Open source CRM provider, SugarCRM (News - Alert), announced today the general availability of Sugar 5.0, offering an array of new functionalities.

 

"SugarCRM 5.0 delivers some smart, intriguing functionality that could challenge the heavyweights in the on-demand world as well as application platform providers," commented Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light, "Their platform is flexible and creative and moves them directly into the war for the hearts and minds of the web and desktop."

 

New capabilities included with Sugar 5.0 allow users to build custom modules as well as access pre-built custom dashboards from their homepage and includes new charting capabilities as well as an AJAX email client that brings the "functionality of a desktop email client with the portability of a web-based email application."

 

Platform enhancements also introduced with Sugar 5.0 include a new metadata driven user interface, improved access control, and a new module builder to improve how the application is built, customized, scaled and upgraded.

 

"Sugar 5.0 will be the growth platform for thousands of companies, including our own," said John Roberts (News - Alert), CEO of SugarCRM. "We want to thank the thousands of developers and customers who reviewed the Sugar 5.0 beta code base and offered feedback to make Sugar 5.0 the most important release in our company's history."

 

With the release of Sugar 5.0, SugarCRM is also unveiling its Multi-instance On-Demand architecture which offers customers the ability to be automatically be upgraded to new versions of Sugar, as well as the ability to develop new functionalities on test servers and move between Sugar On-Site and Sugar On-Demand. Also, with the new Multi-instance On-Demand architecture, each customer receives their own On-Demand instance to improve security, flexibility and control.

 

According to a news release, the three beta editions of Sugar 5.0 were downloaded and tested over 30,000 times by community members during the beta process.

 

Thanks to SugarCRM's commercial open source model, users are able to download and inspect source code and work together to create new capabilities and produce a higher quality product. This capability is not possible in proprietary development models.