Summary
SugarCRM is a great tool for streamlining your business processes and automating the workflow. The users are able to build dynamic dashboards, which can help you provide a summary of your business from different aspects based on your choice for Information management and Business Intelligence.
A Dashboard in Sugar is built consists of various Dashlets, which allow users to view specific data, insights, and useful visualizations. One of the most common dashlet in Sugar is a ListView dashlet, which gets records from a particular module. Having implemented SugarCRM for multiple customers, we saw a need for people to be able to view records quickly pulling data from multiple sources. Thus, we at Nablasol built a dynamic Custom Query Dashlet that can bring data from multiple modules in a single list and can even show the record summary before the user actually decides to open the lead.
Challenges
While SugarCRM’s default List View dashlet provides an easy way to show data from a single module, there is a plenitude of use-cases where data needs to be pulled from multiple modules. There is a Report Chart dashlet, but it first pulls a graphical report and also, cannot show columns from multiple modules in a Single List.
To overcome these challenges, most organizations build custom query Dashboards to show data from multiple modules, but they come with their own unique challenges:
- Reliance on Developers for adding new dashlets or modifying existing dashlets, which resulted in increased turn-around time.
- Managing a ton of Custom Dashlets, which makes the dashlet list cluttered and difficult to organize.
- Multiple versions of similar dashlets being built, since on-the-fly changes are difficult for these rigid custom dashlets.
Our Solution
We reviewed the challenges faced by these organizations in managing their team’s workflows and came up with a Custom Query Dashlet which can be created for the users on the fly. Here are some of the features we added to the dashlet:
- The Dashlet can be organized in a Tab View, which allows multiple tabs to be added in a dashlet for easy access to all the available data in a single view.
- Tabs can be organized in multiple categories for ease of organizing these tabs.
- A new tab can be added by adding a record in the Custom Dashlet module and defining the SQL query in there.
- Appropriate filters with the user, role, and team restrictions can be added for each tab in the dashlet.
- The data on the dashlet can be color-coded by adding the color code for the records in the SQL query.
- Users can preview the record’s related notes, calls, and appointments before deciding to open the record.
- A note can be added and an appointment can be scheduled by the users from the dashlet itself, without opening the actual record.
Results
Implementation of this dashlet had a huge impact on streamlining the workflow with a great user experience. Some of the biggest advantages of this dashlet included:
- Quick turnaround for building and modifying the dashlets pulling data from multiple modules in SugarCRM.
- Features like color coding the data and tabs made it easy for users to access the data and identify using visual cues.
- Being able to preview the relevant data from the records, without the need to open them helped increase user productivity.
