Recently in SugarCRM Category

I'm scheduled to give a talk at the ICT Expo this Friday afternoon on "Linux and some of its friends in the enterprise " So what should I be talking about? Of course I have some ideas already formulated, but what kind of images / ideas spring to mind when someone mentions OSS and business? Are we talking about desktops? Servers? Mail? Web? Replacements for proprietary software? Any thoughts welcome

I've mentioned some titles by published by Packt in the past. What makes Packt different is their philosophy:

Packt believes in Open Source. When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.

I don't know how that works out in reality, but the idea is good. In any case they have some very interesting titles coming up over the next few months: Implementing Sugar CRM - the book I needed last year! Building Forums with VBulletin - although they don't say which versions this covers it could be a useful read. Building Websites with Joomla! - Joomla forked from Mambo Open Source and has become very popular with developers. I'm currently experimenting with it on a couple of sites, as some of the plugins / components may help with non-technical users Building Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and PHP - they could just as easily have called this web 2.0 with php.. It seems to be the "hot" topic

The SugarCRM team announce that v4 beta of the Open Source CRM is now available for download.

Austrian company go-mobile has released a number of extensions for SugarCRM. Details available on their site

Upgrading Sugar CRM should not be a painful process, but it can be, as I found out. Unlike some of the older releases the current stable version does not include either an upgrade option or any instructions on doing it, while the documentation link points to the wrong place. Fortunately I had taken a backup of my entire DB before I started, so it wasn't too bad :) In any case if you want to avoid this kind of headaches: 1 - Take a backup of your Sugar CRM database 2 - Go here 3. Read the instructions 4. Grab the correct .sql file 5. Import it: mysql -uusername -ppassword database< 2.5-2.5.1_open_db_upgrade.sql Edit to taste 6 Run the installer for the latest version Make sure you DO NOT create new tables or drop any existing ones Login as the "admin" user. You'll be prompted to run a couple of upgrades via the admin panel to finalise the install.

SugarForge has been launched to help developers working on new modules and extensions for SugarCRM. The site uses gforge and provides the same kind of functions available on SourceForge Over the last few months the number of users and developers who have shown an interest in SugarCRM has grown exponentially, so the foundation of a dedicated community for developers is a fantastic step. The number of projects listed on SugarForge is quite small at present, but I'm sure it will grow over time.

I've been using the excellent Sugar CRM for the last couple of months. The last couple of releases have included an optional (paid) plugin for Outlook. It interfaces with Sugar via soap and allows you to export contact details from emails and archive entire emails. Very very handy! The only gripe I have with it is that the GUI lacks a "close" button, but has a "cancel" one, which suggests that the action is going to be cancelled.

Sugar CRM 2.5 was released yesterday. This latest release adds even more functionality to the open source CRM application. New features include:

• RSS
• Portal functions
• Custom menus
• Customise areas of the application via the web interface
• Improved security for shared hosting

The graphs have also been greatly improved. For users running any previous version of Sugar CRM a database update script is available which you need to run before installing the rest of the application. I upgraded our install in a couple of minutes.