Blog

There are several times we, as consumers, are faced with upgrade options. For just $0.60 more I can get an extra espresso shot in my latte. For $2,500 more I can get seat warmers in a new car. We often weigh the cost and benefit of these upgrade decisions by asking ourselves, “does the need or desire for the extra feature or quantity justify the increased cost?” At W-Systems, we face the upgrade decision with our customers in every new and existing CRM project. We work closely with our customers to help them determine which Sugar edition is the right fit for their current business and which might be the right fit as they scale. Within the last year, SugarCRM has introduced several new features to Sugar Enterprise in an effort to meet the needs of companies seeking a bit more power than what is offered with Sugar Professional. Additionally, there are some changes coming to Sugar Professional that affect the current workflow manager and may justify upgrading to Enterprise. To help define what the differences are so you can make an informed decision, we’ve detailed-out the added features and benefits of Sugar Enterprise below.

Opportunity Revenue Line Items

Sugar’s Revenue Line Items allows users to associate multiple line items with a single opportunity. This allows for increased granularity when working opportunities and forecasting since each line item within an opportunity can have its own sales stage, probability, and close date.

Role-Based Views

Sugar roles enable system admins to define module and field level permissions for certain users in Sugar. With Role-based views in Sugar Enterprise, admins can define a specific record layout for users in a certain role. For example, users in a customer support role can see different fields or a different layout in an Account record than users in a sales role. Role-based views ensure that only the relevant information about a record is displayed to the user.

Advanced Workflows

Advanced Workflows is an easy-to-use business process management (BPM) and workflow tool that is replacing the legacy workflow manager, currently offered in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise. By the end of 2016, workflow manager will be removed from both Sugar Professional and Enterprise. Advanced Workflows will be left as the only business process management tool included in Sugar and will only be available for Sugar Enterprise and Ultimate editions. Using workflows allows administrators to configure cause-and-effect type actions and create a fluid and automated process. With Advanced Workflows admins can use graphical, drag-and-drop interface to build processes and streamline common but often complex business processes.

More Storage and Support

For On-Demand customers, Sugar Enterprise includes four times more storage than Professional and more frequent backups. The inclusion of Sandboxes with Enterprise enables customers to test customizations and upgrades in a development environment before pushing to their live system.

Customer Self-Service Portal

The Sugar Portal is used by customers to access specific information or create new records in your Sugar instance. The portal allows customers with valid login credentials to access cases, bugs, and knowledge base records. While the customer self-service portal is a nice extra, we typically don’t recommend upgrading to Enterprise purely for this feature. If a company has a need for a portal, W-Systems recommends using our portal framework which is mobile friendly and completely customizable to meet functional and branding requirements.

Advanced Reporting (SQL based)

Advanced reports allow admin users to create custom reports using a single or a combination of SQL statements to directly query your Sugar database. This allows for more advanced reports than what is possible with just using the standard Reports module but does require knowledge of MySQL. Depending on how you are using or plan to use Sugar will determine which edition is best for your organization. If you’d like more information on the differences between Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise or would like to talk about which is a better fit for your company, reach out to us on our contact us page.