SugarCRM 5.1 sails into beta with mobile phone support, monitoring, advanced reports
Open source CRM star SugarCRM has released into beta testing an upgrade of its platform that offers new wireless support and vastly enhanced reporting capabilities. SugarCRM 5.1, which is available for testing now, supports mobile phones including the Blackberry and iPhone as well as advanced reporting and analytics, data import capabilities, customization and tracking features.
On a recent Catamaran sail during OSBC with the SugarCRM crew on San Francisco Bay, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts (shown below, third from right, with drink in hand) hinted to this blogger that the upcoming release was a lot more substantial than the 5.1 version number indicated. 
Version 5.1 gives users a substantial web based implementation of SugarCRM on mobile phones. New wireless features include an improved user interface for mobile users, a rich HTML client for web based delivery of data, new search features and device independence.
On the reporting and analytics front, the upgrade offers a new user interface and wizard for report creation, the ability to create more complex reports across multiple modules and combined data sets, enhanced integration with Micrsoft Excel and matrix reporting and run-time filters with pivot features like those of Microsoft Excel.It also allows better features for importing data into SugarCRM from Excel, Act!, Microsoft outlook and salesforce.com and easy import of data from other CRM applications into SugarCRM.
The update also offers new features of interest to developers and administrators, including a more robust Module Builder that allows users to more easly create objects and custom modules from scratch or by combining data sets across multiple modules. Improvements incude the ability to create new relationships among modules, an auditing function that keeps track of creation, modification and customization of modules, new templates and a dashlet that provide summary views of custom data within SugarCRM.
On the admin side, version 5.1 features a new tracking system that allows users to create tracker reports that offerssnapshot into system usage and system monitoring capabilities.
SugarCRM posted the beta to its web site on wednesday.