SugarCRM Expands In Europe
SugarCRM is opening new headquarters in Germany, attributing it to a significant growth in its customer base in that region. Sugar has over 1,000 customers in the EMEA region, and that number is grwoing.
Europe has traditionally been a fertile ground for adoption of open source applications. The European union officially encourages using open source software (related PDF here), and many local authorities (mainly in France and Germany) have opted to go with open source alternatives (Linux for the desktop and Openoffice as an alternative to MSOffice). For business open source applications, Europe has a huge potential.
In other SugarCRM news, Sugar showcases several customers who adopted Sugar’s CRM on demand solution. I personally like the cloud alternative over the on-premise one, especially for the SMB. The advantages are clear, but the main concern is integration - you must make sure you can easily integrate the on-demand solution with other business applications (e.g. ERP).
Data Model Customization In SugarCRM
This is the third in a series of articles introducing SugarCRM’s Module Builder to create custom modules representing custom objects (blog writers and blog posts), and we will now learn how to customize the data model representing our blog writer object.
In SugarCRM, logged in as Admin user, go to Admin>Module builder. On the left pane tree menu, click on the package you created (we called it Blog), containing the two modules - writers and posts. Click on writers to expand it, and click on ‘Fields’ icon. You will see a list of fields that are already part of the writers object. We will need to add some new fields (click on the ‘Add Field’ button), that better describe a writer object. You will notice that the writers module (screenshot below) has several fields under the ‘Person’ section, and none under the Writers section. That is because when we created the module, it ‘inherited’ fields from the Person type. Fields we will add now will be added under the Writers section.
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SugarCRM Modules Customization Options
Our last post explained how to create custom SugarCRM modules. Modules allow you to represent custom objects in SugarCRM. In past SugarCRM versions, you had to build modules by editing PHP files, but now Sugar’s Module Builder does all the dirty work for you. Once you created a new module, you will need to customize it further - define the data structure representing the objects and build the UI elements supporting this object.
To make this tutorial more clear, we will create our won custom modules in SugarCRM. As an example, we will create modules that are related to blogs - blog posts and writers. We will then customize our writers object. But first, lets go over some of the customization options SugarCRM provides.
Customizing SugarCRM With Module Builder
SugarCRM has come a long way from it’s early days as a basic CRM application. It is now gradually becoming more of a platform than an application. This becomes very clear when you need to customize SugarCRM. One of the most common customization scenarios is building new modules.
Using the term ‘Modules’ might deter novice SugarCRM developers, because Modules sounds like something very complicated (in ERP systems, for example, modules are usually difficult to develop). But all a module does is describe the properties and supporting UI elements required to support a certain type of data object. SugarCRM supports many objects (modules) out of the box - accounts, leads, projects,cases, calls etc. If you want to add support to a new type of object, you need to to create a new module to represent that object.
SugarCRM Upgrades, Integrates With IBM sMash
In this weeks’ sugarCRM news roundup, we learn about Sugar’s plans going forward with versions 5.5 and 6.0 from Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and vice president of product management, and present IBM’s Web 2.0 development platform sMash integration with SugarCRM.
Marketing campaign and partner management enhancements
SugarCRM 6.0 is coming up next year, and plans for that release have been detailed by Clint Oram, who founded sugarCRM over 4 years ago, and currently holds the position of of V.P. of product development. SugarCRM 6.0 is going to provide enhancements in two area:
- Marketing campaign management: as more and more people do business on the web, larger amounts of ad dollars go to online ad campaigns. It becoming an integral part of any marketing strategy. Sugar plans to improve manageability of multi-step campaigns, in which potential customers are engaged in several ways, including phone, email and web advertisement.
- Partner portal: networking is everything these days, and developing strong relationship with your partner network is crucial to the success of any business. SugarCRM 6.0 will include a dedicated partners portal, allowing your partners to login securely to your SugarCRM system and access relevant information.
According to Oram, the next sugarCRM release, 5.5, will include mainly platform enhancements rather than new functionality.
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Another Performance Boost For SugarCRM. Almost.
We continue our SugarCRM performance series ( codenamed project SucralosCRM) with an analysis of another suggestion from the SugarCRM official performance tweaks. If you read the last post in this series, you know that we were able to improve SugarCRM performance by 300%, simply by implementing one of their suggested configuration tweaks. We thought we would find another low hanging fruit by continuing to implement other suggestions.
Sugar has the following suggestion in their performance guide:
Collapse Unused Sub-Panels
- Greatly decreases processing required to render the page.
- We don’t retrieve information for hidden sub-panels. Users can expand them as they desire.
The important part of the suggestion is “we don’t retrieve information for hidden sub panels”. We did not try to implement this specific tweak, but it made us head to a new direction in our search for parameters influencing the performance of SugarCRM search. After all, scanning 100,000 contact records and fetching the names of each contact which matches the search query should take very little time. After all, we do use indices (the MySQL contact table has indices on both first name and last name, which are the fields we used for the search). There must be another problem. A problem with some additional information displayed in the result page.
Open Source CRM Live Demo Systems
Many of this blog’s visitors are looking for a simple way to compare the different open source CRM solutions available today. Comparing open source business applications requires considerable amounts of efforts, but we all know how important a first impression is. If you are looking to compare the different available solutions, the easiest way to do would be to login to a demo system and play around.
Since open source CRM solutions are relatively new, most offer a web based user interface and are offered in the cloud, as on-demand software. That makes them very simple to demo, since anyone knows how to use a web browser, and no downloading, installation or configuration are required (most users hate downloading and installation software).
SugarCRM
SugarCRM, the most popular open source CRM solution, offers a wide range of online demo systems. Separate demos are available for community, professional and enterprise editions.
SugarCRM Demo Systems
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Should SugarCRM Turn SugarERP? No. Integrate? Yes!
5 years ago, the hottest buzzword in IT was SaaS - Software as a Service. SaaS turned into cloud computing, and cloud computing turned to PaaS - Platform as a Service. PaaS became a natural evolution for traditional SaaS providers, realizing early on that they needed to provide a simple, yet powerful platfrom to extend their core functionality. Although stand alone PaaS solutions have been around for years, Saleforce.com, the on-demand CRM maker, was the first vendor to fully utilize their PaaS offering, Force.com.
But since applications built on top of PaaS solutions are only limited by the developers imagination, software developers began developing fully functional, stand alone applications, which had nothing to do with the ‘original’ application build on top of that particular PaaS, CRM in the case of Force.com.
SugarCRM, the leading open source CRM solution, provides their own development platform, called SugarForge. Initially, trivial extensions to SugarCRM core functionlaity were built, such as integration with external mail software and browsers. During a recent visit to SugarForge’s application directory, I was surprised to find attempts at building fully functional ERP solutions on to of the platform.
Should SugarCRM endorse these solutions, or even develop their own ERP system on the based on SugarForge? I say No. There are two dimension to that question which require further discussion - a technical dimension and a commercial dimension.
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Improve SugarCRM Search Performance By 300%
Project SucraloCRM is a collection of optimization efforts aimed at achieving the best possible SugarCRM performance, without having to add any new hardware.The project covers several components influencing SugarCRm performance - database server (MySQL) , application server (Apache and PHP) and the operating system (Ubuntu Linux).
We begin our optimization efforts with a small configuration change that will have a huge positive impact on performance. When you are looking to optimize an application which is built on top of on several other components, the first place to look for optimization ideas is on the application vendor website and forums. You are likely to get your best advice there.
SuagrCRM Performance Guidelines
Open source CRM Vendor SugarCRM provides there own basic performance guidelines. Since we are trying to solve search related performance issues, we will focus own efforts around a suspicious looking guideline: “Drop Absolute Totals From List Views”. When you search for a contact in SugarCRM, results are paged with 20 results per page. You can also see the total number of results your search query returned. Look at the screenshot below:
LAMP Stack Influence On SugarCRM Performance
In our last post we announced project SucarloCRM (sucarlose is x600 sweeter than sugar) - a SugarCRM configuration dedicated to extreme performance, making your open source CRM SugarCRM users as happy as Google users. The outcome of the project is a comprehensive SugarCRM configuration guide.
Before we go into actual configuration tweaking, we begin with an overview of the different components in the suagrCRM technology stack that influence performance. We will have to perform component specific configuration in order to get the bet possible performance.
LAMP Stack
Like any other business application, SugarCR relies on services from 3 different software components: an application server (Apache & PHP), a database engine (Mysql or MSSQL) and an operating system (Linux,Unix or Windows). When it comes to performance tuning for SugarCRM, we will have to optimize each of these components separately. There are endless configuration options for each of them, but Pareto’s principal is definitely applicable here - 20% of the available configuration options will provide 80% of the performance boost we are looking for.
Project SucraloCRM will focus on the LAMP stack: the operating system we will use is Linux (Ubuntu), the database server is MySQL and the application server includes Apache and PHP.
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