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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: CRM solutions help businesses streamline their customer management processes. However, choosing and deploying the right CRM solution for your needs is not an easy task. There are many proprietary and Open Source CRM solutions to choose from. SugarCRM is an Open Source CRM solution that is easy to deploy and is flexible enough to adapt to any business environment.
Unlike other Open Source solutions that need to be deployed on the Linux platform, SugarCRM can be deployed on Windows platform also. In this article we demonstrate how you can deploy SugarCRM on Windows or use its alternate virtual appliance version.
SugarCRM has a community edition which is available for free download from its website sugarcrm.org. It has a commercial counterpart as well, which is available as an installable application or as a cloud-based service. It can be used by businesses of any size. It does not require a core technical team to support its deployment and installation.
SugarCRM is built on PHP and can support MySQL as well as Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle database users would require a separate connector which is also available from SugarCRM developer community. And the web server component can be deployed on Apache or IIS. The alternate to all this is a preconfigured SugarCRM appliance that includes the SugarCRM application pre-installed with PHP, MySQL, sendmail and httpd on a Linux base. This appliance can be installed virtually on VMware.
| When the web server is running, point the browser to address http://localhost/sugarcrm and the SugarCRM web installation wizard's welcome screen is displayed. |
| After selecting MySQL as database, you are prompted to provide database configuration details. You can also choose to populate database with demo data. |
Installing SugarCRM
To deploy SugarCRM on a Windows-based machine, you need to have installed PHP, MySQL or SQL Server and Apache web server before hand. On this month's DVD we have given the latest version of SugarCRM Community Edition 5.2, as well as a WAMP server package, which has PHP, MySQL and Apache web server. It is a simple installation, and saves you from the hassles of installing all these software packages separately. To begin the SugarCRM installation, extract the contents of file SugarCE-5.2.0j.zip to www directory of the WAMP server, which would be C:\wamp. Navigate to www directory and change the name of SugarCE-5.2.0j folder to ?sugarcrm?.
| SugarCRM lets you localize the settings as per your preferred needs. These settings are globally reflected on the installed SugarCRM instance. |
Start the WAMP server, which will start the services corresponding to Apache web server and MySQL database server. Now to begin installation of SugarCRM, open a web browser and enter address as: http://localhost/sugarcrm. You should get the welcome page of SugarCRM web installation wizard. This welcome page displays the information corresponding to required system components, system checks, and custom installation requirements.
The rest of the installation is pretty simple, and easy. A wizard will guide you through selecting your installation type, your database local settings like date, time, and currency. Incidentally, SugarCRM supports IVR. An interesting point to make here is that you can auto-populate your databases with demo data. This would help you understand features and functionality of the product, various widgets, charts, etc.
Once the wizard completes collecting information, it begins the installation unless it encountered any error. Upon successful installation you are prompted with a screen that displays the results of the installation process. The installation of SugarCRM is complete now, and by clicking on Finish button you are directed to SugarCRM login page. Upon giving the administrator username and password you can now proceed to SugarCRM homepage.
| Once the installation has been completed, the Perform Setup page is displayed with all successful processes that have been performed. |
| After logging into SugarCRM, on the homepage a user can view the details of his contacts and leads to be followed. He can customize the homepage as required. |
SugarCRM as an Appliance
If you do not have a dedicated technical team and you do not expect a high user load on the machine, then you can opt for using the SugarCRM appliance. The benefit will be that you can keep copies of the VMware virtual disk file on a regular basis, and if your server crashes, you just have to copy this virtual disk file and start the server. All your data will be restored to the previous backup. With this month's DVD you can get the SugarCRM appliance packaged in sugarcrm-os-5.0.0b-x86.vmware.tgz. tar file. It is a VMware deployable appliance. This appliance can also be downloaded from the SugarForge.org website.
| When the appliance boots in VMware, it is assigned an IP address, which can be used to access SugarCRM. |
To deploy SugarCRM appliance, you need to have VMware installed on the machine and once you have installed and booted the SugarCRM virtual machine configuration file through VMware, all you need to do is determine the network address and browse to it. Upon booting, the appliance starts the MySQL server and Apache web server, and also detects and allocates a network IP address for itself from the network DHCP.
If the network address assigning fails, you have to assign the IP address manually. When the appliance has booted, it displays the allocated IP just above the login prompt. In our case, the appliance assigned itself the address 192.168.5.73; you just now have to point your browser to this address from any other machine connected on the network or the web browser of the host machine, and you will have SugarCRM login page displayed to you. The default credentials to login into SugarCRM as administrator are 'admin' as username and password as 'changeme.' If you need to change the database settings or want to do any other installation setting you can do that by logging into the system as root with no password. The default user for MySQL database for SugarCRM is ?sugarcrm? with password ?changeme?.