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SugarCRM has announced the release of Sugar 6.3, which the company calls a major upgrade to its Community Edition.
Announced and available as of Nov. 3, enhancements to the company’s open-source CRM platform include support for deeper integration with third-party applications, faster feedback for real-time collaboration, and tighter administrative control for a more complete view of all activities and projects. Since 2004, there have been more than 10 million downloads of Sugar and its related projects, delivering value to more than 850,000 people at more than 70,000 organizations worldwide, the company said.
“Being open and flexible is in SugarCRM’s heritage; we provide a free and open-source platform that developers can use to build their own applications,” John Mertic, community manager at SugarCRM, said in a statement. “The newest release of the Sugar platform is dedicated to our community, and provides them with more robust tools and significant feature enhancements. It’s imperative we build together, so as the community grows, so does SugarCRM as a company.”
The new Sugar 6 provides more thorough administrative controls to users. The new mass update control allows administrators to arrange either role-based or policy-based access, granting a complete view of activities for better project management. Improvements to the platform increase the ability to handle activities during lead conversation, resulting in more flexibility during the lead conversation process. Also, the Sugar Logic administrative engine now has the ability to import data, create formulas, rename modules and manage mass updates to all modules for greater transparency.
Moreover, the latest version of Sugar 6 can now integrate data from even more sources. Sugar 6.3 has an enhanced Import Wizard and the ability to import Google contacts. Users can also do more inline editing, thanks to the improved quick edit feature in ListViews, subpanels and reports. Users can also easily import and archive external emails into Sugar 6.3.
In addition, the new platform allows SugarCRM’s open development process to gather continual feedback from customers and users, resulting in higher quality products designed to meet real-world needs, the company said. For example, through the company’s Open+ Developer program, Sugar 6.2.4 had a record 10 percent of the bug fixes that came directly from community contributions, and there have been nearly 100 accepted code contributions this year, company officials said.
“By participating in the SugarCRM Open+ Developer Program, we have had the opportunity to contribute to code sprints and to co-innovate alongside other members of the community and SugarCRM engineers,” Vincent Rollin, CTO and co-founder of Synolia, said in a statement. “The program lets us have a larger voice in SugarCRM, and we are effectively able to shape the future of the Sugar product family.”
The new platform also offers an upgraded Ajax user interface, resulting in an average of 40 percent performance improvement with faster response time, SugarCRM officials said.
Users can run Sugar 6.3 both on-premise and in the cloud, and can make unlimited changes without restriction, the company said. SugarCRM officials said there are more than 30,000 developers and over 1,000 extension projects on SugarForge, and the Sugar community supports a growing collaboration of developers, programmers, partners and customers.