SugarCRM 5.0 Now Generally Available

Published: January 15, 2008

by Alex Woodie

SugarCRM last month announced the general availability of Sugar 5.0, the first major release of the open source CRM package since the company announced support for the System i server last summer.

The Sugar CRM package is part of a new class of open source enterprise applications written for the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) architecture that's making headway against the traditional closed-source, platform-centric development process.

Last summer, IBM and SugarCRM announced a partnership to port Sugar to i5/OS, thereby providing iSeries and System i users with another option for CRM on the platform.

By late summer, SugarCRM was delivering beta releases of Sugar 5.0, which introduced several new features that the company believes will give SMBs enterprise-level CRM capabilities, including a custom module builder, an integrated e-mail client, and a multi-instance architecture that the company hopes will put Sugar on par with some of the CRM heavy weights. In mid-December, after three betas and more than 30,000 downloads, SugarCRM declared that Sugar 5.0 was ready for general availability.

Sugar highlights the multi-instance architecture and the module builder as two of the most promising new features in Sugar 5.0. The multi-instance architecture ensures that each customer using a copy of Sugar run by a hosting company has its own instance of the product, thereby boosting security and providing more control over upgrades.

The new module builder, meanwhile, will make it easier for users and partners to customize Sugar for niche deployments, says Tim Hickernell, Associate Senior Research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. "Module Builder will be beneficial to companies that need company-specific and vertical industry process customization to SugarCRM, but lack the resources to engage in costly application extension through traditional application development," he says.

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