For an enterprise business, there must be several third-party business stakeholders. To bring them all on one platform demands a CRM Portal. You may choose to develop one for yourself. Or, look for an agency to do it for you. Both come with cost and time. There’s a third option, look for CRM extensions. But, is it viable for your data security?
An enterprise business having a significant number of partners across the globe is pretty common. A partner portal is an ideal solution for such businesses to grow and manage partnership program. It can create a data-sharing platform that provides specific information to the external stakeholders without clutter or data security breaches. It is an ideal method to establish automated communication process and “self-service” mechanism for the end-users of your CRM.
Results of Case Study Published on Sugar
A recent case study published on SugarCRM Blog shared a story of a Construction & Engineering giant. On an average, their staff spent about 20 hours per person every week to manage the communications with their suppliers. They integrated their Accounting programs and customized the SugarCRM modules. Further, they built specialty Portals for sub-contractors and internal departments. Results? 30% increase in project management efficiency, streamlined resource-sharing and reduced time for meetings.
Possible size of the Partner Network for an enterprise and the current scenario of how they communicate with your business, and the business processes:
Before We Get on to Data-Security
Usually, even with the current technology, having the Sugar deployment and everything else, the communication follows the traditional way. Emails, Phone calls, even WhatsApp at times is the standard interface for this Partner-Employee communication. You are a little advanced, you prefer Slack, or Skype. It all boils down to two people at different location, for one of them requiring certain piece of information which could be readily available on your Sugar.
This method is time-consuming and oftentimes redundant. The critical challenge is due to “not having” a gateway. The end-user of the CRM – your external stakeholder does not have access to your CRM through a secure channel. A SugarCRM Partner Portal could be the fix of this issue. And, that does not even spike a debate similar to whether companies have CRM or not. Absolutely elementary stuff!
So Coming Back Now to Deployment…
Taking matters at hand is heroic. But, is that heroism needed? The question I asked most my clients during my interaction with them is that are you a technology company? If yes – be my guest, and develop your way to growth. If not, the technology changes, so does the CRM integration challenges, and you would require to work with them while you focus on your core business expertise.
So, let an expert do this for you. Here, we came to an agency. Similar to ours. Honestly, if you find a technology-partner with right skill-set, it isn’t really a pickle you are in. Earlier option certainly is. However, this would still require some of your time in Project Management, and vetting the resources. Once you are through that stage, an agency like ours would require a decent amount of time to get through the development of your SugarCRM Partner Portal.
Deployment with CRM Extensions
For starters, we also have an extension to build a SugarCRM Partner Portal. And, there are many others available in the market, too. The method of this integration is rather similar to what you did when you deployed Sugar. You integrated the CRM with your website for the CRM to fetch the data. Now, you require that CRM data to flow back into another website – the CRM Portal.
So Where does the Security Breach come?
Not all extensions just fetch the data from the CRM and pass on to the CRM Portals. If they require processing this data, your CRM data is going to be exposed to the vulnerabilities on the database and dedicated server set-up of the owner of this extension. Also, some extensions carry the code of analytics to track the hits, users, etc. Here, the extension is sharing partial data from your CRM to the third-party analytics platform.
CRMJetty – SugarCRM Customer Portal
Do not be off by the name. Our SugarCRM Customer Portal can be used for any use case of your integration from CRM to the CRM Portal. We understand this security concern, and we aimed to build a solution that does arise this concern at all. Our architecture simply connects your CRM with the CMS or custom admin of the Portal. It is a bridge with anonymity to ensure that there is no leakage of data due to this integration.
I would still not say that your CRM data is secure while using this extension/plugin. But, it would not add any vulnerabilities. You would be hosting this CRM data on your secure servers, just the way you have done it at present. So, any possible breach of this data can only trigger from your setup – that I believe you would be in control to take care of.
Some Other Features You Should Know About…
- Role-Based Accessibility:
- Generate Mass Credentials:
- Custom Page Layouts:
Beyond this, you may or may not wish to have customization to the modules or the portals. If you do, (we can brag) we can certainly do it for you. While you are searching for an agency to develop a Partner Portal for SugarCRM, we built a solution altogether – we sure can do that. Why don’t you plan a schedule or a demo with our experts and explore the solution yourself?
