The last thing a sales guy would like is to open up a desktop and punch data into a CRM application. So even though companies spend thousands of dollars on, many a times they face the problem of low user adoption and even lower business value realization from CRM. One of the reasons for this is the fact that a major proportion of the users are mobile and would want to access data on the go. We felt that the value that the application delivers is hugely enhanced by accessible on the go without much of a hassle. This article details why your business may need to have a responsive theme and also the design considerations that went in when we designed our theme. The limitations have been given along with comparison of what it is like to have a mobile application versus a responsive theme for SugarCRM.

Business Cases – Why a plug-in to make your current SugarCRM theme Responsive Though it is not difficult to visualize the benefits of having SugarCRM on mobiles and tablets, if you are still wondering about the same, following are some key business examples why we should consider it. As sales manager, you can access dashboards on your mobile for example you can access latest opportunities created in the system and mobilize your resources for maximum business gains even on the go. Still better, you can personally greet the customers with whom you just closed business with. As salesperson, you can capture the recent notes / opportunities / meeting details just after your meeting, instead of waiting to reach office and filling the same offline.

Oct 29, 2015 - Why we don't have an options or a list of default themes of our SugarCRM Professional? We can't change themes because there is no themes.

This not only eliminates information loss but also removes the need to login into a desktop to fill in your daily field details. As a support staff it is needed to visit customer site to fix service related cases, you can see your newly assigned records and optimize your travel / work plan for the day. Thus, if you have users accessing SugarCRM on the go, you must seriously consider moving to a responsive theme which can help them access the system from anywhere and on any device. Mobile App versus a Responsive Theme So now you are convinced that on the go access to SugarCRM is a value add, there are two ways of accomplishing it – i) Developing Mobile Application (ii) Responsive theme. Following chart compares the two approaches Features Mobile Application Responsive theme Ability to access data on mobile Yes Yes Ability to create data using mobile Limited Yes Platform independent?

No Yes Custom fields / Custom modules No Yes Total cost of ownership Higher Moderate Time to market Longer Shorter As shown above a clear cut winning argument in favour of responsive theme is the fact that whereas Mobile apps have to be developed for each operating system like Android, Windows and iOs, responsive themes are platform independent. Moreover, as you customize your CRM application by adding new modules or new fields, you may have to enhance you mobile app as well.

This may consume time and money and bring down your user experience. So it is absolutely correct to say that a responsive theme wins hands down so far as the above alternates are considered. Key Considerations for a SugarCRM responsive theme converter plug-in When we started to make the responsive theme converter plug-in for SugarCRM, we thought of the following key design considerations. This helped us in ensuring that the design can help organizations across versions, industry verticals and customization levels.

Data Access versus Data Entry There are themes in market which can help you to access data. However since creation of data is complicated, they leave this part. Lane bryant employee handbook. We thought, it is no fun to have only data access without creation of a new record.