vTiger 6 Beta has been out for a while now. After installing the latest version of vTiger you find yourself wondering what to do next. No worries, here’s our list of 5 things to do.
By: https://www.vgsglobal.com
2. vTiger 6 Beta has been out for a while now.
After installing the latest version of vTiger you find
yourself wondering what to do next. No worries,
here’s our list of 5 things to do.
3. 1. Update your Company Data and
Logo
The first thing we should do is to enter our company data. This data will
be used on system correspondence like emails and PDF documents,
such as invoices.
Go to Settings > Templates > Company Details
Now, on the Company Details screen, click on the Edit button and
simply enter your information
Now click Save. Your company info has been entered, and your logo has
been uploaded.
4. 2. Set up your outgoing server
Sending emails to our customers and recording them in our CRM is one
of the most common features of any CRM, and vtiger offers a lot of
possibilities like: Mass Emailing, Individual Emails, Email Notifications,
Word flow Emails, Email/PDF Invoices and more.
In order to send your emails through your CRM you would need to set
up your outgoing email server.
To get started, go to Settings > Other Settings > Outgoing Server.
5. You can use any email provider you may like. Since I know many of you
use gmail or google apps, in this post we will be using gmail as outgoing
server.
For gmail server to work with vtiger, you would need to enter your
server information as shown in the following image.
If everything works OK you should get an email from your CRM, to let
you know that the server is working fine:
6. 3. Upload your Users to get your team on
board
If you are running a small company, you probably work with other
people, so why not bring them on board?
Vtiger has a very sophisticated, role-based security model. You can
control a user’s access to specific modules. You can even restrict access
to specific fields, and finally you can also control users’ access to each
other’s data.
The user model consists of profiles, roles, and users. Users can also be
arranged in groups. So, how does it all work together?
7. • Profiles: A profile in vtiger represents a set of actions that a user can
perform: Create and Edit Records, View Records and Delete Records.
• Roles: Roles can be linked to a position in a company like Sales
Manager. It can be used to allow managers to follow up on their
employee records and hide the manager records from their team.
• Users: Are the people. Therefore, each given user would have a
specific role in the company and a specific profile that would allow
him or her to perform a set of actions.
8. To go further into vtiger security model I would recommend
visiting vtiger’s wiki. You would find all the related information in there.
For now let’s go to Settings > Users & Access Control > Add New
Users and create your first user. You can always create specific roles
and profiles later if you need a more complex scenario.
9. 4. Import your customer s data and bring some
life to your system
A CRM without any data will not be much of a help. vTiger already has
an import functionality so let’s start to upload some data on it.
To start go to the module you are planning to import, lets says for
example, the contacts module, and export the first records to CSV file
(Comma-separated values)
Once you export your module data, you can remove everything but the
first two lines, and then start filling the CSV file with your own data.
10. Finally, go back to vtiger and hit the import button.
In the first step you will be prompted to upload the file you just
created. Choose the delimiter, and then specify whether your file has
headers or not.
In Step 4 you need to match each of your CSV columns, to one of the
vtiger module fields
Finally hit next to start importing your records.
11. 5. Fine tune your views: Create some filters
Filters are a powerful tool to manage and view the data inside our CRM. By
using filters we can easily follow up on orders, contacts, tasks, etc.
To create a new filter in vTiger 6 all you need to do is go to the Module, and
then choose filters to finally click the button: create new. Once you click the
‘create new’ button, you will find the following screen where you need to
enter the filters/view columns name and the filters conditions.
As an example, in the next image we will create a filter that will show us: the
leads coming from our website and that have a status equal to Not
Contacted. It may be a good idea to start contacting them, and move them
to the next stages on your customer life cycle.
12. Bonus: Workflows, Webforms and E-mail
integrations
If you have read so far and implemented every step in this tutorial, you
are on your way to make vtiger feel like your own system. Now you
can checkout our extension store to find modules to improve your
vtiger usage
If you want to take this a few steps further, please consider reading the
following posts
• Integrate vtiger with your website
• Setup wokflows to automatize your daily tasks
• Setup vTiger Outlook plug-in and start uploading your customers
emails to your CRM