End Users
Welcome to Sugar Professional!
Strong relationships are at the core of every organization's success, and Sugar brings ease and order to the creation, maintenance, and support of your organization's important relationships. We recommend taking the time to read this page and explore our Getting Started knowledge base articles to thoroughly familiarize yourself with Sugar basics. The sections below cover the following topics:
- Introduction to CRM
- Sugar License Types
- Accessing Sugar
- Core End-User Features
- Sugar's Basic Terminology and Concepts
- Sugar's Basic User Interface
- Learning Resources
- Additional Software
Introduction to CRM
Whether you have used a CRM solution for years or are unsure what the acronym stands for, understanding CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will help you get the most out of your Sugar subscription. Sugar will become your one-stop shop to manage and maintain all customer information and interactions, correspondences, transactional history, and much more! Please refer to our Introduction to CRM article for a run-through of the basic principles and goals of CRM.
Sugar License Types
Sugar is purchased with a set number of user seats for each SugarCRM product: Sugar Serve, Sugar Sell, and the legacy offering of Sugar Enterprise. Sugar users, including administrators, are then assigned to one or more products via the License Type field on the user record. The license type(s) you are assigned determines what functionality you can access in Sugar. If you are assigned to multiple license types such as Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve, then you will be able to access the combined functionality of both selected products. For more information on license types in Sugar and the functionality available for each license type, please refer to the User Management documentation.
Accessing Sugar Professional
It's time to access your Sugar instance! Enter your instance's URL (e.g. https://myinstance.sugarondemand.com) in a supported web browser and enter your user name and password. If you don't know your URL or login credentials, please reach out to your Sugar administrator for further assistance. If you can't remember your password, you can click the "Forgot Password?" link (if available) on the Sugar login screen to reset your password. If you do not see the Forgot Password link on your login screen, then please reach out to your Sugar administrator for further assistance. For more information on accessing and configuring your user settings, please refer to the Getting Started documentation.
Core End-User Features
Sugar consists of interrelated records in modules such as Accounts, Contacts, Meetings, Emails, etc. and wraps your data in an intuitive user interface that helps make sense of these different elements of your business. Whatever your organization's focus - sales, marketing, support, or other ventures - Sugar's flexible modules bend to align with your business's models and practices. Manage your relationships from inception to fruition and beyond with Sugar's built-in modules and relationships as well as your custom modules and configurations that are available to Sugar administrators. The core features for your Sugar product are as follows:
Sales Force Automation
- Target, Lead, and Contact management to direct and organize efforts throughout the sales life cycle
- Account management to aggregate interactions with organizations and individuals
- Opportunity management to pursue new business, share sales information, and track deal progress
- Sales Forecasting to enable sales representatives and managers to understand upcoming business
- Quote management to prepare potential sale figures including multiple line items, currencies, and tax codes
- Quoted Line Item management to capture the details of your organization's goods and services
Marketing Tools
- Target, Lead, and Contact management to support the creation of new relationships
- Email marketing campaigns to present relevant email messages to groups of recipients
- Campaign management and reporting for tracking campaigns across multiple channels and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing activities
- Target List management to organize groups of recipients for ensuring campaign message relevance
- Web-to-Lead Forms to capture lead information directly from external web input
Customer Support
- Case management to track service and resolution of customer issues
- Bug tracking to identify, prioritize, and resolve product issues
- Contact and Account management to track support history and enable continuity of service
- Knowledge Base to manage information and share it externally
Record Keeping
- Email, Task, Call, and Meeting management to facilitate day-to-day work
- Note management to affix information and file attachments to other Sugar modules
- Document management to track living documents and their changes
- Contract management to capture and maintain sales and service contracts
- Search capabilities to quickly and easily locate your data
Collaboration
- Shared Email and Calendar to provide visibility across individuals and teams
- Connectors and tools to leverage third-party information regarding your prospects and clients
Reporting
- Report creation and management to gain insight into your organization's Sugar data
- Home page dashlets to display important tables and reports
Sugar's Basic Terminology and Concepts
As you get started using Sugar, it is helpful to understand some key terminology that is used when referring to different areas of the application. The following list explains some common elements and concepts of Sugar to help familiarize you with the application. For more information about other basic elements of Sugar, please refer to the interactive image in the next section.
- Deployment Model
- SugarCloud deployment: Refers to Sugar instances that are hosted on our servers using SugarCRM's Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
- On-Site deployment: Refers to Sugar instances that are hosted on the customer's own server or that of their partner.
- Roles: Roles control a user's access to modules in Sugar as well as enforce restrictions for selected fields within those modules. You must be a System Administrator user in order to create and manage roles in Sugar.
- Teams: Teams control record visibility and determine which records a user can access in Sugar. Only users belonging to the team(s) selected in the record's Teams field will have access to view the record.
- Modules: The Sugar application consists of a number of different modules such as Accounts, Contacts, Call, Meetings, Emails, each of which contain individual records.
- Sidecar modules: Refers to the Sidecar user interface that was introduced in Sugar 7. The majority of the modules in Sugar use the Sidecar user interface.
- Legacy modules: Refers to the Legacy user interface that carried over from Sugar 6. Very few modules use the Legacy user interface.
- Records: The individual records (e.g. ABC Company) contained within each module (e.g. Accounts) in Sugar.
- Navigation bar: The navigation bar spans across the top of your Sugar screen and allows you to access the various modules (e.g. Accounts, Contacts), access your Home page and user profile, perform a global search, etc.
- List View: A module's list view displays all records within the particular module to which you have access to in Sugar.
- Record View: A module's record view displays thorough information regarding the record such as name, email address, phone number, etc.
- Subpanels: Subpanels appear beneath a record's fields and contain related records from various modules (e.g. Contacts, Meetings).
- Intelligence Pane: The intelligence pane lives to the right of list views and record views and displays valuable record information via dashlets and previews.
- Dashboards: Dashboards contain a set of configured dashlets. Dashboards are available on the Home page, intelligence panes, and console views.
- Dashlets: Dashlets are dashboard widgets that allow users to get a quick view of various records, activities, reports, etc.
Sugar Professional's Basic User Interface
For more details on the basic elements of Sugar, please refer to the User Interface documentation in the Application Guide.
Sugar Professional Learning Resources for End Users
SugarCRM provides the following resources to help you succeed:
- Documentation: Sugar's Documentation explains how to use the main application, mobile solutions, plug-ins, connectors, etc. Simply select your Sugar product (e.g. Serve) and version on the Documentation page to see all of the documentation relevant to your instance. Sugar's main application is primarily documented in the following guides:
- Application Guide: Covers end-user functionality.
- Administration Guide: Covers Sugar administration.
- Installation and Upgrade Guide: Covers the requirements and process of installing or upgrading an on-site Sugar instance.
- Online Knowledge Base: Sugar's Knowledge Base is a collection of articles that go beyond the topics covered in our documentation to explain complex use cases and help you to troubleshoot potential problems or questions. Navigate through the hierarchy of topics from the Knowledge Base page or search the support site using the search bar at the top of any page.
- SugarClub Community: Visit SugarClub to collaborate with other users, Sugar partners, and Sugar employees to answer questions and solve problems. You can ask a question of your own, share ideas on how to improve Sugar, search previous discussions, stay up-to-date on new releases, and more.
- Training & Certification: Training & Certification offers a variety of training options to help end-users, administrators, and developers. You can find self-paced videos or e-courses, live training and webinars, personalized training, and pursue Sugar certification.
Additional Software
Sugar provides a number of additional applications and extensions which work with your main Sugar instance to make it even more powerful and pervasive in your organization's work. For information about the specific add-ons available for use with your instance, select your Sugar product and version at the top of the Documentation page to view the compatible add-on software options under "Additional Guides".