CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I get a lot of rookies using CiviCRM at my client offices.  Interns, temps, and people thrown in front of a computer with little or no training frequent the CiviCRM world, you know the type... tasked with updating, searching or doing data entry all expecting CiviCRM to be as easy to use as their kitty kat blog.   No such luck.  As I work remotely, I'm seldom there to supervise and prevent user-error tragedies that frequently occur when the uninitiated get their hands on a huge CRM database and start clicking.  This is not an administrators guide, it is a guide to prevent the top 5 worst offenses by users.

The whole point of this document is that it is SHORT, and it assumes that the person is fairly computer literate, but hasn't worked with CiviCRM much, if at all, and has gotten very little instruction.  These are the 5 basic steps, in my mind, to prevent tragedy.

I'm not going to edit or add to this list myself, but you can download it, copy it, edit it, and use it as you see fit.

http://www.korlon.com/civicrm/CIVICRM-GUIDE.pdf