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How to create and better handle with Sales Meeting`s Minutes in Sugar modul Meetings if users use calendar synchro within add-on Sugar Connect

Tomas Ciba

Dear Sugar folks,

our sales colleagues have been using their Meeting´s minutes (MoMs) in Cloud Sugar module "Meetings", where they basically do 2 things. One, they choose the date and time regarding the customer`s meeting and second, they write down several bullet points regarding the most important conclusions from this customer`s meeting. They save it and then it starts our SugarBPM feature in the background, which sends an automatic notification with these MoMs from Sugar Meetings to Outlook to our sales regional directors as well as top management.

There is one drawback at the moment. If a user uses proactively calendar synchro within add-on Sugar Connect at the same time, then these automatic notifications send out any internal and organizational calendar meetings sales regional directors as well as top management together with MoMs from customer`s meetings. Is there any already running solutions how to set up and handle better with that? I do know -> perhaps to implement any action buttons within Sugar module "Meetings"? What is the best use case for this?

Thank you for your point of view and sharing of your experience,

Tomas

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  • 0 Sugar Employee Badge

    Hi Tomas,

    Best practice is to use the internal notes field to track information like summarizations and conclusions from held meetings. Sugar Connect will consider updates to the following fields as a trigger to sync a Sugar meeting to an external calendar (Outlook in your case):

    • Date
    • Time
    • Subject
    • Status
    • Location
    • Invitation Body

    If you put your meeting notes and minutes in the body field, Sugar Connect will sync that change to Outlook. Outlook will detect a change in the meeting and broadcast a notification of the change to all meeting attendees. We have looked into trying to suppress those notifications from Outlook and cannot find a way to do so. It is Outlook's default behavior on a meeting change. In fact, Outlook will do this if you manually update the meeting.

    I hope this helps you!

    Thanks,

    Andrew Blue

    Sr. Manager, Product Management

  • 0 in reply to Andrew Blue

    Hi Andrew,

    We are still struggling to handle MoMs efficiently. The sales team's current process is:

    1. They create a meeting in Outlook.
    2. After the meeting was held, they send MoMs via Outlook to the participants.
    3. They add a MoM to SugarCRM by misusing the "Meetings" module as the actual MoM.

    We can push them to use the "Meetings" module as originally intended, but there are two main issues:

    1. The MoMs to the participants, sent via Outlook, are not linked to the meeting record. So, sales team would need to manually copy this information to... the "Internal Notes" field I suppose.
    2. There is no easy way to send an email from SugarCRM to a meeting's participants (e.g. an action button cannot access the participants' email addresses). Even if there was, the email would not be linked to the meeting (or vice versa; I mean you wouldn't see from within the meeting record that there is a related email).

    We see two possibilities to mitigate this:

    1. Somehow sync email replies to a meeting from Outlook to the meeting record in SugarCRM. Then our sales team could just send the MoMs as usual from Outlook.
    2. Add an action button "Send email to participants" to meeting records, and visibly link the resulting email to the meeting record.

    There may very well be something we do not understand about the intended usage. Looking forward to your explanation Slight smile

    Best,
    Christoph

  • 0 Sugar Employee Badge in reply to Christoph Klöcker

    Hi Christoph,

    If I understand correctly, your sales team are sending an email to meeting participants with minutes from the meeting after the meeting was held. You also want the minutes of the meeting to be available in the CRM as well. If that's not correct, let me know.

    One thing you can do is to archive the email and relate it to the meeting in Sugar at the time the email is sent. You will need to build a relationship on the Meeting module to Activities so you can relate an email to a meeting and see it in a sub-panel on thee meeting record. Then, when you compose the email in Outlook, you can use Archive w/ Options in Sugar Connect to relate the email to the meeting when the email is sent. You would then be able to see the email from the meeting record (screenshots below). Do you think this would work for you?

    Andrew Blue

    Sr. Manager, Product Management

  • 0 in reply to Andrew Blue

    Hi Andrew,

    Yes, this is probably a valid solution/workaround. Tank you very much for this suggestion.

    It would still involve the, in my view, unnecessary step to manually search for the meeting in the archiving dialog. It could be matched automatically and show the meeting under "Related Entries". Even better would be a general configuration option for Sugar Connect: "Link related emails to meetings automatically". Of course, this would require the relationship between meetings and emails to be built-in.

    Best,
    Christoph

Reply
  • 0 in reply to Andrew Blue

    Hi Andrew,

    Yes, this is probably a valid solution/workaround. Tank you very much for this suggestion.

    It would still involve the, in my view, unnecessary step to manually search for the meeting in the archiving dialog. It could be matched automatically and show the meeting under "Related Entries". Even better would be a general configuration option for Sugar Connect: "Link related emails to meetings automatically". Of course, this would require the relationship between meetings and emails to be built-in.

    Best,
    Christoph

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