SugarCRM: A complete installation guide

Being a researcher who is closely working on Customer Knowledge and CRM along with other management areas along with being an avid evaluator of software and services I have been waiting long to evaluate SugarCRM the open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) suite. I have done cases and papers on other open source solutions like Intalio, the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), Alfresco, an Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS) along with OrangeHRM an open source Human Resource Information System (HRIS).

I’d be writing about all these one by one and to begin with, yesterday after a little bit of effort I successfully installed the community version of SugarCRM on my localhost and post installation my first reaction was WOW!

Home Page

http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/

Description

SugarCRM is rethinking how technology can help companies manage customer relationships. Sugar, the market leading commercial open source CRM application, delivers a feature-rich set of business processes that enhance marketing effectiveness, drive sales performance, improve customer satisfaction and provide executive insight into business performance. Supported by deep collaboration and administration capabilities that adapt to how your company operates, Sugar is delighting customers of all sizes across a broad range of industries.

SugarCRM Edition Overview

Along with an open source edition SugarCRM offers two commercial editions: Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Professional.

I was evaluating this product and hence I had no choice but to evaluate the community version of the product. Following is how the website describe the community edition:

Sugar Community Edition is the freely distributed open source edition of the SugarCRM software. It is a production-ready CRM system supported by both the Sugar Community and SugarCRM Inc., the company behind Sugar Community Edition. Released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3, you are free to download, modify and redistribute Sugar Community Edition.

Pre-requisite

Because I have no intention nor the reason to try it on my blog as I don’t run and don’t feel the need to run and CRM initiative I wanted to try this product on my local machine using a local host. As a result of this I installed Vertrigo, a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and Php) on my machine and installed the community version of SugarCRM on the local host.

You can download Vertrigo from here.

I used Windows 7 machine with Vertrigo installed on it to have a server running on which I tried SugarCRM. My machine specs are as follow:

• Windows 7 machine
• Intel Core 2 Dua 2 GHz
• 4 GB RAM
• 320 GB hard disk
• 256 MB nVidia graphic card

I am sure you won’t be requiring such high specs.

Requirements

Recommended Stacks*

Installation Steps

Alright, enough of dibley doblying, getting to the point. I downloaded the community edition of SugarCRM from here.

1. After downloading I unzipped the content in the www directory of Vertrigo Serv installation directory and renamed the directory from SugarCE-Full-5.2.0 to sugar for ease of use. Make sure you are running your vertrigo serv or any other WAMP.

2. Go to your browser (I used Firefox 3.0.5) and type http://localhost/sugar/install.php. You’ll be greeted with the following screen which reads are you ready to install and a whole lot of information about the installation.

3. Click next and you’ll come to the screen where you have to accept the license. Use your imagination and move to the next screen.

Post this screen I was stuck with and error message which was something to do with session.save_path error in SugarCRM.

So searched for the solution and found a pretty easy way out. All you have to do to get past this screen is to comment out some code of installSystemCheck.php. This file can be found under the install folder in your sugarCRM folder. All you have to do is to comment out the following code:

/*

// session save dir

$session_save_path = session_save_path();

if (strpos ($session_save_path, ";") !== FALSE)

$session_save_path = substr ($session_save_path, strpos ($session_save_path, ";")+1);

if(is_dir($session_save_path)){

if(is_writable($session_save_path)){

installLog("Session Save Path is ".$session_save_path);

}else{

$save_pathStatus = "<b><span  class='stop'>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}</font></b>";

installLog("ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_WRITABLE']}");

$error_found = true;

$error_txt .= '

<tr>

<td><strong>'.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].'</strong></td>

<td class="error">'.$save_pathStatus.'</td>

</tr>';

}

}else{

$save_pathStatus = "<b><span  class='stop'>{$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}</font></b>";

installLog("ERROR:: {$mod_strings['ERR_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH_NOT_SET']}");

$error_found = true;

$error_txt .= '

<tr>

<td><strong>'.$mod_strings['LBL_CHECKSYS_SESSION_SAVE_PATH'].'</strong></td>

<td class="error">'.$save_pathStatus.'</td>

</tr>';

}

*/

4. In the next screen select the type of installation. I chose Typical.

5. On this screen the SugarCRM installation would have identified the SQL database which is available for it. Click Next.

6. Next screen will require you to provide various credentials. Most important is the database user name and password. Now the catch with vertrigo serv is that it’s default MySQL username and password is as follows (both are caps sensitive):

Username: root

Password: vertrigo

7. In the next screen you’ll have to enter the password for the admin. Please make sure you remember this. The user name for admin is admin. This we’ll need post installation.

8. On the next screen modify the locale settings for SugarCRM.

9. The next screen is another nagging screen which will ask you to change some more settings. You’ll have to increase your PhP memory limit to 40 MB. By default it is 8MB. Similarly you’ll have to increase the upload file size of Php to 6MB from the default 2MB. These settings can be easily changed in your php.ini. It’s only easy when you are installing it on your localhost. However, if you are planning to use it on your web host then you’ll have to contact them and get things changed accordingly.

If you haven’t changed the memory limits you’ll not be allowed to move forward and will recieve a message like the one below.

Note: Once you have modified your php.ini file, make sure that you restart your server (vertrigo serv).

10. That’s it. If every thing goes well you’ll see the following screen.

Once you have successfully installed the package, you can go to “http://localhost/sugar” and you’ll be able to enter your admin credentials. Remember the default admin user name is “admin” and the password that you provided during the installation.

I’ll try to do the interface and feature review at some other time. In the mean time enjoy browsing various sections of SugarCRM the powerful open source CRM solution.