Open-Xchange 
has been offering an open source-based collaboration system for quite a number of years. The company has always pushed the boundaries of what a collaborative solution can do. Their user interface is amazingly flexible and the functions being offered, such as electronic messaging, contact management, information management, project management and reporting, are also powerful and innovative.
When I heard from the folks over at OX this time, they were in the process of launching a connection between their collaborative solution and SugarCRM’s SaaS solution with the help of a partner, DIGITEC
Here’s what OX has to say about this announcement
Open-Xchange, provider of business-class open source collaboration software, and DIGITEC announced the synchronization of contact and calendar information between Open-Xchange and SugarCRM. In addition, Open-Xchange emails can easily be imported to SugarCRM leads, opportunities and accounts.
The DIGITEC OXtender for SugarCRM is developed and distributed by DIGITEC, a system integrator and long-term Business Partner of Open-Xchange. The software keeps customer-related data, calendars and tasks consistent between the two web-based office applications – Open-Xchange and SugarCRM, giving users access to important business information anywhere, with any device.
Both Open-Xchange and SugarCRM are web applications that can be operated on-premises or as a hosted service in the cloud. As data between the two applications is exchanged by using the standard REST interface (Representational State Transfer), users can decide whether to run one or both applications in-house or as a service from the cloud. The software connector supports the exchange of data in all possible combinations.
Snapshot Analysis
As organizations move some of their workloads into cloud computing environments, keeping contact information databases synchronized becomes more and more of a problem. Contact information from mobile devices, the organizations own collaborative system and cloud-based applications has to be synchronized without creating a mess, that is multiple copies of a single person’s contact information or accidentally deleting contact information.
The folks at Open-Xchange and DIGITEC appear to have created tools that will make the connection between Open-Xchange environments and SugarCRM painless. This would be very helpful for organizations using both Open-Xchange and SugarCRM.
If we add this new capability with Open-Xchange’s ability to integrate electronic messaging, calendar management, document management and several social networks, such as LinkedIn, FaceBook and Xing, we can see that the company has created a highly flexible environment.
If an organization has not already selected a collaborative solution, and uses SugarCRM for customer relationship management, it would be wise to learn more about Open-Xchange and the OXtender for SugarCRM.
I’m not sure, however, that this collection of capabilities would be enough to convince users of Microsoft’s Exchange, IBM’s Lotus, Google’s Web-based tools and the like, to move.
