Marluifer

Preface
Welcome to Sugar, a commercial open source Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) application.
Sugar enables organizations to organize, populate, and maintain information
efficiently on all aspects of their customer relationships. It provides integrated
management of corporate information on customer accounts and contacts, sales leads
and opportunities, plus activities such ascalls, meetings, and assigned tasks. The
system seamlessly blends all the functions required to manage information on many
aspects of your business into an intuitive and user-friendly graphical interface.
The system also offers a graphical dashboard to track the sales pipeline, the most
successful lead sources, and the month-by-month outcomes for opportunities in the
pipeline.
Sugar is based onan open source project, and therefore, advances quickly through the
development and contribution of new features by its supporting community.
Welcome to the community!
About this Guide
The Sugar Community Edition Application Guide introduces you to some basic CRM
concepts and helps you get familiar with the Sugar system. It describes how to install
and upgrade Sugar and access it through apersonal computer and a Web browser. It
also describes how to perform a broad range of customer relationship management
tasks and related administration tasks.
Readers are not required to have any programming or software development
knowledge, but should be generally familiar with the use of a personal computer and a
Web browser such as Mozilla Firefox.
Audience
This guide is designed forusers and administrators who are new to Sugar, or to CRM
and Web-based applications.
ii Sugar Community Edition Application Guide
Preface
Overview
Sugar consists of modules, each of which represents a specific functional aspect of
CRM such as Accounts, Activities, Leads, and Opportunities. For example, the
Accounts module enables you to create and manage customer accounts, and the
Activitiesmodule enables you to create and manage activities related to accounts,
opportunities, etc. These modules are designed to help you manage customer accounts
through each step of their life cycle, starting with generating and qualifying leads to
customer support and resolving reported bugs. Because many of these steps are
interrelated, each module displays related information. For example, whenyou view
the details of a particular account, the system also displays the related contacts,
activities, opportunities, and bugs. You can view, edit, and create this information.
As an administrator, you have the power to implement access control for these
modules. You can customize the look and feel of Sugar across your organization. You
can even create new modules if needed.
Core FeaturesSales Force Automation
Lead, Contact, and Opportunity Management to pursue new business, share sales
information, track deal progress, and record deal-related interactions.
Account management capabilities to provide a single view of customers across
products, geographies, and status.
Marketing Automation
Lead management for tracking and cultivating new leads
Email marketing fortouching prospects and customers with relevant offers
Campaign management for tracking campaigns across multiple channels
Campaign Wizard to walk users through the process of gathering information such
as the marketing channel, targets, and budget needed to execute a campaign
effectively.
Campaign reporting to analyze the effectiveness of marketing activities
Web-to-Lead forms to directlyimport campaign responses into Sugar to capture
leads.
Customer Support
Case management to centralize the service history of your customers, and monitor
how cases are handled.
Bug tracking to identify, prioritize, and resolve customer issues
Collaboration
Activity management for emails, tasks, calls, and meetings
Content syndication to consolidate third-party information sources
Preface...