Open Source CRM Upcoming Releases
Writing software is an infinite cycle-you never actually finish building it. Imagine having to build a road that never ends. Since open source CRM solutions are relatively young (only few years old), there are numerous features customers want. Also, as part of any release, you have to improve performance, the user experience and even documentation. We will frequently take a look at what the major open source CRM vendors are planning for upcoming releases.
SugarCRM
Current SugarCRM release is 5.2. The major enhancement 5.2 offered was native mobile integration, including with the iPhone and Blackberry. Next release is 5.5 , planned for the summer of 2009, while a major release (6.0) is scheduled for the end of this year. 5.5 will include the following enhancements:
- You can build your own custom screens for wireless, from the sugarCRM studio (only in the Professional and enterprise editions)
- Records can be assigned to multiple teams (only in the Professional and enterprise editions)
- Improvements in web services - addition of a REST API (in addition to the SOAP API), more complex web service calls to minimize the number of calls being made and improved documentation
- Improved themes - easier to build and customize, separation of the presentation layer from the logic layer.
- Better password management - enforce password strength, password expiration, password reset and locking of users
- Additional native cloud connectors to web services, such as LinkedIn
OpenCX
- Ajax enhancement for improved user experience
- Improved scheduling, such as rooms reservations, car pooling etc.
- Export of object from OpenCRX, such as contact and calender items
- Improvement to the underlying Java infrastructure
- Enhanced mobile support - including the Google G1 smartphone
Installing SugarCRM On Linux With FastStack Installer
We recently wrote a tutorial on how to install SugarCRM on Ubunut Linux. That installation guide explained how to install all the different components (the entire LAMP stack) to run SugarCRM. Sugar also provides a much simpler installer, both for windows and Linux.
These types of installation wizards have been around for years under the windows platform, but are now becoming more and more popular on Unix/Linux. The problem with these installer on Linux is that there are sometimes slight variation between the different flavors and distributions, and it can be tricky to crate an installers that supports all platforms.
I used the FastStack installer on Ubnutu, and it worked like charm. If you have used the installer successfully on other Linux or Unix platforms, add your comment so we all know about that.
The installer has one useful advantage - it makes it very simple to install multiple SugarCRM instances on a single machine. You could use different directory and different ports to run as many SugarCRM instances as you like.
The installer is available to download from here.
Once the installer was downloaded, run the following command from the command line, from the directory where the installer was downloaded:
#chmod 755 sugarcrm-CE-5.2.0a-linux-installer.bin
#./sugarcrm-CE-5.2.0a-linux-installer.bin
The installer will initiate the installation process.
A license agreement will appear. Keep hitting enter (annoying!) until you get a Y/n question.
#Do you accept this license? guess I should… y
#Installation directory - you can use the default, or choose another directory
#Install phpMyAdmin - I think Y , this is very useful for managing your MySQL database
#Is this selection correct - of course.. Y
Typical or Custom - we’ll for typical, 1
#System name - input your company’s name or whatever
#Admin password - which password should I use ? my email? my facebook? generate a completely new one??
#Populate demo data - if this a production system, then NO!!, if this is for tests, ye, why not?
#Install service - if you want sugar to start automatically on machine start up, select Y
#Apache webserver post - you can choose default (80), but make sure no other http server is already listening on that port on your machine ( test with netstat -a | grep 80 or telnet hostname 80)
#SSL port - see above
#Web server domain - you better know what domain you are using. For tests on local machine, leave default
#MySQL server port - again, make sure there are no conflict with existing Mysql instances
#Mysql root password - it’s written on a note on the screen in front of you (kidding)
#Do you want to continue - why wouldn’t I??? Y
By now, the infamous Linux hashmarks trail should be racing across the screen. Go grab some coffee, it’s gonna be a long night.. (it should take about 2-3 minutes to complete). When it’s done, you’ll have a fully working CRM application!! how cool is that?
Best Performing Browser For SugarCRM Award Goes To…IE???
We ran a performance benchmark for browsers running SugarCRM, and Internet Explorer came out with the best results.You must be saying, Hey, wait a minute, Internet Explorer??? Come on, you must be doing something wrong..Firefox is much better, and Safari.. Well, we must admit we were surprised, but these are the results, we rechecked everything, and IE is the winner! The benchmark focused on communication between the browser and the SugarCRM server. Future benchmarks will measure rendering time of the pages returned from the Sugar server, and provide a more complete view on browser performance.
Benchmark Setup
We installed SugarCRM 5.2a Community Edition (we used the Linux binary installer) on an Ubuntu 8.04 machine. The hardware used to run sugar is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ CPU, with 2GB of RAM. The client machine, where we ran all the different browsers, was a windows XP on an Intel core 2 Duo @ 3.16 GHz, with 2GB of RAM machine. We used Webload from Radview to perform out performance tests. We tested 3 browsers:
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
- Firefox 3
- Apple Safari
Business Scnerio
The following business scenario was used for the performance testing:
- Login to SugarCRM
- Create a new contact
- List all Accounts
- Browse to last page in the accounts list
- Search for all accounts with a search string ‘a’
- View details of first result return by the search in step 6
- Logout of SugarCRM
Benchmark Process
Under each browser, we ran all steps of the business scenario outlined above. We then let Webload emulate the browsers for us, running 4 separate test for each browser, rebooting both the server and the client before each test run. In total, 12 runs were made. We measured a host of parameters, but focused our attention on two: response time and receive time. Without going into too many details, these parameters indicated how well the the browser communicates with the SugarCRM server. The lower the results - the better the communication.
Please remember that this test does not take into account the time each browser takes to render the page returned by the SugarCRM server. Different browsers use different rendering engines and rendering time is an important parameter in determining overall browser performance.
Results
Internet explorer was the fastest performing browser in the benchmark we conducted. Average response time for SugarCRM page requests (the more important parameter) was 0.1245 seconds, and average receive time was 0.0633. Firefox came in second with 0.258 and 0.056, respectively, and apple Safari finished last. Although IE registered the slowest recieve time, its Response time values were much better than other browsers. The results are summarized in the charts below:
Chart 1: Response time, in seconds, by browser
Chart 2: Recieve time, in seconds, by browser
Conculsion
This is the first of several Sugarcrm benchmarks Open Source Crm Guru plans to conduct. This benchmark provides a partial answer to the question ”which browser is best for SugarCRM“. The results today put Internet explorer in first place, but look for additional benchmark and final conclusions in upcoming posts. Register to our RSS feed to get the latest Sugarcrm benchmarks and news.
SugarCRM Head Up In the Cloud
Searchcrm had a very interesting interview with SugarCRM’s CEO, John Roberts. Roberts talks about the current situation and the future of the company, and focuses on 3 subjects: the economic slowdown, the cloud, and mobile. Not surprisingly, these are 3 of the hottest trends in the current business application realm: open source and cloud computing as the most viable option for business software in a slowing economy, and the future of business user interaction - the smartphone.
As was reported by Open Source ERP Guru, the entire open source business application industry is experiencing an impressive growth. Roberts explains the trend:
We’re seeing a big shift here to commercial open source as a more efficient and innovative method [of delivering applications]. This recession is certainly highlighting our value proposition versus our competitors. We’ve seen our product surge since Q3 of last year.
The big premise of commercial open source solutions is finally sinking into the minds of CIOs, who are faced with a very attractive option: get a fully functional, mature ,well tested CRM or ERP solution, without having to pay any license fees. “My CEO and CFO are gonna love me for that” , that’s what their thinking. That mindset is the wind powering the turbine of open source business applications recent growth.
The cloud has been around for many years, but the question was (and still remains) - how do business applications live so high, when CIO and IT people like to have their servers nearby, where they can control the application, the data, the servers? SalesForce.com took CRM out of the company’s server room and flew it right up to the cloud. That made things much easier for SugarCRM, who are generating 30% of their revenue from hosted SugarCRM instances. Numerous hosting providers offer their own SugarCRM services to other customers. Since there are so many services out there, in the cloud, integrating them into SugarCRM provides a lot of added value to customers:
As a customer, it’s great that you get these great data information services, and we’re partners with a lot, including Hoover’s, Jigsaw and LinkedIn, and others that are releasing their public APIs. At the same time, SugarCRM as a code base — because it is open — people are building all sorts of different cloud connectors to different information providers across the cloud.
A couple of days ago we wrote a post on SugarCRM mobile services. Roberts mentions the Sugar integration we discuss with the iPhone and Blackberry. Currently, solutions are available from 3rd part software vendors, but Sugar version 5.2 will have full support for these devices and other smartphones, according to Roberts. We look forward to testing this integration.
SugarCRM On Linux Install Guide
SugarCRM is the leading open source CRM solution, and one of the best available CRM offerings. Since it is an open source product, it’s freely available to download, install and use. Our installation guide will explain in details how to install SugarCRM community edition on an Ubuntu Linux machine. We use Ubuntu because it is very simple to install and maintain software on it.
To summarize, the steps required to get SugarCRM up and running on Ubuntu are:
- Get LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) installed and running.
- Download source files of SugarCRM community edition.
- Complete setup of SugarCRM through the web-based installation wizard.
Installing LAMP
Before we can get into the SugarCRM installation and configuration steps, we need to install Apache, Mysql and PHP on the Ubuntu Linux machine. It is pretty straight foreword to get the LAMP stack up and running. To install Ubuntu, use this guide. To install the rest of the LAMP stack, follow the instructions here. If you are too lazy to read the instruction, you can use this command from your Ubunutu command line to get LAMP up and running:
#sudo tasksel install lamp-server
Downloading and Installing SugarCRM Community Edition
You can download the SugarCRM archive (.zip) file from here:SugarCRM Download Page
Just click the “Download now” button. Make sure you are downloading a file named ‘SugarCRM-x.x.x.zip’, where x.x.x is the version number, 5.2.0, for example.
Once you downloaded the SugarCRM zip file, you will need to extract it’s content using the unzip command, and then run the setup program. For a comprehensive guide on how to complete these steps, read the Sugar Community Edition Installation and Administration Guide.
*Note - you might not have the unzip command available on your Ubuntu machine. In that case, install it by running:
#sudo apt-get install zip
That’s it! You now have a fully functional, free to use, enterprise class CRM solution!
Our next posts will explain the first setup steps required to get your SugarCRM installation ready for use by your users. Stay tuned by registering to our RSS feed.
How Sugar (CRM) - Sweet is Google Chrome
A couple of days ago, Google released a web browser - Chrome. It was a big surprise - how did they manage keeping a 2 years development project a secret? As I am sure you all read about what Chrome is and why Google believes that yes, we do need another browser, I decided to test drive SugarCRM on Chrome.
From a technological perspective, Google claims Chrome is best suited to run Javascript based front-end applications. Most modern business applications who run within browser use Ajax extensively to provide enhanced user experience. SugarCRM has progressively implemented more and more AJAX functionality, making it more business user friendly. Running Sugar on Chrome should be a revolutionary experience, at least according to Google.
So we ran the tests. You can see the results in a recorded demo in the CRM Demos page - select ‘SugarCRM On Google Chrome’ from the drop-down menu under ‘SugarCRM. I must admit that browsing with Chrome is different. It is just extremely smooth, making web-based business applications feel almost as if they were installed as a desktop application. I think Google has reached, at least in terms of browser ‘feeling’, the goals it set to itself - make the browser an extension (some would say replacement) to the operating system - not just another application.
Our next post will benchmark SugarCRM on 3 popular browsers - Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Chrome (1.0?). To stay updated on the benchmark results and other open source CRM news, we highly recommend that you register to our RSS feed.
SugarCRM On Google Chrome
The SugarCRM Offerings Portfolio
SugarCRm is a very popular open source CRM solution. As a natural evolution of its offerings protfolio, Sugar is offering much more than just a CRM application. We will preview its most interesting offerings in this post. An in-depth analysis of each offering will follow.
Core Application - SugarCRM Suite
Sugar started as a stand-alone PHP application. You could download the php code, untar it to a directory on your Apache server (bundled with PHP and Mysql) and presto - you got yourself a working CRM solution. That was, and still is, the core of Sugar’s offering - a fully functional Customer Relationship Management application.
Current version of SugarCRM is 5.0 . It is offered in several editions - Community, Professional and Enterprise. You can still download and use it for free ( the community edition).
Sugar Services
Sugar, like many other open source business applications, offers services around its core CRM application. These services include installation, customization, technical support, migration and upgrades, to name a few.
Sugar divides its service offering to 3 main categories - support services, implementation services and professional services. I think this services schema is a bit too complicated.
If you plan on using any of them, I would suggest you to thoroughly research and understand what you get for your buck. Support services are a must for any production implementation of a CRM application, open source or proprietary, and nobody knows Sugar better than the people who develop it.
Sugar On-Demand
One of the main reasons for the success of Sugar is the fact that it is a native web application. It is built on top of the very popular LAMP stack. Offering Sugar in a CRM SaaS model (hosted software) is a natural evolution of Sugar. I predict that more and more CRM customers will go for Sugar’s CRM SaaS model.
SugarExchange
Microsoft Windows is a very successful software. Why was Windows such a huge success when it first came out? Microsoft realized, earlier than anyone else, that if you write software, it needs to be easily extensible. For an operating system vendor, that means it should be easy to develop software that run on your OS.
Sugar (and other CRM application vendors) realized that in order to grow faster than possible organically, it needs to open up its application and promote 3rd party add-on development around its core CRM application. The developers extend Sugar’s core CRM functionality, making Sugar a viable option for a wide range of customers.
That is what SugarExchange is all about - it’s a marketplace for 3rd party add-on applications written specifically for SugarCRM, enhancing its core functionality with features such advanced reporting, mobile connectivity, integration components and more.
I plan to cover Sugar’s entire offering portfolio in details, so stay tuned by registering to our RSS feed.
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