If you missed our first Dev-User Group session, please visit the tutorials section under customizations for more information. Sugar Lead Architect and Master Module Builder Majed Itani walks through dramatic upgrade-safe customizations. Here’s your chance to see how far Sugar’s flexible architecture can be taken.
Hi all -
We are kicking off the 2008 online Sugar Dev-User Group sessions this week with a webcast on building upgrade-safe customizations hosted by Majed, one the lead developers. If you have an hour this Wednesday at 10am Pacific, I highly encourage you to sign up.
We would like to get your input on topics for future sessions. Here are a few suggestions to get the ideas going:
What else tickles your fancy?
Clint
I just read a fascinating post on SiliconValleyWatcher.com where Tom Foremski discusses his idea that Silicon Valley is becoming Media Valley. As he rightly points out, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc are all technology-enabled media companies, not pure-play technology companies. He posits that the media center of the US is shifting from NYC to SV.
But what really got my attention was his rather off-hand comment at the end, “Every company is now a media company to a greater degree than ever before. Even if a company makes steel, or napkins. Every company publishes to its customers, staff, partners, neighbors, to itself. It had better master the two-way media technologies that we now have or it will not survive.”
This point particularly hit home as I spend a big part of my day, every day, thinking about communicating with and fostering communication within the Sugar Community. And we use tools that didn’t event exist just a few years ago with forum, blog and Wiki software. Beyond that we are naturally also using the tried and true channels of email and websites to communicate with the community. We even have an advertising medium with SugarExchange where third-party ISV’s pay to list their wares.
The amount of media-like material that we generate as a software company is truly outstanding at times. And it’s not like what we are doing is way out there. Every modern company that wants to be successful has to figure out how to master these new tools and become more like a media company.
Now here is a truly interesting thought. As we look at Sugar 6.0, we are looking at folding in forum, blog and Wiki components into the Sugar application. After all, these are just new communication channels with the customer, right? You want to know what your customers posted in your forums just as much as you want to know what emails they sent you. Clearly sending out email marketing campaigns is a form of media management.
So as the Internet evolves and CRM software evolves with it, is CRM software and media software converging? Interesting thoughts. I’d love to hear yours.
It’s all great to talk about how wonderful the community is, but seeing the community actually meet in person is where the real fun is.
Did you make it to SugarCon two weeks ago? What a blast! The congratulatory emails have been rolling in from community members around the world who made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley for SugarCon 08. Everybody enjoyed the mix of learning, sharing and partying. Kudos to John and the marketing team for pulling off a fantastic event.
I personally enjoyed the key note sessions quite a bit. We had Daniel Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, kick off the event with the first key note. His irreverant and insightful commentary on open source and enterprise computing was a fun mix of hilarious and uncomfortable (thanks to Zack Urlocker for posting videos of Daniel’s talk and for NOT posting video 5).
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, gave a fantastic talk on the future of enterprise computing and why he bought MySQL for $1B. That guy gets open source!
Paul Greenberg, godfather of CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, also gave a great keynote about the future of CRM. He just posted his thoughts on SugarCon today in his blog and I couldn’t help but grin at his comments on the Sugar culture. But what I most enjoyed was his review of the enthusiasm of the Sugar community.
From his post…
That said, this was not just a good party but the conference itself was extremely well planned and well done and had some of that high spirited sense of community. What was particularly interesting to me was to see the genuine interest the customers, the partners and the developers had for the company, the people and the product itself. They liked it, sure, but they were INTERESTED in it and where it was going . They seemed to feel they had a stake in its success, which is as Shakespeare said somewhere, a “devoutly to be wished” position for a vendor to be in. Part of that was there seems to be an open culture and I hear from my friends at SugarCRM that they enjoy the ride they are on.
/end quote
Thank you to the Sugar community for being so interested, enthusiastic, passionate, ornery, demanding and flat out engaged. That’s what makes this “ride” so much fun!
Clint
Join Sugar Lead Architect and Master Module Builder Majed Itani as he walks through dramatic upgrade-safe customizations. Here’s your chance to see how far Sugar’s flexible architecture can be taken!
This free online webinar will be held on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 10AM PST.
To register for this event, please visit this link.
This webinar is part of the Sugar Developers User Group; we’re aiming to provide free webinars on a variety of topics, offered monthly as schedules permit.
Only a few days ago I disagreed with how Matt Asay had titled his blog post regarding the US government. So, when I read his post today on “Enterprise Software is dead – ask the Silicon Valley”, I thought, “great – more fodder to disagree with!” However, I was quickly humbled by his insight on the changing landscape of enterprise software.
This quote from Matt Asay’s post:
“As research from IDC shows, enterprise IT departments are increasingly the new software “vendors.” Building off open-source components, these enterprise IT staffs are finding great success in serving their own needs rather than shoveling dollars out the door to big vendors with one-size-fits-all value propositions. This is the 21st Century’s response to the 20th Century’s pillaging of enterprise IT budgets by the big proprietary vendors.”
From my own experience, I could not agree with this more. Increasingly I work with sophisticated enterprise organizations that have significant developer resources at their disposal. I’ve been very pleased to work with these savvy organizations because they “just get it”.
For this exact reason, vendors like Sales”farce”.com cannot compete with a product offering like SugarCRM. The SaaS model is perfect for those organizations, particularly the SMBs, that cannot successfully rollout a CRM system (at least from a technical level). However, there are plenty of SMEs and other enterprises that are not only completely capable of adapting SugarCRM to their businesses, but they need to.
Sugar is making it easier than ever with frameworks like the new MVC architecture released as part of 5.0 that allow presentation and controller extensibility that you just can’t do with SFDC. A great example is the forthcoming Wireless platform Sugar will be releasing. Another great example is the Module Builder. I was able to build a multi-componet module with complex relationships to create, record, and report on surveys for other modules. I was able to quickly build the module without ever having built a module before and then add the methods that I needed for the classes (modules) that I created. I cut my development time by probably two days. I leveraged other parts of Sugar to complete my module as well – like workflow, email templates and lead capture forms.
If you are a developer who is part of an IT team, and you’re reading this blog… then you are the new CRM vendor. How have you extended your CRM system in a way that can’t be done without code?
Technorati Tags: framework, Matt Asay, module builder, MVC, open source, platform
GPLv3 Q&A doesn’t seem like the hot topic we expected it to be. Andy Dreisch presented at SugarCON on the ramifications of GPLv3 on Sugar. I think from the tone of his post he left his presentation under-whelmed by the response (or lack thereof).
For those of you who could not attend Andy’s session, but want to be part of the GPLv3 discussion – The 451 Group is hosting a webinar on Feb 20th, complete with Q&A. I recommend that you attend if you want to understand the future of GPL and the Open Source.
Technorati Tags: open source, GPLv3
Matt Asay posted that The US Government Bets Big on Open Source. I love what Matt Asay writes and I think he’s poignant. He furthers “the cause” and we’re, as Open Source advocates, fortunate to have him.
So it is rare when I disagree with him – I hardly think of implementing Open Source as “Betting Big”. I frankly feel that all software implementations are a crap-shot if you don’t do due diligence, have an effective roll out plan, and train all the users. But it’s a real big gamble when it’s proprietary software. Who knows what’s in that black box?
One area of improvement I see for our government is in customer service. The Federal Government would really benefit from a Customer Relationship Management System… hmmm, if I only knew of an Open Source CRM system that really scales…. hmmmm….
On a more serious note, I spoke recently with a member of a state government (which will remain nameless) who heard this message loud and clear. They knew their weakness and that the constituents they served deserved better. I’m glad they made a choice to go Sugar. It’s not the first (or second, etc) state to use Sugar either. Which means to me that there’s a lot of opportunity at the local, state, and federal levels.
If you’re a developer in the public-sector, I encourage you to speak up about your use of Open Source and your use of SugarCRM in your organization. I know there are a lot of VARs and System Integrators reading this blog – I encourage you to look for opportunities in the public sector. It’s only going to grow from here, get there now.
Technorati Tags: government, open source
In honor of Valentine’s Day:
Rose are red,
Violets are blue,
Don’t know about vardefs?
Then you’re probably screwed.
I love the concept of vardefs. Simply put, Vardefs is a multi-dimensional array in PHP for each module that contains the attributes, properties, and metadata about each field/column in the database. Each vardefs file is located in it’s parent module. Jacob and Ken and probably countless others have document this well on the wiki and in the forums.
So, how practical is the information? Well it comes up all of the time – people want to make stock fields required or audited that aren’t already that way. Here’s an example from the Contacts Module. The use case is that I want to make the birth date field in Contacts, required (in the change log). This comes to us from ./modules/Contacts/vardefs.php:
'birthdate' => array ( 'name' => 'birthdate', 'vname' => 'LBL_BIRTHDATE', 'massupdate' => false, 'type' => 'date', 'comment' => 'The birthdate of the contact', // Added below code to make it required 'required' => true, ),
That’s it, just refresh the page and it is now a required field subject to JS client-side validation.
Additionally you can add alter the db in the vardefs file as necessary. A quick “Rebuild Database” in Admin >> Repair >> Rebuild Database and away ya go!
After turning down MSFT, YHOO has to come up with something that justifies why they will be valued at $44+ billion of their own accord. Even though GOOG was happy to intervene after the MSFT bid and take over search for them – they’re not so eager now that there is a proxy fight brewing. However, it seems like Rupert Murdoch is throwing his hat into the ring. Murdoch supposedly wants to mash up Yahoo! with MySpace and get a slice of the bloated valuation (thanks to MSFT) the MyHoo! entity. Ching!
Doesn’t this seem mixed up to you? MSFT has Facebook, which is built on PHP, Yahoo! is a PHP shop, MySpace is running on Cold Fusion, News Corp. isn’t exactly the “tip of the spear”, and Google can’t be the player it wants to be because of regulation (remember the DoubleClick).
I think as developers we’re at risk of losing a major contributor to the Open Source world. YHOO’s contributions to the OSS ecosystem, for example YUI, is an important part of SugarCRM 5.0 release. Even from a debugging level, we have Yahoo! to thank for Firebug. Yahoo! will become the banner ad-engine of MySpace and innovation becomes an after-thought. Do you think that kind of innovation and openness will still pour out of Yahoo! if Rupert Murdoch is sitting on the board?
Wouldn’t it be much more interesting if, rather than News Corp injecting Yahoo! with MySpace, Google and Yahoo! mashed up services as separate entities? Google and Yahoo! should take a stake in each other in an equity deal. The partnership would allow the two to take advantage of each other’s ad-network and/or search technology – while innovation in both organizations would further developers and the OSS world. I’d be happy to see the toolkits and frameworks that would result from that partnership.