What do a VCR, a painted rock, a 4GB flash drive, and a mouse jiggler have in common? You'd know if you had attended yesterday's Social Club session!
Thank you to everyone who was able to join! There were some great conversations, lessons learned, and strategies shared.
One of the key components of Social Club sessions is that they are not recorded so that Sugar customers can speak candidly and conversationally. However, there were some really useful tips shared that everyone should get to benefit from. A few highlights, in no particular order, include:
- Use naming, nomenclature, and notes properly and liberally
- Giving your elements descriptive names and properly writing notes/comments will save you (and other teammates) a lot of time in the future. We heard about how some Sugar implementations include 70, 80, or even 150+ processes. Leaving yourself vague or nonexistent notes will save you a few moments now, but may cost you more time later when you need to reverse engineer or track down a necessary change.
- Also, name your processes appropriately and with versions in the name so you can easily locate them in the future. As you make updates, you can also duplicate and then disable existing processes when they need changes, using naming like "My process name v1.0", "My process name v1.1," "My process name v2.0," etc.
- Review or revisit your processes regularly to check for possible updates or ways to consolidate existing processes
- As Sugar is upgraded, new enhancements are added to SugarBPM which may give you alternate ways to achieve your business goals. Something you built a few years ago may be able to be rebuilt better now.
- If you're taking advantage of Sugar Automate, that may negate the need for some of your processes if you've built them to track your customer's lifecycles.
- Be conscious of the volume of email notifications being sent to end-users
- One BPM sending notifications may seem fine, but if you end up having 100, that will add up.
- A workaround for this is to create a reportable field that is updated instead of the notifications being sent out. Then, send a scheduled report filtering on that field so that the end user(s) can view the records periodically and in a consolidated matter.
- BPMs are often thought of as a tool used to build something large and complex. Don't forget that they can be used for simple actions too, like tracking updates to important fields which can then be used to build reports.
Hopefully, these SugarBPM tips can help all Sugar admins. If you're interested in learning more tips like this, make sure you're following the Sugar Events calendar so you don't miss the next session!