SugarCRM Troubleshooting: SugarCRM 7 Installs

Wow! - That was my initial reaction when I first saw early versions of SugarCRM 7.0 (Sugar 7) a little over a year ago. It reminded me of how impressed I was the first time I saw Sugar in its 3.0 days.

Fast forward to today and a lot of folks have had a chance to experience the same. New customers utilizing the SugarCRM OnDemand environment have had access to 7.0 for a few months. More recently, new on-premise customers utilizing classic LAMP stacks have also been able to take advantage of all the great new features in 7.0. 

As the with any new software release, as it gets exposed to greater quantity of users, certain patterns emerge relating to common problems users encounter. Sugar 7 is no exception. 

Perhaps the most common issue in the 7.0 world today is one where the install procedure completes without error, but after completion, the Sugar login page never displays. In its place, users will see the following:

It would seem Sugar never stops loading because the message never goes away. This is actually not far from the truth, but fortunately, there is a very simple fix to this problem. Before we look at the solution, it is worth briefly discussing the nature of the problem, as it is directly related to an important change that has been introduced into the Sugar architecture.

A Tale of Two Maxes

A few days ago an odd error message experienced by a SugarCRM user made its way to my desk. After scratching my head for a few minutes, some ideas for its source came to mind and the problem was corrected. 

Soon thereafter, a similar scenario once again made its way to me, but the conditions causing the error seemed a bit different. Fortunately, both scenarios resulted in similar errors and the solution for the prior scenario was equally applicable to the latter.

This is the error, extracted from the sugarcrm.log file:

MySQL error 1439: Display width out of range for column '<some_field_name>' (max = 255)

So what is this error telling us? The error is telling us that the referenced field cannot be created because its definition indicates a desired width larger than 255. In this particular case, it was an integer field, which in turn translates to a field that can hold more than 255 digits. Note that this a reference to the number of individual digits the field can hold, or its width, not the maximum value it can hold. This brings us to the crux of the problem.

SugarCRM 101: Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities.

Have you ever wondered about the reasons why some modules exist within SugarCRM? The reason is not always obvious, especially to someone new to the sales/marketing world, and often prompts questions.

Perhaps no other area generates more questions than the Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities modules. To some, the data contained in some of those modules seems redundant, especially the first two as they both contain data about individuals. In other cases, their usage seems like overkill. Yet others are confused as to their need, due to semantics, for example, to some a Lead and a Contact are synonymous with each other. 

Lets try to unravel some of this confusion and answer some of these questions.

If we quickly analyze sales procedures at a variety of businesses, we discover some commonalities across many industries, regardless of the size of the business. Here is a summary:

1. Someone, typically in marketing, is in charge of attracting potential buyers of your services/products. 
2. A potential buyer responds and is screened/qualified, to determine their specific interest and purchasing power. 
3. Lastly, a deal is worked and if won, the potential buyer becomes a paying customer.

That is a very simplistic look at a sales cycle, but it serves our purposes rather well. 

Modern CRM systems, such as SugarCRM, are designed with the above principles in mind. As a result, they include functionality aimed at helping users more clearly differentiate the type of customer information they are looking at to fit in within those various points listed above. More specifically, an application like SugarCRM clearly draws a line between a potential customer and a paying customer, as well as what deals are in the works. 

That, in short, is the reason why the various modules exist, but lets talk some more about their usage.