’ve answered some quiz on their site and that said I should consider both options equally… well – that didn’t help – but still, for other clients that might be a nobrainer

9. AJAX interface

the new version 4.5 has an AJAXish interface, which makes working a lot faster… you can drag the stuff on your dashboard around, and even drag & drop those custom fields you can have everywhere… a good thing … after all usability is the crucial component when it comes to the acceptance of a system for YOU and your users

10. business style presentation

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a techie… I’ve always been and will always stay. But I’m a business owner, marketing manager and sales man as well. And in the latter roles I am looking for a good, affordable, enterprise-scale and flexible solution to support my sales processes.

This means in other words – I’m definately NOT interested the latest MDA archicture mumbo-jumbo that I was told about on OpenCRX’s site and many other CRM site’s I’ve looked at today… (still. OpenCRX is a promising product, a great comparison between OpenCRX and other CRMs… but still, the product management seems too techie)

Frankly, I’ve listed these 10 items above NOT because I think implementing a Drupal or Outlook connector is SOOO hard to do… it’s important to help me do my business – so it’S just the fact that it’s there already – and obviously with a large user base. Same goes for SkypeOut links or some business function addon modules…

You can do anything in PHP or Java with enough time & manpower given… question remains is, if it will help your clients…

and in the case of SugarCRM I’m pretty sure it’s gotten so fame because it helped SALES people… not the admins.

So again, this is a product to keep a good idea on … I’ll setup my first trial pretty soon.