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Hello everyone!  This is the beginning in hopefully a long series of videos that will explore the various APIs in SugarCRM.

John Mertic, a dev on SugarCRM’s core engineering team, walks us through creating a module and also the talks about how to begin to extend the functionality of the modules.

I hope you enjoy!

Module Builder Tour from SugarCRMCasts on Vimeo.

If you have any comments or questions, please let me know.

It took me longer than I wanted it too, but I got Activity and Ratings into the Search Results.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that I haven’t added “SORT” to either column yet.  It’s a bit tricky, but I can do it.  I figured though that I should post these changes though to see how you like them.

Let me know what you think!

Hey everyone, I’m going to be doing an interview with John Mertic tomorrow.  He’s the author of The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM and has recently spoke at a few different conferences, including the DC PHP Conference.

We’re going to be talking about Module Build and a bit of the API. The interview is going to be recorded and posted, hopefully by the end of the week.  We had technical difficulties earlier, so hopefully no more, and we’ll have a cool video to post soon.

Post your comments and questions about module builder here and I’ll ask him!

Download the Sugar 5.5 RC 4
Install Sugar 5.5 RC 4, or upgrade a copy of your existing system to Sugar CE 5.5 RC 4. Upgrade files from the Sugar 5.5 Release Candidate 4 to Sugar 5.5 GA will be provided as soon as the GA is available.

The Sugar Community Edition, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise editions are available to preview online.
Preview Sugar 5.5 RC 4 Online

We highly recommend that you test the upgrade to 5.5 RC 4 from an earlier instance on a non-production system at this time to make sure that the upgrade will perform smoothly. If your Sugar database size exceeds 1GB, we strongly recommend using the Silent Upgrade method to upgrade to Sugar 5.5. For more information about this, please read this forum thread.

View the 5.5 RC 4 Release Notes for information about what has changed in 5.5 RC 4. The 5.5 Release Notes for each edition is available in the Documentation pages. After selecting an edition, click the “5.5″ tab to view the 5.5 Release Notes.

For a full listing of what issues were fixed in Sugar 5.5 RC 4, use the Bug Tracker.

If you encounter any issues, please help us by submitting bugs in the Bug Tracker. Please be sure to select “5.5.0-RC4″ for the “Found in Release” field.

Please also share with us your feedback and comments within the Sugar 5.5 forums.

There’s a lot of discussion on the topic of Open Source collaboration of SugarCRM and on SugarForge.  There’s a lot that you and I want to see happen and we’re each in a place to affect it. I think the right way to go about it, is to make several, minor, agile changes until the end result is what we really want.

Of course, this doesn’t play well with my need for instant gratification to have large sweeping changes.  Alas, I will set that aside and do what I can.

Ok, let’s start with SugarForge… the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor, meaning – it’s hard to find active projects.

Last night I added a feature under the project rating that allows you to nominate a project for removal.  You must be logged in, in order to cast your vote.  I will tally up the votes and start working on cleaning up the stale and dead projects.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

The Sugar Community Edition 5.5 Release Candidate 3 is now available to download

Download the Sugar CE 5.5 RC 3
Install Sugar CE 5.5 RC 3, or upgrade a copy of your existing system to Sugar CE 5.5 RC 3.
Note: We plan on providing upgrade files from the Sugar 5.5 Release Candidate 3 to Sugar 5.5 GA.

View the 5.5 RC 2 Release Notes for information about what has changed in 5.5 RC 3. For a full listing of what issues were fixed in Sugar 5.5 RC 3, use the Bug Tracker.

If you encounter any issues, please help us by submitting bugs in the Bug Tracker. Please be sure to select “5.5.0-RC3″ for the “Found in Release” field.

For customers, the Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise Release Candidate 3 files will be available to download shortly as well. Look for the announcement in the Customer forums this week.

Please also share with us your feedback and comments within the Sugar 5.5 forums.

Have you noticed that we’re really trying to cut the time between releases?

Engineering has been busting their tails, changing up their development methodology a bit – I’ll save more information about that for another post…

Regardless, 5.2.0k and 5.0.0n was released last night and you can get it all on SugarForge.

Any feedback regarding the patches is welcome here or in the forums.

Wow, I just realized after writing that title how many obscure references there are and you have to be in the “know”. So let me break it down for you:

RC3 == Release Candidate #3

We’ve released SugarCRM 5.5 RC2 in the third week of October and we already have over 300 installations.

GA == Generally Available

As people test and use the release candidate, they have been submitting bugs and we fix them. In the next week, we’ll likely release “Release Candidate 3″, which will be the most likely candidate for a Generally Available release.

So test, test, test. Because before the end of November, we expect to release SugarCRM 5.5 GA and it’s likely going to be the same code as RC3, unless you tell us otherwise. Thanks for your help!

Editors Note:  For this post, I decided to reach out to one of our most influential community members, Angel Magaña, to discuss one of his latest and very interesting projects on SugarForge.org.  Expect more of these to come.  Thank you Angel for taking the time.  – Matt Heitzenroder.

One of the biggest challenges in deploying a CRM solution relates to the process of populating the system with legacy data.  This is a challenge inherit to working with database systems in general, due to differences in structures, design philosophy and database formats, amongst other things.

SugarCRM includes tools that help streamline the process for certain scenarios, but others require specialized tools to simplify the process.  A great example of such a scenario is that of someone wishing to port data into SugarCRM from an existing CRM system, in this case, GoldMine.

While it is possible to export data from GoldMine into CSV files and in turn use SugarCRM’s import capabilities to import the data, this technique is not efficient and error prone.  CSV files can be difficult to import due to potential formatting issues, especially if one is interested in importing free-form text data such as that which can be found in GoldMine’s Notes tab.  That type of data usually requires some level of manipulation before it can be imported via CSV files and it can be a tedious task.  This is one of the primary reasons why the use of CSV files can be a frustrating experience.

An alternate and more effective approach for such a task is to read the data directly from the GoldMine database, but herein lies a challenge.  SugarCRM doesn’t have any native features that allow it to directly communicate with the GoldMine database to request the appropriate data.  In addition, it is also necessary to prepare the data for its new home in the SugarCRM database and that too is a task that requires outside assistance.

Enter the SugarCRM Express Conversion (SEC) utility.

SEC effectively addresses the issues highlighted above by providing an easy to follow, step-by-step process for migrating GoldMine data into SugarCRM systems.  By directly communicating with the GoldMine MS-SQL database, the need for a user to massage GoldMine data prior to the migration is eliminated.  This directly translates to effortless migration of free-form text data and the elimination of other data related issues that may arise when using CSV files.

To further streamline the process, SEC provides a simple interface for mapping GoldMine fields to the desired destination field in the SugarCRM database, fully cognizant of custom fields in both applications.  Staying true to its mantra of providing a simple process for migrating data, the only other task a user is required to perform is to click the button to start the process.

All the necessary data massaging, parsing, etc. is automatically handled by SEC — behind the scenes.  Upon successful completion of the import process, users can then dive into their SugarCRM system, fully equipped with their legacy system’s data.

SEC is freely available for download on SugarForge.  It does not include any restrictions on the amount of records that can be imported, but does restrict the type of data that is transferred to: Accounts, Contacts (Primary and Secondary), E-mail Address and Web Address.  A full featured version capable of importing Calendar, Opportunities, History and E-mail is also available for purchase from Acts Automation, Inc., a SugarCRM Silver Partner.  A version supporting dBASE installations of GoldMine is in the works.

Excellent news!  SugarCRM Engineering team keeps rolling out the release candidates for 5.5.

Please download from the link below or try the free preview and see if the bugs that you’ve submitted have been fixed.  We are really trying to get the highest quality release out to you ever.  So please, if you find a bug, please report it at http://bugs.sugarcrm.com.  More to come!!!!

Download the Sugar CE 5.5 RC 2
Install Sugar CE 5.5 RC 2, or upgrade a copy of your existing system to Sugar CE 5.5 RC 2.
Note: We plan on providing upgrade files from the Sugar 5.5 Release Candidate 2 to Sugar 5.5 GA.

Preview Sugar 5.5 CE RC 2 Online
Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise Release Candidates are also available to preview.

View the 5.5 RC 2 Release Notes for information about what has changed in 5.5 RC 2. For a full listing of what issues were fixed in Sugar 5.5 RC 2, use the Bug Tracker.

If you encounter any issues, please help us by submitting bugs in the Bug Tracker. Please be sure to select “5.5.0-RC2″ for the “Found in Release” field.

Please also share with us your feedback and comments within the Sugar 5.5 forums.