SugarCRM Adds Collaboration

Open-source customer relationship management software developer SugarCRM Inc. is adding several new components to extend the capabilities of its sales, marketing and customer service applications.

The company plans to announce the new release, Sugar Professional 3.0, later this month at the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. SugarCRMs components can be downloaded for free, although the company sells an enhanced version of the Linux components as Sugar Professional, as do a number of software resellers and systems integrators.

In Sugar Professional 3.0, part of the vendors Sugar Suite offering, the Cupertino, Calif., company is adding a new module called Sugar Collaborate that will bring a number of project-driven capabilities to SugarCRMs existing applications, which include Sugar Marketing and Sugar Support.

Document management capabilities will be added throughout the suite, including the ability to manage sales documentation, marketing collateral and customer service incident reports.

"We have a help desk, so well be able to utilize the document management piece to track [customer support] issues," said Charles Hausmann, chief technology officer of Internet vaulting managed service provider VaultLogix Inc., in Ipswich, Mass., which has six users using Sugar Professional, mostly in sales and service.

Support for lightweight calendaring, project management, tasks and activities reminders, and employee directory access will also be added in this version. The Sugar Sales module will get new sales forecasting capabilities, including support for pending deals and the auto-calculation of revenue based on sales opportunities.

Sugar Professional 3.0 will be available in beta April 18. The upgrade is free to current license customers on a maintenance subscription and will be extended to SugarCRMs on-demand and Sugar Cube appliance delivery models.

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