SugarCRM For Dummies

I started this book with the intention of bringing a new side of SugarCRM to light. Since I began working at SugarCRM, I saw the flexibility and extensibility that the application could provide. I looked back on my previous position developing internal business applications, and saw that many of the features I added and design issues I would wrestle with were problems that SugarCRM had already solved. The engineering team at SugarCRM had built the application to solve this problem, yet few developers outside of SugarCRM really knew how powerful the underlying platform was. I knew there were other developers in this same boat, and that if I could reach them it would make their jobs much easier. What a CRM application does or doesn’t do isn’t authoritatively defined; instead, its goal is to fill in the gap where a company needs to solve problems in their relationships with their customers. Sometimes this means keeping track of meetings and phone calls. Other times, this means tracking the progress of an ongoing project. It could also mean managing support cases and product defects. Yet sometimes an application may not completely cover this. Just as every business or organization is unique, so must be what CRM will mean to them. Up until SugarCRM, this application space was full of players who thought they had the CRM problem solved, and built large proprietary applications that were expensive to implement and support and notoriously difficult to customize to meet their needs. SugarCRM came in and changed that scene, making CRM something that is inexpensive to implement, easier to customize, and more approachable for end-users to work with. It’s designed to be a CRM that your users won’t hate, which is the philosophy that the founders of SugarCRM set as their paramount goal when building it.