Sugar CRM 5.0 Review

The acronym "CRM" is not well known among lawyers. Why should it be? After all, it comes from the sales and customer service sector. CRM Stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a business strategy that focuses on customer satisfaction while maximizing profits. This business strategy has spawned dozens of software applications to support it. Perhaps lawyers and law firms could benefit from the CRM software since they share common goals (satisfaction and profit). But could CRM software be used for a case management system?

Enter SugarCRM, a web-based CRM application developed by California-based SugarCRM, Inc. It is available as open-source software with an option to pay for an enterprise version. Because it is web-based, it can be used on Linux, Windows, and Mac and can be utilized as SaaS or a locally installed client/server application.  The commercial backing for SugarCRM is comforting.  I decided to take a look at the latest release of the open source version, 5.0b, released under the GPL. My goal is to see if law firms could use SugarCRM as case management software.

SugarCRM is written in PHP and uses a MySQL back-end. It will run on all three major platforms, but is best suited for a LAMP installation (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php). LAMP is not required, as it will run on any web server that can run PHP and connect to MySql. It will even work with Microsoft SQL server.

Installation

The SugarCRM website has an installation wizard that will allow for easy installation. You answer a series of questions about which edition you wish to download, which OS you use, whether you need to download Apache, PHP, and MySql, etc. Don't worry if you don't have any of those applications already installed, you can download a FastStack installer that includes everything you need. If you would like, you can download the entire LAMP stack as an ISO image and make your own installation disk! This is an incredibly well-planned installation wizard.

For testing purposes, I downloaded and installed SugarCRM on both Windows and Linux using the installers. Installation was pretty much the same for both.

I chose the custom installation options, but it didn't seem very complicated. It did ask me for three different passwords, one for the SugarCRM admin, the mysql admin, and the phpmyadmin administrator. I was also presented with the option to fill the database with demo data, which I chose to do. Once the installation began, it only took five minutes to complete, including time for creating the demo data. That's all it took to install 4 different programs. I tell you, there is no easier way to install Apache, MySql, and PHP, but I wonder how secure the setup is.

Using SugarCRM

The layout of SugarCRM 5.0 is pretty much the same as version 4.5, although the new homepage now includes multiple columns. I was frustrated a bit because the SugarCRM did not fit entirely on my 15” screen, which could be a problem for laptop users.

SugarCRM is designed to be extremely customizable, but I decided to see how well SugarCRM will work for law firms out of the box. As I navigated through the different modules, I noticed that the data structure included lots of relationships. For example, in the contact module, each contact was associated with nine other modules such as accounts, projects, activities, etc. If you scroll down in the contact detail view, you can see all of the relationships in sub-panels. These data relationships are what gives a good case management system its power. The only relationship shortcoming was that I could not relate any documents to cases or anything else for that matter.

The default modules included calendar, tasks, documents, contacts, accounts, campaigns, leads, opportunities, cases, projects, bug tracker, meetings and calls. Some of these, such as the bug tracker, are not helpful for law firms. Some of the module names can be a bit misleading for lawyers, but this is not SugarCRM's fault, it is simply that some terms are used differently in the sales industry. For example, the Accounts module would keep track of what lawyers call clients.  Fortunately, you can rename or even hide any modules you wish.

Many of the basics of a case management system are well covered. The contacts module behaves exactly as you would expect, as does the calendar module.  But one odd thing about the calendar is that appointments did not appear as I expected. I schedule a single appointment for six hours. But instead of seeing a single appointment on the day view, it displayed six consecutive, identical appointments, one every hour. This is not how I would expect to see it. Overall, the calendar module provides all the basic functionality you would expect, such as reminders, tasks, and an invite option.

The big new addition to SugarCRM 5.0 is the built-in email client. Everyone wants email integration from the case management software, but SugarCRM goes one step further and provides its own email client so you don't have to worry about integration problems, unlike Amicus Attorney.  The email client can be configured to link to a POP3 or IMAP email service.  I had no trouble hooking it up to my gmail account.

Another great feature of SugarCRM is the ability to limit certain users from performing certain actions, such as deleting cases or contacts. If you ask me, only one or two people in a firm should have the power to delete cases or contacts. The user settings can accomplish that and provide a very find grain of control over users.

Extending SugarCRM 

The basic SugarCRM CE installation does not include any tools for time-tracking or invoicing--two very important features for law firms.   Fortunately, there are plug-ins available to add that functionality.  One is Just CRMs Time and Invoicing.  This plug-in is a bit weak. It does not convert time into an amount due so you have to add the amount for each line manually, and the pdf view did not work because of a conflict with another webserver on my computer.  This plug-in got some positive reviews, so it may be an option.  But it caused nothing but problems on my installation.  Once I installed this add-on, I kept getting javascript errors and some functions stopped working (could not add a document).

Speaking of plug-ins , there are dozens of them available for SugarCRM. Many of them may not yet work with the newest 5.0 release, but expect that to be cured quickly.  There are plug-ins for Firefox, word, outlook, and many others.  There are even plug-ins that make your calendar look more like a calendar.

Customizing

As I mentioned, SugarCRM is built to be highly customizable.  The admin screen contains tools to edit modules, drop-down lists, and even add new modules--all without having to write any code.  So the question becomes, can SugarCRM be customized to fill the needs of law firms? 

With the Studio tool, one can edit any existing module.  You can add and change fields and edit how those fields are displayed.  For example, I was able to add a field to the Cases module to store an external case number, a court case number or claim number. One thing you cannot do is to add a new sub-panel to one of the pre-defined modules.  Thus, I could not put a documents sub-panel in the Cases module.

There is also a Module Builder that allows you to create and customize your own modules.  With this tool, you can add sub-panels and build relationship to other modules. In theory, you should be able to solve the inability to create new sub-panels in an existing module by creating a new custom module (with a different name) and add a sub-panel from there.

Finally, there is the drop-down editor, which allows you to edit any drop-down list in the application.  For example, you can add your own case types, statuses, things like that.

Any customization you make can be exported.  So if someone took the time to customize SugarCRM for law firms, they could easily share those customizations with others.  Any volunteers? 

Conclusion

Overall, the SugarCRM is easy to use. I didn't have to consult the user manual once, which shows that the developers did a good job of making the program intuitive.  Once I did check out the docs, I was impressed with their depth.  SugarCRM has great potential to be used for case management, and more.  Law firms can even use it to keep track of marketing campaigns.  With some customization, SugarCRM is a viable alternative to proprietary, closed source Case Management applications.  I like this application a lot, so I may do a little demo of it in a podcast.

Pros:

1. Free, and open source;

2. Free as in "free beer";
   

3. Works on all major platforms;

4. Easy to install;

5. Built-in email client;

6. Easily customizable.
   

Cons:

1. Not ideal for lawyers out of the box;

2. No document assembly;

3. No time-tracking, billing, or accounting;

4. No off-line or mobile capabilities.