Sugar has quietly released Sugar Outlook Plugin 2.1.0 in the last week of December 2015 when everyone is busy with holidays or closing their year end sales.
There are few features enhancements that make the SugarCRM Outlook plugin more useful to the users than the older version. Sugar Outlook Plugin 2.1.0 works only with Sugar 7.x so before upgrading your Outlooking plugin, please ensure your base SugarCRM is upgraded to Sugar 7.x.
Contacts Side Panel:
The most notable enhancement is the Contacts Side Panel. Once you install SugarCRM outlook plugin and setup for the contacts synchronisation, this feature should be very helpful.
As and when you access an email, Sugar Outlook Plugin searches for the “From, To and CC” email ids from the mail and does a look up on whether contacts with that email id exist. If only one exists it opens the Contact Information in the Contacts Side Panel which almost like the mobile CRM view of Contacts without the action parts. If there are more than one Contact record based on the multiple emails ids present in CC or To or From, it gives an indication on other contacts at the top right hand side corner. The preference to show is giving “From” if the mail is a received email from a contact and “To” if the mail is sent to a Contact. If there is no Contact in SugarCRM with any of the email ids, you can directly create a contact from the side panel.
Either way you get a chance to see the complete history and more information about the contact within your Outlook UI. If you want to see all the meetings with that particular person, you can just click the sub panel and access it.
Email Archiving Enhancements:
Looks like with this releaser Sugar has completely revamped and enhanced the archive option. Main enhancements are
1. You can archive now existing emails and new emails directly to SugarCRM by either right click or with the option provided at the top right hand side corner.
2. You can also archive all future emails too to SugarCRM. Once you achieve an existing email, you can say that all future incoming and outgoing emails to that archived email can be automatically archived to SugarCRM. This feature ensures that you don’t need to archive certain mails again and again.
3. Now you can archive emails to custom modules also. As long as a new custom module that you have developed is related to activities modules, you can easily archive email to those module.
There are many such enhancements that can give your email archiving a significant facelift.
User Interface Enhancement:
Some of the usability issues have been addressed with this version
Please look at the detailed SugarCRM Outlook Plugin 2.x User Guide for more detailed information. Apart from Outlook Plugin, SugarCRM editions come with Word Plugin and Excel Plugin as part of the product.
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