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.

Sounds more like adding soap in the sugar. Moses has an excellent write up on how latest version of Ajuby extends SugarCRM’s soap capability. Republishing that post here as it’s relevant for our SugarCRM users. Please provide feedback using comments.

Wow! Now SugarCRM is more sweeter with Ajuby. Within Ajuby, now you can access your various modules of SugarCRM like Accounts, Cases, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities.Let’s see how we can make SugarCRM more sweet using Ajuby.

Login to Ajuby, and go to Control Panel. Click on the SugarCRM link under Mashup settings.

Now it will take us to the page where we have to create SugarCRM mashup with Ajuby. Fill in the web-services details of SugarCRM. Hey, there’s a trick to get the WSDL file of your SugarCRM. Type the url of your SugarCRM instance and add soap.php in the tail. This will open the page where you can get the WSDL url of the instance.

Use this to fill in the web-services details.

Wow! Let’s test the connection.

Checking the connection will give the following information:

Let’s hit the Browse Objects button. Here they are, now I can see all the modules within SugarCRM. Also I can browse through the modules and create new also.

Right now SugarCRM SOAP file allows to create new records in the
following modules: Accounts, Cases, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities.

Technorati Tags: Ajuby, open source, Salesforce, SugarCRM

Wall Street Journal’s unsubstantiated story is fast becoming rumor of the day on blogosphere. Speculations range from some kind of deal to possible acquisition.

Erik Schwartz on InfoWorld is cautioning on massive changes which can come if this alliance goes through:

“..Rather, all applications are simply part of a pull down menu with users accessing each application as if it were just another feature on the desktop.

If every Web-based app came with Google Apps or something like it, perhaps StarOffice, it would give users the interoperability that they can’t get now from Microsoft Office easily, unless they turn to SAP, which has an integration deal in Duet with Microsoft.”

Jason Maynard thinks acquisition is out of picture but closer relationship is on the cards here.

I think this will have broad implications in the developers market. Salesforce needs Google. Google doesn’t have to accelerate their enterprise penetration at the speed where they need to wake up Oracle, IBM, SAP and tons of other middle level players. That will be too disruptive and will make for a world-against-Google scenario. I doubt Google will be able to afford that level of distraction.

This makes sense at the narrow developer tool level. My guess is Google would like to see their JotSpot acquisition act as a glue software between Google Apps and Salesforce Apex platform. That way Google can approach enterprise market whereas Salesforce can build another defensive layer.

What this means for open source CRM like SugarCRM and CentricCRM? It really comes down to positioning for the SOA world where the economics are increasingly defined by SaaS architecture (Salesforce) and advertisement model (Google). Gmail (Google Apps edition), Google Adwords and Google Analytics are fast becoming must have applications so all open source offerings have to have very tight integration with them to pass through the RFP process.

Technorati Tags: SugarCRM, Salesforce, Salesforce

Technorati Tags: Salesforce, SugarCRM