SugarCRM Scheduling in Rackspace Cloud

Recently, I had the joy of setting up an instance of SugarCRM for a client. For those of you who don't know about SugarCRM, it is a CRM (Customer Relationship/Resource Managment) framework written in PHP. It allows one to set up an execute and track e-mail/newsletter campaigns, among many other things. Many hosts limit the number of e-mails sent from an account within a certain period of time, and this is the case with rackspace (currently 250 max. every 20 minutes). Because of this, scheduling is an important requirement.

Rackspace Cloud Sites are unique in that they provide a few of the necessary features you might find in an ordinary server (such as simple cron jobs), while maintaining the cost and features of shared hosting without most of the headaches. That's all good, but not when it comes to frameworks that require more granular control (such that an actual server would provide, and such that SugarCRM benefits from)

Fortunately, as stated before, Rackspace does provide minimal control over cron jobs. To set up e-mail scheduling in SugarCRM on a Rackspace Cloud Site you must configure a cronjob in the RSC control panel, and do some configuration in SugarCRM. I will attempt to explain both.

Setting up the Cron Job (Rackspace)

Once we have successfully installed SugarCRM (which I am not going cover in this post) we must set up the cronjob in rackspace. To do this, navigate to the cloud site you have created, then click on the features tab, and click "Add New Task" in the "Scheduled Tasks(Cron Jobs)" section. Lastly fill out the form:

• Task Name (Common Name): Whatever your heart desires.
• Send me an email: Check it if you wish to receive communication every time the task is run (can be quite annoying).
• Command language: I selected http after trying combinations of the others, it seemed work best with the crontab entry SugarCRM installation suggested. If you choose another command language the rest of this does not apply.
• Command to Run: "--silent http://crm.4nsixray.com/cron.php > /dev/null 2>&1" without the quotation marks.
• Repeated by the: select minute
• Frequency: I used 5 minutes, which is the current minimum. You may choose another interval if you wish, just consider how much granularity you want.

Setting up the Cron Job (SugarCRM)

More like confirming it is there and functioning, but there is a value or two we need to change here. Let's set up the number of e-mails per batch, as rackspace doesn't like anything over 250 per 20 minutes. Navigate to the admin area, then click "Campaign Email Settings". Set the number of e-mails per batch to something 250 or less, I did 200. Click save. On to the next part.

Navigate to the Admin area in SugarCRM. Click on the Schedulers section. Once there, select "Run Nightly Mass Email Campaigns". Edit if need be. I set mine to run every 20 minutes (to avoid the limit imposed by Rackspace--and the hand slap). Make sure it is active. If everything is in order, we can start sending e-mails. Read on.

Send your e-mails

Now we're ready to send our e-mail campaign. What's this you say? You don't have an e-mail campaign yet? Well, create one! I'm not covering that in this post. Here's a link to help you get started: SugarCRM University. Edit your e-mail campaign, and set the date and time on the e-mail to when you want it to begin sending. Once this is complete and you're confident the campaign is otherwise configured correctly, click "Send E-mails". On the next page you see, check the checkbox in the row that contains the e-mail(s) you want to send. Please also take note of the target lists it shows here, each e-mail you check will be sent to its respective target list(s) shown here. Click send. Now you'll see the campaign status page. Return to this page to see if you're e-mail(s) have sent, how many, and so many more statistics (click-through, opt-out, etc). When troubleshooting e-mail sending issues, I find it helpful to view the queued e-mails section of the admin area.