Table of Contents

Table of Contents

How to use Plugin

Creating a ‘Stay In Touch’ Group

Using ‘Stay In Touch’ Fields - Record View Actions

Adding Record To a Group

Using ‘Stay In Touch’ Fields - List View Actions

Status Indicator Scheduler

List View Filters

List View Dashlet

Introduction

Complete solution for keeping healthy relationship with your customers. Business is based on relationships and we provide you the necessary tools to stay in touch and better connect with your customers.

Plugin Support

To receive any kind of support related to Plugin, you can easily access our support portal from new link that has been added to Admin section. Access to support portal can also be found here.

How to use Plugin

Creating a ‘Stay In Touch’ Group

After the module is installed and licensed, you can create your first group! Go to ‘Stay In Touch Groups’ module and click on the ‘Create’ button. We’ll create ‘Hot new leads’ group in this example.

As shown in the picture below, you’ll need to populate the following fields:

• Group Name

• Module - select a module this group will be available for. Please note that once you select a module you will not be able to change it after the group is saved. The list of modules you’re presented with is composed out of all active modules that have at least one activity relationship (relationship towards emails, calls or meetings). We’ll create a group for Leads in this example.

• Contact Every - this is a time interval that you want to contact your leads within. In other words, the tool will help reminding you to contact your persons of interest before the set time interval expires. It consists of input field that accepts a number, and a dropdown field where you can select ‘Days’, ‘Weeks’, ‘Months’ or ‘Years’. We will set ‘Contact Every’ interval to 2 weeks in this example.

Please note that editing this value (after a group is saved) will recalculate the ‘Next Activity Due By’ date on all the records that are part of the group that you’ve edited.

• Share With Everyone - this checkbox makes the group public. If checked, other users will be able to use your group. Please note that person that created the group will be the only one that can edit it after it is saved.

• Define activity status that will count as interaction - since you can make 3 types of interactions with people within SugarCRM application (Emails, Meetings and Calls), you can configure which statuses of mentioned activities will be considered as interaction.

In other words, you’ll probably not want to take scheduled calls or inbound emails as interaction, but only held calls and meetings and outbound emails. Also, maybe you don’t want to make configuration based on ‘Status’ field for calls and meetings. In the first configuration dropdown for these 2 actions we’ve listed all dropdown fields (including custom ones) from meetings and calls, enabling you to select which dropdown field and then which field’s option will be the status that will count calls and meetings as activity. You can find more on activities in the following text.

After all the configuration options are all set, click on ‘Save’.

Using ‘Stay In Touch’ Fields - Record View Actions

Now when you created your first Stay In Touch group, let’s see how you’ll be using the groups.

At the time of creating a group for particular module (we created one for Leads module in this example), that module will get a couple of fields created so our module can work. 2 of those fields will be automatically placed on second row of record view, and one will be placed as second column of list view. Before you add a person to a group, Stay In Touch field will display ‘Please add this record to 'Stay In Touch Group' for this field to work’.

You can reorder the fields in studio just like any other fields. Said two fields are:

• Stay In Touch - displays various information that help you determining when to contact the person

• Stay In Touch Group (display) - the field that serves as relate field towards Stay In Touch Groups records and enables you to assign record to a group

Adding Record To a Group

Next thing to do is adding a record to a group. One person can be put in only one group. In order to do that you’d need to click on the pencil icon that’s located at the right corner of ‘Stay In Touch Group (display)’ field and a drawer will slide down (as pictured below). Said drawer will display all the groups that currently logged in user created, as well as groups that other users created and made public. Please note that ‘Group Manager’ is the group’s assigned user. Group is being selected by clicking on the ‘Select This Group’ button.

If you want to move a record to a different group, you’ll be using the same pencil icon to show available groups. In this case currently selected group will have ‘This group is currently selected’ message written on it instead of selection button. Once you select a group, Stay In Touch fields will look like in the image below.

Please note that additional field called ‘Stay In Touch Group (report)’ will be added to the record view by default. It is default relate field that’ll be created because of relationship between ‘Stay In Touch Groups’ module and module you created a group for. We recommend using this field only for reporting purposes (and mass assignment of people to groups. You’ll learn more about this in the following text.). You should relate records to groups using only the ‘Stay In Touch Group (display)’ field.

Relate field will display the group’s name, along with edit (pencil icon) and ‘delete’ (circled x icon) buttons. Clicking on delete icon removes the record from a group (after confirmation). Removing record from a group will remove all the Stay In Touch data, including status indicator.

Stay In Touch field displays a couple of information:

• ‘Status Indicator’ (green square). Please note that the indicator will be green if up to 70% of time to next activity has passed. It will be yellow if between 70% and 100% of time has passed, and it will be red if time to next activity has passed.

• ‘Next Activity Due By’ is a date until the next activity should be made, based on the frequency that you have set on your group. This is basically the date of last activity incremented by frequency.

• ‘Activity Preview Icon’ (eye icon) opens the last activity’s record (call, meeting or an email) in the preview pane of record view you’re currently at.

• ‘Last Activity On’ is a date when the last activity with record you are looking at has happened. If a person that you add to a group doesn’t have an activity (that complies to group’s configuration) at the moment of adding to a group, the current moment in time will be set as Last Activity On date.

• ‘Manual Update’ is a button that opens date and time field inputs so you can manually set the last activity date. You can use this option if a contact other than email, call or activity was made with a person, or in any other situation. Following image shows manual update of last activity date.

Updating last activity’s date will change the next activity date based on group’s ‘Contact Every’ configuration. In other words, set ‘Contact Every’ frequency will be added to set last activity date.

As previously mentioned, clicking on ‘eye’ icon opens up last activity in preview pane.

Using ‘Stay In Touch’ Fields - List View Actions

As previously mentioned, a field ‘Status Indicator (display)’ will be added to the list view of the module you’ve created at least one group for. The word ‘display’ is used in the label to distinguish the field from ‘Status Indicator (value)’ dropdown field, which holds the value of status indicator: 1 for ‘Green’, 2 for ‘Yellow’ and 3 for ‘Red’. This ‘value’ field will come in handy in reports or list view filters, so you can list all the people whose next activity date has been passed (you can find more about this in the following text).

Apart from adding records to a group one by one on record view, you can use mass update functionality to add many people to a group at the same time. You can do so by following these steps:

1. Select all the records that you want to put in a group

2. Select ‘Mass Update’ from actions menu in upper left corner of the list view

3. Select ‘Stay In Touch Groups (report)’ as a field that will be updated

4. Click on ‘Search and Select’ in order to pick the right group. This action will open up a choice screen, similar to the one pictured below.

Please note that all the public groups and groups created by current user will be shown, including groups created for other modules. Pay attention to selecting the right group and make sure that group was made for that module whose record you’re trying to add to the group.

After selecting a group click on the ‘Update’ button. You’ll see that all the records are now assigned to selected group, and the ‘Status Indicator’ field is now showing indicators, in a form of red, yellow and green circles. Hovering status indicator icon will show you the ‘Next Activity Due By’ date. Let us remind you that the indicator will be green if up to 70% of time to next activity has passed. It’ll be yellow if between 70% and 100% of time has passed, and it will be red if time to next activity has passed.

Status Indicator Scheduler

After you install our package, a custom scheduled job called ‘38 Elements: Recalculate Status Indicator’ will be set. The job will run every night at 3am and it’ll recalculate the status indicator field. This way status indicator will always be up to date, and you’ll see proper status indicators (red/yellow/green icons).

List View Filters

Every module you create a group for will get a couple of fields, one of which is ‘Status Indicator (value)’. It’s a dropdown field with 3 possible values: ‘Red’, ‘Yellow’ and ‘Green’. If you want to change the labels you can edit ‘e38_sit_status_indicators_list’ dropdown in Studio. Please leave the dropdown’s keys (‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’) as they are.

Stay In Touch fields that you can use in filters are:

1. Status Indicator (value)

2. Stay In Touch Group (report)

Using these 2 fields you can filter out all records from any particular group in any particular status.

For example, we can filter out all contacts that are part of ‘very important sales reps’ that have ‘next activity date’ overdue. Let’s create a list of people that need to be contacted.

1. Go to list view and click on ‘Create’ filter button, that’s found in upper left part of list view. A dropdown will appear.

2. Select ‘Stay In Touch Group (report)’ from dropdown, and then select ‘is any of’ as operator from dropdown that appeared.

3. Now click on the input field that appeared, and then click on ‘Search and Select’. Selection view will appear. Please note that all the groups for all the modules will appear in this list. Select a group that was made for the module you are on. We’ll select ‘very important sales reps’ as an example.

4. Now click on plus sign next to the input field (so we can add another filter criteria) and another filter row will appear.

5. Now select ‘Status Indicator (value)’ from dropdown, and then select ‘is any of’ as operator from dropdown that appeared.

6. Now select the status indicator status(es) that you want to filter out. We’ll select ‘Red.’ You can also select multiple statuses.

What you’ll have after filtering is the list of people that you placed into the same group, where everyone has certain status indicator.

List View Dashlet

Another way of using Stay In Touch fields is in ‘List View’ type dashlets. Dashlets can be very helpful addition to your Home screen, or any list view. You can create a dashlet for every group you create, and you’ll always have lists of people in certain status ready.

In order to create ‘List View’ dashlet on Home page of your SugarCRM, do the following:

1. Click on ‘Create’ button in upper right corner of Home screen, or click on arrow next to ‘Create’ button if you want to edit existing dashboard.

2. Select how many columns you want to have in a row (we will select 3).

3. Click on plus sign in the first column, and then select ‘List View’ from list that appeared.

4. Select a module (which you want to create a list for). We will select Leads

5. Now set the dashlet’s name. Our will be called ‘Hot new leads.’

6. You can set a number of rows that list view dashlet will show (using ‘Display Rows’ dropdown).

7. Now you can click on ‘Filter’ button, and then on ‘Create’ button that will appear.

8. A dropdown will appear above, so you can select 2 fields, just as in earlier chapter, ‘List View Filters’.