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Hi. My name is Carolyn and today I will show you some of the administrator functions Sugar offers and how you can use them to manage users and control access rights to modules and fields.
I’m going to start by logging into Sugar as an administrator. The display of the homepage changes based on the role of the user. Each user can easily modify what dashlets appear on his or her homepage. I can track module usage or display any tracker report. I can also see all my open tasks and meetings at a glance.
I will access the admin page by clicking on the admin link up here. This link only appears to users with administrator privileges. This section provides access to the Sugar support portal, documentation, Sugar updates, and license management. Here’s where the overall maintenance of SugarCRM is performed. We’ll visit each of these sections throughout today’s demo.
User management: this is where you can create, edit, activate, and deactivate users.
Role management: here you can create roles, define role characteristics, and set privileges.
Team management: this section enables you to create teams, assign users to teams, manage team information, and create and manage team notices.
SugarCRM offers the common functionality that everyone uses in a CRM application but also provides easy to use tools that allow to you configure and extend the application.
Today we will look at workflow management and develop a tool which allows you to automate business processes, send alerts, and creates tasks triggered by actions or elapsed time.
My organization just hired a new sales representative. I’ll need to create a new Sugar user in order to allow this employee to access Sugar. A user is how Sugar identifies the people in your organization who utilize the Sugar system. The username must be unique. An active user counts as a license. An active user can log in and be assigned records. A user can set some of his or her own settings such as date and time format, display options, and personal information. This user is a sales rep and reports to Barbara, the regional sales manager. This manager hierarchy plays into access level. We’ll see that later as we view teams. There are preferences a user cannot modify – status, user type, access to offline client, reports to, team membership, and role membership.
This is a new sales rep and he is interested in only a few tabs. We can remove the unnecessary tabs such as cases. I also want to admin remove tabs such as campaigns. A user can modify tab display but not tabs removed from view by the administrator.
Let’s view this new user’s settings. Here are the settings I chose for my new user. At this time, Matt has full access to all Sugar modules. I have not yet defined any roles for him. A role defines operations that can be performed within the module. Users can be added to multiple roles but the most restrictive role prevails. Since he is a sales rep, I will assign Matt a sales role. I have defined this role previously according to my organization’s request. Notice how access is now disabled for select modules to fit the predefined sales rep role. I can also restrict access down to the field level.
Let’s change some of the restrictions on the sales rep role. Here’s a list of all modules. I’m going to choose contracts and make reference code read only for sales reps. Now, sales reps will be able to view reference code but won’t be able to change it. I haven’t manually set up teams for Matt yet but here we see he already belongs to two teams, global and his private team.
Global team: records are available to all users.
Private team: this user’s private team.
Teams are used to allow or restrict visibility to records, meaning if a user is a member of the same team a record is assigned to, then the user can view that record.
Here I see that Barbara and John Narcom are also automatically members of Matt’s private team. Remember, Barbara is Matt’s manager and John is Barbara’s manager. When a user is assigned to a team, the user’s management reporting hierarchy is implicitly added to the team as well. This ensures that members of the user’s management hierarchy also have visibility over the records of this employee.
We just saw how you can easily create a new user and utilize teams and roles to define and restrict access to modules down to the field level. Workflow allows me to standardize business processes across the organization. Workflow can be triggered when a record saves under a specific condition or time elapses. This workflow creates a task related to the target module when a record is saved under specific conditions. This workflow is triggered when the opportunity becomes closed won.
Alerts are emails sent to a specific set of recipients upon meeting the condition of the workflow. For example, actions allow you to create a record or update a record. In this case, we are creating a task. Here’s an example of a workflow triggered by time elapsed. When a case has been open for over 24 hours, an alert is triggered in the form of an email.
We just took a quick overview of some of the tools available for Sugar admin users. We saw how you can restrict record access down to a field level via team and role management. We also saw how easily you can modify and/or extend Sugar to tailor to organizations’ existing business processes.
Get started now with your own personal SugarCRM by going to http://www.itontap.com/try-web-based-crm-software-for-30-days
Brought to you by Troy Netreba from I.T on TAP, helping businesses spend more time on sales by reducing marketing administration. Visit http://www.itontap.com/
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