Greytrix – Sage CRM – Archive Communications

By | May 20, 2009

Going by the saying, “Practice what you preach”, Greytrix is using SageCRM extensively for the past 6 years. Although we are a GOLD development partner and one would think that our internal SageCRM would be loaded with all kinds of “funky” add-ons and “cool” customizations and add-ons but the fact is that our internal CRM has only a few but really important customizations.

One of the customizations was to file the incoming and outgoing email from our company to resellers to the corresponding opportunity that has been created in SageCRM as communication record. It’s really awesome and the fact that it has been working for us without a hitch for the past few years speaks highly about it effectiveness. What this customization did was make sure that all the communications that Greytrix has with its clients are maintained at one central location under each person and its corresponding opportunity. By this approach the users did not have to necessarily depend on their outlook for checking out communication for a particular person or opportunity. They could just login to SageCRM and navigate to the communication tab and it was there. Life was good.

But lately we started to notice that SageCRM was beginning to slow down. We had it installed on a powerful machine with good network connections. The number of users were also not too many. So what was the issue? It did not take much time for us to realize that our communications table in SageCRM database had a huge number of records and hence this was causing the SageCRM to go slow. I would not blame our email filing add-on as we receive close to 200 mails a day and it was storing the communications for the nearly 6 years now.

We could not remove the add-on as it was a critical part of our marketing and sales operations. Hence it was quite obvious that we will have to do something with SageCRM and communication data in particular. On closer analysis we found out that there were communications that were pretty old or there were communications for opportunities that were already closed. These communications would not be required for daily operations and could be easily skipped or rather “archived”. We were thinking for functionality pretty much which MS Outlook provides. We decided to archive the communication for specific criteria and display them in a separate tab under a company context.

Our developers got to work and came up with a solution to store the archived communication with minimal changes to the SageCRM system. We also designed an external utility that would archive the records for communications entity in Sage CRM based on any criteria.

We decided to implement this on the live server and results were very obvious. The SageCRM was back to its original performance. By implementing the Archive Communications add-on we were able to isolate the older communications from the main view/screen but keep them available for viewing in SageCRM.

We found this to be a very useful tool and now we are now doing this for other entities for Sage CRM as well. But that will be another topic of discussion on the blog which I will be putting very soon.

If you find this useful, Please drop us a mail on crm@greytrix.com.