We are looking to implement a CRM system at work and having downloaded SuiteCRM and installed it on a test machine or three, it is apparent there is a major deficiency in the documentation.
There is an installation guide.
There is a user guide.
There is nothing for administration! Why not?
Administration and customisation is essential to a successful implementation of SuiteCRM!
There are a few bits and pieces on the forum and the web generally.
I can’t believe that the default SuiteCRM installation is expected to be suitable for everybody - it certainly isn’t for us!
We need to customise it, but it’s very frustrating, time consuming and we don’t know what is possible and what isn’t, without php programming skills that we don’t currently have.
We’ve gleaned some info. from SugarCRM, but it’s not enough.
Is there any intention to produce an Admin. guide?
I believe if there was such a thing, then SuiteCRM would be a bigger player in the CRM market.
Of course, in general you are right, there should be much better documentation, and there are efforts to expand it. My blog is an attempt at writing a different sort of documentation that I felt was missing. I’m sure one day we’ll pull all of these sources together and have a decent community-produced guide.
Please don’t take my previous comment too seriously - bad day trying to figure out stuff.
Basically, my issue, which I’m sure affects other potential users, is that when trying to customise SuiteCRM is the lack of information regarding why things work as they do.
The currently available documentation tells you how to change things, but provides very little info. about why you might want to and the interactions / consequences of doing ‘things’.
The best comparison I can come up with is SugarCRM’s Knowledge Base. It contains some great insights into how the system works.