When you have a few problems with a piece of software and there is an upgrade available, the natural inclination is to upgrade and hope that the problems disappear. I saw the announcement:

Posted By: Jason Nassi
Date: 2005-08-15 10:36
Summary: Sugar Open Source 3.5.0 Available for Download
Project: Sugar Open Source

So, it seemed like a good idea to go ahead with it. It didn't say Beta, but now I know that it probably should have. Not sure if this was a mistake or more likely just pushing to release and get an announcement out on a particular date whether ready or not. I had a little hesitation on this based on seeing the 3.0.1 release fairly soon after 3.0 - should have trusted instinct and waited.

Where to start? There seem to be thousands, and I would guess that the vast majority are worthless or nearly so. Although free always sounds great, paying a few hundred dollars seems like a good way to quickly reduce the number of choices.

I have been on an e-newsletter for a few months by Brad Callen. Some good information here along with a bit of self-promotion. He has (or promotes) a product called SEO Elite that seems useful. My information has come primarily from the screenshots and description in the newsletter articles.

Another one is from a guy named Bruce Clay. There are actually several from this site, and it is a web site service rather than desktop tool. I guess the first part of my criteria is whether I can learn something useful from them just by reading an email or their web site. There is a decent article here that has some good info.

We are pretty new to CRM, so some of this is a little confusing. What is the difference between a Lead and Opportunity? The term prospect is also used in the Campaign module, which is also a bit too similar to distinguish yet. Similarly, there are Cases, Bugs and Project Tasks which all overlap somewhat in my vocabulary and experience. Is there some way to turn a Case into a Bug? Do I have to look at a list of all three to determine what to do today? At this point, I am not sure if this is a program that just has much more functionality than I want or there is some clever distinction between these similar entities that will all make sense soon. (after thumbing through the Sugar user guide, I found the modules section which does a decent job of explaining this, it is now starting to make sense)

Started with Sugar Suite v3.0.1b July 1, 2005. First impression is that it looks good, with lots of useful functionality, although maybe somewhat overwhelming with the large number of tabs/modules.

Ran into a couple bugs and disappointments pretty quickly:

1235540 Releases cannot be added
Applied fix and it works.

1208942 Email reminders not being sentq
Not sure if this is the same as what I have but assigning a task does not generate email reminder.

New project task form doesn't work (block under shortcuts). Have to add tasks using the create task button instead :(

1218905 Date Due in Project Task works only using 24 hour time.

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