Sugar CRM - Customising etc

Zascar

I'm doing some work for a mate who has just implemented Sugar CRM. Its a fantastic peice of kit, I'm amazed how good it is, and its free!!! His business is distribution and marketing of several products. He has a massive list of customers, and a few sales people that he wants to gain more control over. Anyway as we are at the beginning and only just inputting acounts etc, I suggested doing some work to customise it more towards his business needs. He said in time he is willing to spend money on it, but in the meantime I'd like to have a go myself (if that is possible). I have practically zero prgramming knowledge, but do you have to or is there a back end where you can modify how it works? I'm not talking anything major, just changing contents of dropdown lists etc to only what he needs, to take out the stuff that is n/a.

Can this be done easily, and if so, how? If anyone here is expert at programming sugar, please get in contact as I might have some work for you.

Oh, and if you have not yet experienced Sugar CRM yet and have been thinking baout it, I highly recommend doing it NOW it is fantastic.

Cheers

mneylon

There's a book you can get on it:
http://www.packtpub.com/sugarcrm/book

PDF download or hard copy or both

vito

Yep SugarCRM has been progressing very well over the last year or so. I did take a look at the inner-workings when it was at version 3.0 (think its at 4.0 now).

It is quite customizable but if you want to create new modules you have to be very comfortable with high-level php OOP and have a good understanding SQL table structure and query language (good ol left outer joins at every turn).

I *think* with the latest iterations it is easy enough to add custom fields and to change labels and the like.

If anyone wants an impressive php application to learn from then you could do worse than download SugarCRM and take a look under the bonnet.

Zascar

Ok so its deffo way past my abilites but if I find someone that a whizz with PHP and knows some SQL they should be able to do it? Its just some basic stuff. There are loads of fileds all over the place that we don't need, but we would need to add (rename) some that would be usefull in tracking data etc I think it would be better to trim it down to only what we need.

Where would I go to find someone that can do this? I've hear of sites such as rentacoder.com, getacoder.com etc, would they be worth a go?

vito

Zascar wrote:

Ok so its deffo way past my abilites but if I find someone that a whizz with PHP and knows some SQL they should be able to do it? Its just some basic stuff. There are loads of fileds all over the place that we don't need, but we would need to add (rename) some that would be usefull in tracking data etc I think it would be better to trim it down to only what we need.

Where would I go to find someone that can do this? I've hear of sites such as rentacoder.com, getacoder.com etc, would they be worth a go?

SugarCRM foums has a dedicated board for commercial programmers and SugarCRM customisation I believe.

Have a look at what you can and cannot customise via both the installer and the admin panel. You might be able to do what you need yourself without heavy customisation.

Also have a look for custom moudles that have been coded by the community (and therefore free) - also a board on their forum for custom modules I think. You mght just find what your looking for.

Sorry I cant help more, but I only checked out the code to see what made it tick and that was about a year ago.

MartMax

hey

I am also testing SugarCRM at the moment for a client with employees less than 10 persons. Basically the intention is to replace Horde mail client and use SugarCRM mail client plus the other features can be useful too especially this client is a trading house. So might be handy to have all the collaboration things between workers. The big boss also can monitor the work progress since he's always away from office. Finger cross, hopefully SugarCRM can do the job nicely.

Mart