SugarCRM 5 sweetens the deal with on-demand service, AJAX e-mail

A leading open source customer app provider launched a major upgrade of its customer relationship management (CRM) software that features on-demand capabilities, an AJAX e-mail client and enhanced customization.

SugarCRM on Monday announced general availability of Sugar 5.0, which underwent three rounds of beta testing by more than 30,000 users, the company claims. SugarCRM, which was founded in 2004, is based in Cupertino, Calif.

The software’s multi-instance on-demand architecture will allow customers to access their CRM data from on-site servers or on-demand. With this dual access and delivery option, customers receive their own secure on-demand instance and have the flexibility of easily moving between Sugar On-Site and Sugar-On-Demand. The architecture also allows for automatic upgrading and easier staging and testing of new features on host servers.

The new Ajax e-mail client offers full desktop capabilities and also the portability of a web e-mail client.

Sugar 5 also offers improved dashboards with new charting capabilities including pie charts and bar graphs and support for multiple dashboards per homepage for quick access to pre-built or custom dashboards from their home page.

New customization features will allow customers to tailor their CRM software and build new applications more easily. For example, version 5 offers a new module builder that allows customers to build modules from scratch or combine custom objects to built new modules a la mash-up style. It also offers a new "metadata driven user interface" that allows customers to store their customizations in a metadata repository for re-use. The software also offers improved access control for better security and support for team hierarchies.

The Sugar Community Edition 5.0 is available at http://www.sugarforge.org/content/downloads/ and a free trial of Sugar Professional 5.0 - On-Demand is available at http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/ondemand_eval.html .