Know-How Exchange : Other

I set up Vtiger (a fork of SugarCRM) in about an half hour. Set up goes quickly, but adding user/passwords and permissions is what takes the time. It would depend on how many staff you need to set up with access.

Darcy Moen
Customer Loyalty Network

It rather depends on the implementation you are considering. Also see my last paragraph.

Sugar comes in about 6 “Flavours” with Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise being the basic building blocks – Enterprise is more feature rich than professional. Both can be on-site, which appears to be the subject of your query or On-Demand, i.e. Hosted. Also remember Sugar Cube which comes ready to deploy including the hardware for an extra $4500 or more for the enterprise version which sits behind your firewall and utilizes a browser on the workstations to access the application.

On site runs on a MySQL database or if you are ambitious, Oracle and the main server installation time consideration ensuring that the various modules are loaded correctly and that MySQL is going to reference your application correctly. Oracle is a totally different story.

Two to three hours would make sense for an IT consultant fully trained in Sugar CRM and depending on your deployment about 30 minutes for a workstation, assuming that there is no customisation or very little time at all if you are just browsing the application on the server. It’s very similar to Maximizer which we handle, the main difference being that the latter comes with most of the user options ready for use. There is a difference between customizing an option and needing to deploy it!

If the IT consultant is not Sugar trained, then the installation time is as long as a piece of string.

Then there’s deployment. For Professional and eEnterprise Sugar offer 24/7 and 40/10 deployment packages which will respectively see your application and processes be installed, after consultation in 24 hours over a 7 day working period or 40 hours over 10 working days. The cost depends on the complexity, the off site work needed and the charges levied by the Sugar Business Partners.

If you are contemplating doing this for yourselves, have a close look at the Sugar Forum:

https://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9333&highlight=workstation

This posting is to frighten the socks off you – I recently did a Novell application with Maximizer which whilst taxing, didn’t come close to this!

Or
https://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9333&highlight=workstation

To give you an idea of just how good their forum is. Other CRM vendors would do well to take note.

As Sugar is open source it is always going to “Product Under Development” but you will need to take into account just what you want it to run on and what you want it to run with. That’s, Linux or Windows, Office, Outlook, Internet Explorer, FireFox, MySQL, Oracle, etc, etc.

Look on the forum for your ancillary applications, your operating system and look for plug-ins to speed up deployment and also look search for “bugs”

The way you phrased the question left me a little worried. Needing to estimate the time to deploy on the server is about 1% to 10% of the total time and cost of deploying most CRM systems, Sugar included. You need to take a hard look at all the other contingent costs and deployment times to get the full picture.

Regards


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions