SugarCRM Journey from 6.0 to 7.0
SugarCRM released its latest version 7.10 for On Demand Customers. Key improvements it the migration of some of the modules to new sidecar framework and improvements to Reports and Dashboards framework.
Sugar’s journey to move to a latest “mobile first” and “complete RESTful” framework started in October 2013 with the introduction of sidecar framework. From 7.0 to 7.10 Sugar has steadily moved modules from old framework to new sidecar framework. With 7.10 we can say that it has completed 80% of this movement, with just few module left out from end user side – Admin area will be the next target.
Emails User Interface
SugarCRM’s Emails module stores copies of email messages that have been sent from Sugar and archived to Sugar using the plugins available for Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes. Sugar is not an email application but allows users to send email using their email address. Especially when customer support tickets are being handled, support team can use to capture support email and also send emails from there.
Sugar has improved Emails module User Interface in Sugar 7.10 version using sidecar framework. The new framework allows users to see the Email gist using the preview button and the Intelligence pane allows for many other related information display. This is one big improvement that caters to many of the Customer Support Automation implementations of Sugar.
Get more information from Sugar Support on Emails
Outgoing Email Accounts
Users can directly configure multiple SMTP accounts for sending emails from different email ids. This can be directly configured for Google Email, Outlook and Exchange Email accounts. Especially when a sales agent or customer support agent is catering to multiple clients on behalf of the customer, he can use the customer’s email id instead of his email id.
Now if the system administrator allows the users to use admin configured email ids, the list of the email accounts shows those email ids that can be used to send outbound emails.
Drill Through Report Charts
Sugar’s Reports module allows users to build, generate and manage reports for modules such as Accounts, Contacts, Calls etc. Reporting is a very valuable tool in Sugar as users can gather data from various modules and generate vital summarised information. Some of these reports can be rendered as Charts.
SugarCRM 6 version used to have report charts and dashlets that are drill down by default. But once the new sidecar framework is introduced, developers need to do tweeks to achieve the same functionality.
In the last version 7.9 Sugar moved the reports module to sidecar framework. But with Sugar 7.10, report charts are now better and enabled for drill-through. This allows users to click on a segment of a report’s chart and view the list of records belonging to that segment.
Get detailed information from Sugar Support on Reports
Shareable Dashboards
Sugar 7.10 comes with a comprehensive revamp of Dashboards feature. Earlier versions allow us only to create our own dashboards that can be populated with report generated dashlets.
But with 7.10 we get a module called Dashboards that can be used to group our eligible dashlets and also share them among teams and other private users.
This allows the key pain point of creating dashboards when the team members are 10s and 100s. For example if we have 10 support executives whose dashboard has to be streamlined among all, in the older versions you need to manually configure dashboards with a set of dashlets. Now admin or one of the team members can configure a dashboard and share the same among the team members or others.
Like default reports, Sugar now includes 30 default configured dashboards that can be used directly by users.
Contracts and Contracts Types User Interface
Sugar’s Contracts module can be used to capture and manage individual business contracts an organisation has with the vendors, customers or others. This module will be very much useful when we have a Subscription Management with Renewal as a key business element or when we have a Support Contract with customers for maintenance and support.
The Contracts Module and Contract Types module are now sidecar enabled modules, which brings the movement of end user modules to sidecar framework to 90%. The only ones left out are the Campaigns, documents and partially reports module.
You can view more on Contracts Module
SugarCRM Admin – Products and Quotes Related Modules and Currencies User Interface
Sugar has revamped its products and quotes module to sidecar framework in 7.8 and 7.9 versions. With products and quotes related modules like Manufacturers, Shipping Providers and Tax rates it started moving the admin modules slowly to the new framework.
The other admin area that has been moved to sidecar framework is Currencies module.With Sugar 7.10 release, Sugar has once again showed its commitment to improve usability of the product as well as features.
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