SugarCRM's #1 problem: It's too easy to use

Matt,
It's interesting you state that it's easy to use - the subject line caught my attention. I don't think it's easy to use. But after reading your post, I see that you are not saying it's easy to use but easy to administer which are too totally different things - they both are very important though.

I just installed SugarCRM for my business and have begun to use it. Everything I've done and also read agrees with it being easy to Administer. But it definitely is not easy to use! Trying to figure out how to use it as a Sales tool has been very challenging. And there is NO good documentation that I've found anywhere that helps. Guess part of the problem is that it's very flexible and can be used in many different ways but too me that makes it very complex. One big issue I see is that you can't have a huge list of leads (non qualified leads) and convert them to sales prospects (company is interested in product so worth pursuing). But that took days of researching in the forums to figure that out. So right now I'm only using it for tracking prospects through the sales cycle. But even then, I still haven't figured out how to track my interactions with the prospects, have it remind me when I'm suppose to get back to prospect, etc.

I'm sure it supports all these capabilities and then some. But honestly, it's not that easy to figure out (so not easy to USE) and finding this information has proved to be just as challenging.

So maybe rename the title of your article that it's easy to Administer!

Hi all -

Thanks for the great comments on SugarCRM. We are 100% focused on making SugarCRM the easiest-to-use and easiest-to-administer application possible. I'm glad to hear people are finding some (most?) areas of the app easy to use and we completely hear you that other areas need to be improved.

We are releasing the GA version of Sugar 4.5 this week and I think everybody will be pleased with the things we have done to improve SugarCRM.

Here are a few of the highlights of 4.5 from a usability perspective:

- Reduced the number of clicks needed to navigate the app as well and introduced the ability to heavily personalize your Sugar home page. Lots of cool implementations of AJAX allowed us to do this.

- Significantly improved the documentation. The Online Help got a complete overhaul in 4.5. We also spent a lot of time updating and extending the existing application documentation.

- Introduced Sugar University (http://sugarcrm.com/crm/university) with training manuals, videos and instructor-led training sessions for end users and administrators. Sugar U is available for customers of Sugar Network (training and support for Sugar Open Source), Sugar Professional or Sugar Enterprise.

- Introduced Sugar Wiki (http://sugarcrm.com/wiki) with an extensive support knowledgebase and developer knowledgebase. This is primarily a commmunity-driven effort with lots of helpful info for all users of SugarCRM (Sugar Open Source, Sugar Professional and Enterprise).

My apologies for the rather shameless commercial for us, but I wanted everybody to know that we've done a lot over the past six months to signifcantly upscale the overall experience of working with SugarCRM products and services.

To learn more about Sugar 4.5, check out http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/45-roadmap.html.

Cheers!
Clint Oram
GM and Co-Founder
SugarCRM

Sugar is great!!

I installed it in a coupel of hours and not it is the basis for my whole business.