SugarCRM Bolsters Development, Admin Features with Version 6.3

November 8, 2011 Alex Woodie

SugarCRM last week unveiled a new release of its popular open source customer relationship management system. With Sugar 6.3, users gain new administrative controls, better integration with third-party apps, and the capability to benefit from more open collaboration with the broad Sugar development community.

The SugarCRM Open+ Developer Program was started in late 2010 to provide more collaboration and a tighter feedback loop with customers and the Sugar business partner community that writes add-ons. As an open source project, SugarCRM estimates there are 30,000 Sugar developers around the world, and more than 1,000 extension projects on SugarForge.

Since the Open+ Developer Program started, more development work is being done by the community as opposed to SugarCRM developers. The company says 10 percent of the bug fixes for Sugar 6.2.4 were done by the community, which is a record, and that there have been almost 100 accepted code contributions for the year. In the end, the Open+ Developer Program will result in better quality code, and give the SugarCRM community a larger role in shaping the evolution of the software.

Administrators will also rejoice with the addition of new controls added to Sugar 6.3. There is a new mass update control that will give administrators more power to grant access to the system on a role or policy basis, the company says. Also, this release makes it easier to import data, create formulas, rename modules, and manage updates to the modules. SugarCRM has upgraded its Import Wizard to support the import of Google contacts as well.

The product’s AJAX Web interface has been upgraded, and the result is an average 40 percent better response time, the vendor says. SugarCRM has also added a “quick edit” feature in ListViews, subpanels, and reports that allows users to edit data inline.

SugarCRM is written in PHP, and runs on IBM i servers and all other platforms that support PHP. In fact, SugarCRM and IBM have collaborated on an IBM i Solution Edition bundle that includes SugarCRM software and discounted Power Systems hardware. For more information, see www.sugarcrm.com.