Customise SugarCRM Case assignment from Inbound Emails

Creating Support Tickets from Emails is one of the core functionalities of a ticketing system and it can hugely benefit any organisation if the ticketing system is directly part of the global CRM implementation.

SugarCRM since the early days has included on any version of its CRM product a great functionality that is commonly used between my customers: the Inbound Email to Case creation (as in Email to Support Ticket creation).

To know more about how to set-up the functionality out of the box, for a Sugar v7.2.2.0 (latest Sugar version while writing this article), please refer to this section of the manual.

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Arduino and SugarCRM 7 – Do we have un-handled support tickets?

Following up on my previous post about connecting an Arduino to internet with an Ethernet module, I wanted to build a quick solution to notify the support team about un-handled customer issues on the CRM system.

Arduino Sugar7 Case counter
Arduino Sugar7 Case counter

The objective is to connect via the REST API to SugarCRM and give an immediate feedback to the team using an Arduino. The output can be anything; from an awesome smoke machine, to a rotating light, a small set of LEDs, a LCD display, an audio alarm, whatever really. In this specific case it will be a set of 5 LED’s and a buzzer.

This practical example shows how to bring together Arduino micro-controllers, basic electronic skills and software web technologies. The result creates a physical device that gives real time feedback for software users about something that needs immediate attention.

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How to get an Arduino clone and connect it to the internet for less than $8

Recently I wanted to start using Arduino embedded micro controllers, to refresh and improve my knowledge of electronics and telecommunications, the subject I studied back in the days at my beloved high school (Arturo Malignani in Udine, Italy).

On this post we will see how to connect an Arduino to the internet (and moving towards the “internet of things”) by using cheap components bought in eBay for less than $8!

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SugarCRM using multiple MySQL databases

Let’s assume you currently have a MySQL Setup with one “Master” and multiple “Slaves”, and you do want to make sure your Sugar system uses the “Slave” instances for reading purposes. Alternatively, if you are looking at deploying MySQL Master/Slave instances with a click of a button to test this out, you can achieve the same setup using Amazon AWS RDS, by deploying one MySQL database with additional read replicas.

SugarCRM commercial editions already have a feature that allows to connect Sugar to a slave database for Reports and/or an additional one for module’s ListViews, providing additional performance and scalability to the application. The feature is provided out of the box and it is available by changing a configuration file, for self hosted systems.

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Can I remove Team Security from SugarCRM?

Any SugarCRM Commercial Edition has a great feature for segmenting data, called Team Security.

In a nutshell, all non Administrator Users can only see SugarCRM records associated with at least one of the Teams they are part of.

…but what if in my organisation I do not want to limit who can see which records on the CRM system? Keep reading to find out the answer!

Not everybody knows that SugarCRM recently introduced the Visibility and ACL Layer that gives Partners and tech savvy End Users, a great granular control when customising record visibility and permissions.

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Upgrading CodeIgniter

I finally had an afternoon free, to test the upgrade of the base PHP framework CodeIgniter, on one of my websites.

CodeIgniterThe first operation we need to do (especially if the initial coding started long ago) is to find out which version of CodeIgniter we are currently using.

We need to search for the constant “CI_VERSION” defined inside the code. In my case the starting point was version 1.7.2.

Now we neet to understand which one is the latest version in the download section (currently 2.1.3) of CodeIgniter’s website.

The next step is to find out our upgrade path defined on the upgrade page and to download the required packages.
CodeIgniter Upgrade Path

In my case I downloaded my current version 1.7.2 and the latest 2.1.3.

NOTE: If for any reason you are still running PHP 4, you will not be able to upgrade to CodeIgniter 2.x. It only supports PHP 5.1 and above.

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