When I was implementing previous issue, my manager asked me: “Can we also mark meetings with colors, corresponding to users?”. This way it becomes somewhat easier to identify originator of an event. “Yeah, it would be cool, but it can be tricky and difficult to implement”,  I said, rejecting the feature request. I said so just to save my ass from potentially frustrating project. Just the day before Marcelo had told me that he has a friend who was working with SugarCRM for a year and he hadn’t quite enjoyed the experience. (more…)

SugarCRM is a decent piece of software. At least, it doesn’t look bad and source code is not as scary as it could be. However, it could have better documentation (I realized that when I was adding some custom fields to built-in entities). But this is another topic.

And today I am going to tell you about its Calendar feature. My colleagues were wishing it could be easier to share a meeting with others. Yes, sharing is theoretically (and practically) possible. All you have to do is to add selected individuals to your event and they will see it on their calendars in “Shared” section. This sounds like sensible behavior for large companies. However, for a small company like us it is more desirable to have zero-friction sharing. It will bring some informational noise (meetings that don’t really relate to certain individuals), but since we are small company, we can live with it. So, I started looking into the sources and here are my findings. SugarCRM stores association between users and meetings (and other entities, like calls) in join tables, usually named like “meetings_users”. And it uses these tables, when showing calendar. The easiest solution for our problem (zero friction sharing) would be to take that join table out of queries and show ALL meetings. And we will do just that. (more…)