I’m wondering on the suitability of using suitecrm as a customer support / activity tracking tool for my software development/integration business. I’m looking for a persistent / on-line application which will allow me to better track my project activities on behalf of my customers and improve my time tracking.
I realized the majority of CRM users are from a product sales/marketing perspective which I would later have the ability to use if I so desire. I would also be able to augment the framework for both myself and the community at large.
Please comment as the above being a reasonable intended usage of suitecrm.
Yes, SuiteCRM could be used for customer support/activity tracking. Our Advanced OpenPortal allows integration with Joomla and SuiteCRM/SugarCRM for customer support. As regards activity tracking, can you expand on what you would require Suite to do in this instance? There are ways to create calls, tasks, projects etc but you may want a more complex solution.
Almost like a typical project management tool where milestones are defined and activities (ie essentially tasks) which are necessary to accomplish them are tracked. This way I have better control as to the time spent on the particular activity/task as well as those who are involved. Secondarily, as a bug tracker and enhancement list for future products and services.
My goal is to provide a dashboard to capture the aspects of my operation. Also, to get some experience with the tool to recommend and use for my customers. I’ve been on the sidelines as I was never really comfortable and weary of the Sugar CRM Community edition as it seemed/seems to be missing quite a bit of functionality etc.
I did not know about the Joomla Integration which will be very useful indeed.
I would need to confirm this but you can certainly create and maintain projects/tasks within Suite. Setting milestones/dates etc. As regards the bug tracker, would this be simply SugarCRM, or a front end where users submit bugs and this integrates with sugar where these bugs can be seen/monitored? The Cases module is very like a ticketing system, which our portal integrates with as a front end on Joomla. This may fit your requirements, with a few modifications to the fields required etc.
You can demo SuiteCRM here to get a feel for how it works and there are a host of extra modules not standard with SugarCRM CE.
Looks like there was an old bug tracker as distinguished from case tracker in earlier versions of sugar. (not sure if this was in Pro or Community editions?). Jira has an addon which integrates with Sugar. I think what I’ll do is upload a copy to my VPS and play around with things. I may need to actually run a full fledged external bugtracker like BUGZILLA, but this will not be a deal breaker. I think that there will be more than enough here to keep track of things at a macro / project level instead of a micro level of development stuff.
Thanx for Your Assistance. I’ll keep you posted during my evaluation if I find something interesting.
I am not able to automatically get the email templates Insert variable $lead_first name in the email when sent to the person. His or her name is not displayed
This has been a problem forever, if the “contact” is a lead $lead_firstname works fine, but if it’s a contact, it won’t you need to use $contact_firstname .