SugarCRM Office Suite Review

Posted by admin
in Online Office Suites

I’m afraid this will not be a very complete review of the SugarCRM script, as it has way too many functions to be covered in just a few pages – you would need a small book for that!

This year has been a busy one for me, and as my business and personal projects have taken off I have been overwhelmed. I started looking for an online office suite that can help me manage both my clients and my own projects, and so far I’ve only found a few scripts (SugarCRM included) that come close to what I’m looking for.

Here’s a short list of SugarCRM’s features:

Let’s take a closer look at these functions.

Email client:

What most web email clients lack is support for multiple email accounts, but this isn’t a problem with SugarCRM. Now don’t get me wrong, it isn’t of Yahoo or Gmail caliber but it’s pretty much ok. You can configure multiple folders, search emails and you can configure access through POP or IMAP.

What it doesn’t have is a spam filter, and this is extremely important to me. Some days I get more than 500 spam emails and deleting the crap gets very annoying very fast.

Document manager:

This one is pretty straight forward. You can upload any type of document, give it a name and assign it to a category. There’s also a revision system that lets you keep track of what changes have been done to files and even an expiration date.

Task manager:

You’ll find the task manager under the “Activities” tab. You can create tasks and notes and assign them to one of your employees. You can set a priority and connect them to one of the client accounts.

The tasks and notes are different: tasks are more configurable (they have start and end dates, you can specify a status, priority and a contact name) while notes are simpler (you can attach files, but not much more).

Calendar manager:

The calendar is pretty much standard with daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views. You can schedule calls and meetings, which are almost the same except for a couple of options.

Contacts and accounts manager:

These are also standardized… much like other contact managers. The good thing is that you can import data that was exported from other applications, so in case you have a lot of clients this won’t be too much work.

There are more features, but I’m not going to review all of them. You should take a look at a live demo or even install it on your test server and form your own opinion.

It is a great app but I did have some problems with it.

First of all, the interface is very crowded and sometimes confusing. Considering AJAX was used a lot they could have hidden some parts.

Second, pages load very slow, even on localhost, and everytime I open SugarCRM in a Firefox tab RAM consumption jumps up 100 megs.

And third of all, SugarCRM is quite a pain to install. I tried it on my webhosting server and it wouldn’t proceed because it thought mbstring wasn’t enabled, which it was… I even triple checked to be sure. It did install on my localhost (WAMP) server, but that doesn’t help me too much when I have to give 24/7 access to somebody else or when I go on vacation.

Conclusion:

All in all it’s very good, but things like the lack of a spam filter for email, slow speed and installation problems made me look somewhere else.