SugarCRM Blog

What Open Source APIs are used by SugarCRM?

avinash — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:51:22 +0000

Friend recently asked me what is all there under the hood in SugarCRM. Most programmers who come from J2EE and C++ background have a tendency to expect complexity as part of enterprise software.

Like something has to be hard!

List of APIs written by wonderful folks at SugarCRM and few coming from open source community:

Sugar - The world’s most popular sales force automation application created by SugarCRM Inc. (http://www.sugarcrm.com)
XTemplate - A template engine for PHP created by Barnabás Debreceni (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtpl)
NuSOAP - A set of PHP classes that allow developers to create and consume web services created by NuSphere Corporation and Dietrich Ayala (http://dietrich.ganx4.com/nusoap)
JS Calendar - A calendar for entering dates created by Mihai Bazon (http://www.dynarch.com/mishoo/calendar.epl)
PHP PDF - A library for creating PDF documents created by Wayne Munro (http://ros.co.nz/pdf/)
DOMIT! - An xml parser for PHP based on the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Spec. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/domit-xmlparser)
DOMIT RSS - An RSS feed parser based on the DOMIT pure PHP XML parser. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/domit-rssparser)
PNG Behavior - Adds support for PNG graphic format to Internet Explorer. (http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html)
JSON.php - A PHP script to convert to and from JSON data format by Michal Migurski. (http://mike.teczno.com/json.html)
JSON.js - A JSON parser and JSON stringifier in JavaScript. (http://www.json.org/js.html)
HTTP_WebDAV_Server - A WebDAV Server Implementation in PHP. (http://pear.php.net/package/HTTP_WebDAV_Server)
JavaScript O Lait - A library of reusable modules and components to enhance JavaScript by Jan-Klaas Kollhof. (http://jsolait.net/)
PclZip - library offers compression and extraction functions for Zip formatted archives by Vincent Blavet (http://www.phpconcept.net/pclzip/index.en.php/)
Smarty - A template engine for PHP. (http://smarty.php.net/)
Overlibmws - JavaScript library for client-side windowing. (http://www.macridesweb.com/oltest/)
Yahoo! User Interface Library - The UI Library Utilities facilitate the implementation of rich client-side features. (http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/)
PHPMailer - A full featured email transfer class for PHP (http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/)
Crypt_Blowfish - Allows for quick two-way blowfish encryption without requiring the MCrypt PHP extension. (http://pear.php.net/package/Crypt_Blowfish/)
PHP_Compat - Provides missing functionality for older versions of PHP. (http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_Compat/)
HTML_Safe - A parser that strips down all potentially dangerous content within HTML (http://pear.php.net/package/HTML_Safe/)
XML_HTMLSax3 - A SAX parser for HTML and other badly formed XML documents (http://pear.php.net/package/XML_HTMLSax3/)
Yahoo! UI Extensions Library - Extensions to the Yahoo! User Interface Library by Jack Slocum (http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/)
JSMin - filter which removes comments and unnecessary whitespace from JavaScript files. (http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html)
SWFObject - Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script. (http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject)
TinyMCE - A WYSIWYG editor control for web browsers that enables the user to edit HTML contents (http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Index)
Ext - A client-side JavaScript framework for building web applications. (http://extjs.com)

Steps to remove dashlet from SugarCRM

vikash — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:51:08 +0000

Sugar administration section loads up sugar news dashlet and this caused annoyance to one of our customer. I can see how this can be irritating for some users.

Here are quick steps to remove this dashlet:

Go to

modules/Administration/index.php

Go to line 355 and comment out following line:

Not only you will avoid making call to external site but also remove unnecessary scrolling required to go to key administration features.

Sugar(y) Roundup From Around the Web

vikash — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:45:05 +0000

There is plenty of SugarCRM wisdom floating around. Tips and hacks are flying around. Great time to be a SugarCRM developer -

Email marketing campaign using SugarCRM

Performance and response time are critical issues. Fact that SugarCRM is written on LAMP affects performance characteristics. I think it makes it run faster, availability of good thriving LAMP performance management ecosystem helps.

How to consume Google Reader shared items with SugarCRM

Review of SugarCRM Developer’s Manual Authored by Dr. Mark Alexander Bai

Angel.com Brings Hosted IVR to SugarCRM

vikash — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:44:02 +0000

Angel.com, provider of on-demand call center and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions, recently announced the Angel.com SugarCRM Connector:

With the SugarCRM Connector, Angel.com makes it possible to access, update and manage accounts, contacts and leads using voice commands over the phone. Users can record details from a recently completed meeting, set a follow-up task or dial a contact by voice. Angel.com’s speech-to-text functionality also allows SugarCRM users to send e-mails by instantly transcribing and sending a spoken message as text.

A host of contact center and customer support tools are also built into Angel.com’s SugarCRM Connector. With SugarCRM Support, callers can perform functions such as checking the status of a case, opening a case or transferring to a live agent by connecting to their SugarCRM account through the phone. By implementing Angel.com’s SugarCRM Connector, customers also have the ability to retrieve data about callers in real time, allowing them to service each caller differently depending on the context of their call.

It is offered in a SaaS model -

Fully hosted: the Connector is offered as a service — no code installs.

Easy to use: all you need to know are the parameters to pass, and what variables are returned and you can start invoking it from an Angel.com transaction page.

Powerful: enables you to execute actions such as creating a lead, looking up a contact, creating and updating cases.

Personalization: with the ability to retrieve data about callers in real time, you can now treat each caller differently depending on the context of their call.

Automation: callers can now accomplish tasks over the phone without needing to speak to an agent.

Insight: with the Connector, you can now log details about every call and gain deep insight of activity on your phone line.

Anybody care to share their feedback or experience with this product?

SugarCRM Plans New Marketing, Partner Management Tools

vikash — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:26:35 +0000

Every marketing people know about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SugarCRM is one of the very famous CRM services provider. SugarCRM is popular in whole world for providing CRM services. SugarCRM always come up with new version according to market need and customer demands. Now SugarCRM Plans New Marketing, Partner Management Tools. Give a quick look to know more about Partner Management Tools:-

SugarCRM will add new marketing and partner management capabilities to an upgrade of its open-source customer relationship management software due out by about the end of the year, company officials said.

SugarCRM version 6.0 will be released in beta by about October and made generally available by the end of the year, depending on feedback from the beta test, said Clint Oram, SugarCRM cofounder and vice president of product management, at the company’s SugarCon conference in San Francisco Monday.Version 6.0 will have better lead generation tools, including a scoring tool that looks at how potential clients have responded to past marketing campaigns along with data such as their job title and company size. It will also coordinate multistep marketing efforts, where prospects are approached through various campaigns — e-mail, telephone, Web advertisements — that are sometimes linked to each other.

A new partner management application will allow partners to access a company’s SugarCRM system, to register deals or ask for marketing funds, for example. It will provide separate views for partners and securely restrict access to information that’s relevant to them, Oram said.

SugarCRM was founded four years ago and has about 4,500 paying customers, up from 3,000 a year ago, according to Oram. Customers can use its open-source software on-premise, or as a hosted service from either SugarCRM or one of its partners. Tata Communications of India added its name to that partner list this week.

The company is building a network of resellers and service providers that is allowing it to compete better with larger rivals such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com, according to Kristian af Saneberg, who manages SugarCRM accounts for Redpill Linpro, an open-source services company that operates across Scandinavia.

Linpro won a deal to provide a 400-seat SugarCRM system for the Nordic division of Avis Rent A Car, Saneberg said. It beat out Microsoft Dynamics and a smaller vendor, Mayflower, because Linpro was able to customize the open-source SugarCRM software to give Avis exactly what it asked for, he said.

“We built some new modules and did some integration that you can’t do with Dynamics,” Saneberg said.

Still, SugarCRM is a relatively young product and some of its capabilities are quite basic. A few people at SugarCon said it needs a better calendaring application — one reseller here said he lost a deal over it. Another person asked for a better project management tool. Oram said calendaring and advanced project management, along with some other features like full-text search, aren’t scheduled before version 6.5 in 2010. “We have to prioritize our resources,” he said.

The company may offer its software in a full stack, including an OS and database, for partners who want to offer SugarCRM as an on-demand service. To do that today they have to assemble the stack themselves. “This is something we’re considering, but it’s still on the whiteboard at the moment,” Oram said.

Before all of this, SugarCRM also announced plans to release version 5.5 of its software in about July, with a beta scheduled for March. Like other recent releases, 5.5 is more about strengthening the underlying “platform” than adding new CRM capabilities, Oram said.

Among the changes, the company has rewritten the Web services framework to make it easier to import data from external sources. It also has REST (representational state transfer) interfaces that should improve performance for custom modules and other plug-ins, Oram said.

It has also added new Cloud Connectors for Zoominfo and CrunchBase, providing access to those data sources. It has also worked on the user interface, making it easier for developers to create new “theme” views for end-users.

We have been doing lot of SugarCRM customizations and integrations with other components. Our team of dedicated members have proven their expertise in overcoming various SugarCRM challenges. Our team is fully loaded with latest version of customizations. Here you can see some of our customers, for most of them we worked on SugarCRM.http://www.apptility.com

CFOs agree SugarCRM reduces TCO for CRM projects

sanjay — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:19:44 +0000

Open source saves money. Less money spent on complex sales cycle, more effort going in bottom up innovation, it has clearly won the hearts and minds of implementors in IT food chain. What has traditionally been difficult was to conclusively win this debate at the ’suit’ level. CFOs had their concerns, in some cases valid, about putting $ value on open source software. Whereas CIOs were worried about not getting sufficient support and infrequent fuds about legal challenges associated with code ownership.

Over time open source industry has neutralized lot of these objections. With IT forces converging from different angles - social computing, SaaS, cloud computing and open source, debate is now going back to cost. This time open source has definite advantage. Deployment advantages provided by cloud computing has lessened, to great extent, legal and support concerns expressed by executives.

CFO magazine’s recent article titled ‘Open Secret’ is surprisingly positive on consistent open source growth. Magazine’s core audience is mostly bean counters so don’t be surprised if CFOs chime in during project evaluation - ‘Have we looked at open source solution?”. That will be a big win for open source adoption.

Also statements like these influence the overall evaluation process:

SugarCRM will cost us about 65 percent less then other name-brand solutions that we evaluated - Dean Manzoori, senior vice president of service delivery and technical operations at Broadcore

thanks to the absence of licensing fees, Alfresco consistently quotes prices 90 percent lower than those of its proprietary rivals - Matt Asay

If you are facing difficulty getting finance to approve your budget. Send them this CFO article and also migrate to open source. Be a hero in recessionary times!

InsideCRM’s Top 20 blogs of 2008

sanjay — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:10:47 +0000

2008 is nearly gone. This is the time when we all sit back and thank to all those who made 2008 happy and memorable year.

Our own blog had on and off kind of flow this year. We promise to dig deeper into the internals of SugarCRM and share with our readers power tips. SugarCRM is a leader in open source CRM and have successfully made CRM affordable to many organizations. They deserve praise and support as well. Beyond SugarCRM, CRM practice is gaining social media steam as more and more bloggers contribute to the public knowledgebase. Chris Bucholtz at InsideCRM, has an excellent list of top 20 blogs.

Authors of these blogs did an extremely good job of highlighting issues and opportunities. You are highly recommended to visit Chris’s blog and read his comments. I think that list should be Top 21 to include insightful InsideCRM blog.

1. Chris Bucholtz at InsideCRM
2. CRM 2.0: The Conversation by Paul Greenberg
3. Church of the Customer Blog by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
4. Mercury Rising by Scott Annan, Scott Lake, Jeff Meldrum, Creighton Medley, Michael Marker, Andrew Milne, Jud Rasmussen
5. Brent’s Social CRM Blog by Brent Leary
6. Beagle Research Group by Denis Pombriant
7. CRM Outsiders, Martin Schneider and Colin Beasty
8. The CRM Consultant by Richard Boardman
9. Destination CRM Blog by Marshall Lager, Christopher Musico, Jessica Tsai, Lauren McKay, Josh Weinberger
10. Social Customer Manifesto by Chris Carfi
11. Customer Insider by Graham Hill
12. Michael Maoz’s Gartner Blog
13. 1 to 1 Media Blog by Ginger Conlon, Kevin Zimmerman, Jeremy Nedelka, Mila D’Antonio, Elizabeth Glagowski, Martha Rogers, Don Peppers
14. CRM Views and Trends by Wouter Trumpie
15. The Perfect Customer Experience by Louis Columbus, Randy Saunders
16. CRM Mastery Blog by Jim Berkowitz
17. CRM 2.0 by Guido Oswald
18. B2B Lead Generation Blog by Brian Carroll
19. Duct Tape Marketing Blog, John Jantsch
20. First Coffee by David Sims
21. Project VRM Blog by Doc Searls

SugarCRM 5.2.0 GA version is ready for download

sanjay — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:50:42 +0000

SugarCRM product management team is busy catching up with recent industry trends. We have seen strong interest in cloud computing initiatives, along with massive buzz around micro-blogging tools like Twitter and Yammer.

Not to be left behind, SugarCRM has come out with feature rich version to capitalize on these trends. From Readme notes:

Connectors to External Data Sources
Sugar provides a connector to LinkedIn. Additional connectors to other data sources can be obtained and installed using Module Loader.
Sugar Feed
Sugar Feed enables users to be informed as soon as a user creates a new contact, lead, opportunity, or case. Users can add a My Sugar Feed Dashlet on their Home page so that when a user performs any of these actions, a message displays in the Dashlet on their Home page. Users can also be notified when a lead is converted, when a case is closed, and when an opportunity is closed.
Additionally, users can post status updates, external links, images, and YouTube videos for other users to view within the Dashlet.
My Portal Dashlet
Sugar provides a My Portal Dashlet that presents product information and news about SugarCRM on your Home page. You can add additional My Portal dashlets to view information from external web sites and applications directly within your Sugar instance.

OpenAppDotOrg team will digging deeper into these modules. Let us know how imaginative you want to get with cloud connectors. Some users we discussed this are pretty excited about cloud connectors. There were muted concerns around security and performance but I am sure those will be taken care of eventually.

Are you ready for 5.2.0 GA? Download from SugarForge. Also check out release notes. Let us know all the pros and cons of upgrade exercise.

How to generate unique Sugar id in the database?

moses — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:50:33 +0000

Suppose if you have created/uploaded a custom module in your SugarCRM instance and want that custom module to work as the other modules in the system. You want the custom module to have the ACL/Roles actions accordingly as the other modules are having. At the same time you want to update the database with the unique SugarCRM id in the database. Now the big question is “How to do that man?”

Let’s create a php file which will do the same and name it createID.php. This file will create random SugarCRM unique id of 36 characters.
/*In this portion of code we give the login credentials of SugarCRM database which is to be updated.*/


global $host, $username, $password, $database;
$host = "localhost";

$username = "sugar";

$password = "sugar";

$database = "sugarcrm";
/*This portion of the code will create a MySQL connection that will connect to the database.*/
$server = mysql_connect($host, $username, $password) or

die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($database);
/*This portion of the code will crteate the 36 character unique SugarCRM id.*/
function create_guid()

{

$microTime = microtime();

list($a_dec, $a_sec) = explode(" ", $microTime);
$dec_hex = sprintf("%x", $a_dec* 1000000);

$sec_hex = sprintf("%x", $a_sec);
ensure_length($dec_hex, 5);

ensure_length($sec_hex, 6);
$guid = "";

$guid .= $dec_hex;

$guid .= create_guid_section(3);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= create_guid_section(4);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= create_guid_section(4);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= create_guid_section(4);

$guid .= '-';

$guid .= $sec_hex;

$guid .= create_guid_section(6);
return $guid;
}
function create_guid_section($characters)

{

$return = "";

for($i=0; $i<$characters; $i++)

{

$return .= sprintf("%x", mt_rand(0,15));

}

return $return;

}

function ensure_length(&$string, $length)

{

$strlen = strlen($string);

if($strlen < $length)

{

$string = str_pad($string,$length,"0");

}

else if($strlen > $length)

{

$string = substr($string, 0, $length);

}

}

/*This portion of code will select the all the records of the table mentioned here.*/

$query = "select * from custom_module";

$result = mysql_query($query);

$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);

if($num_rows > 0)

{

while(($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) != null)
/*This portion of the code will check if the condition is true(meaning data is there in the table mentioned above) then it will create the unique id and update the existing records.*/

{ $opp_proid = create_guid(); $id = $row['id']; $query2 = “update opportunities_products set opp_proid=’$opp_proid’ where id =’$id’”; echo $query2; mysql_query($query2); } echo “completed”; }
Wow!! The table is updated with the new unique id.

SugarCRM Open Source Adopt GPLv3

moses — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:51:45 +0000

John Roberts, CEO SugarCRM announced during a panel discussion at the annual O’Reilly Open Source Conference that the next version of Sugar Community Edition will be licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, scheduled late this year.

“Sugar Community Edition 5.0 will fully support GPLv3 when the software is made available,” he told attendees.

The move makes SugarCRM one of the first vendors of open-source
software to embrace the latest version of the GPL, which was just
released last month.
The move was welcomed by Eben Moglen, the executive director of the
Software Freedom Law Center, who was also extensively involved in the
drafting of GPLv3.

Read more.